The Indie Dream is Dead

For me, it always comes back to design.

The problem with the massive increase in competition we've seen over the past few years is that it fundamentally changes how indies design their games. One of the biggest advantages of being an indie developer (at least in my opinion) is autonomy. The freedom to design a game the way you want to. But having a market flooded with competition inherently makes it harder to sell a product, no matter what that product might be. There are just so many alternatives, so it is harder to stand out.

And because of this, present-day indie developers are looking for ways to increase their sales, and are adjusting the design of their games in order to give their projects a better chance in a much more brutal market. While this is sensible from a business standpoint, it inherently dilutes the games they are making, and robs them of some of the individual personality that made them great in the first place. They have to tie their design in knots all for the sake of paying their bills. (a rational and reasonable motivation, people gotta eat)

This is one of the reasons why I don't mind being a hobbyist. As much as I would like to have more time for my game dev work, it also is never an anchor hanging around my neck. My game development is a pleasure that I get to return to when I can, not an obligation that I have to struggle at in order to keep a roof over my head. While I have the utmost respect for full-time indies, I'm also content with my part-time work for now. As a hobbyist, I have the autonomy to design whatever I want, not matter who it may or may not appeal to.

I am also free to develop smaller tools. Tools that I occasionally share with the community at large, so that they can get a leg-up on developing their games faster and easier.

 

I can remember an article from a good game developer/designer who said that 1 in 10 people can program well, 1 in 10 can do good artwork, 1 in 10 can create good music. But good game development is a 1 in 1000 talent. And this was an article about 10 years ago so before the F2P era and mobile platforms and free game engines arrived.

Maybe all we are seeing is a flood of not very good game developers learning their limitations, the hard part is that even if you are a 1 in 1000 game developer with a great game you could be lost in the tsunami of new releases?

 

Sure, but you hear the same thing about lots of professions. You either have the willpower to dive in or you don't, practice and repetition will increase your skills no matter what. There are a lot of average coders who turned into good coders through just doing it day in and day out.

 

Add onto the flood of people thinking their game idea's is what people want or can actually make money. The common trend in the forums is to make some crap game in a few weeks and dish it out as quick as possible and try to get lucky. I truly do not see how this method would work, no one wants to play a poorly designed game. I especially don't see how this game would ever make any money either way.

I just don't see how people expect to make some puzzle game / side scroller game they designed in 8 weeks to make them money. Especially when everyone in the world is doing this? Maybe spend 3 years and make a new Final Fantasy spin off and you would have better chances?

 

Well, if you still wanna read on the subject, there is also a new article by the SteamSpy guy who started the whole #indiepocalyse drama with its famous data graphics:
https://medium.com/steam-spy/on-indiepocalypse-what-is-really-killing-indie-games-3da3c3a1ea76

Anyway, on the topic in general:

REALITY CHECK: the majority of new businesses fails within 3 years and working in a hit-or-miss industry increases those chances of failure, people are better off getting regular daily revenues as a window cleaner (yep, that's a business) than as a game dev.

 

Why it's a bad idea (warning long reading ahead):
http://aurelregard.tumblr.com/

PS: Don't know from which part of the world you are but in Western Europe, 3 years would equal around 28K Euros of living costs (based on social welfare for a single person)

 

I don't get that part either. That is what I meant by people learning Unity & throwing their first game out on the actual markets weeks later. I can see posting their game to their own website or on one of the numerous online gaming portals but not throwing it out on the commercial markets.

Maybe that is the difference though? Maybe I am seeing the mobile app stores and Steam as commercial marketplaces and perhaps they are not really that any more? It certainly seems like they cater more to an "amateur hour" than being real commercial marketplaces. Basically you just pay the fee and can publish, right? No other criteria or qualifications needed as far as I can see.

I think the reason most people don't spend months and years on larger scale games is because they are focused on the money. They feel they cannot risk spending a year or two on a game just to see it flop (like Air Rescue the 3 year game project). The thing is spending months and years in itself does nothing more to make your game a success than spending weeks does. At least not from what I have seen.

But yeah I agree. My first Unity game I put up on Kongregate: It was a Christmas Game.
My last little game I wrote in Monkey X and posted it as an html5 game on my website: Game Inspired by Moon Patrol.

I never even considered putting the games out on the actual market places and yet I have seen many mobile games much simpler, less involved and less fun out on the market places. It is just.... strange.

 

Living expenses are nothing to sniff at. If I wanted to quit my job and coast on my savings to work on indie stuff full-time, I would have to save up A LOT, for quite some time, just to afford a single year of time off. If I cut my expenses to the bone, I might be able to save up enough after two years. So, I would work for 24 months in order to spend 12 months working on my own stuff full-time. And keep in mind, my current day job actually pays pretty well, so the scenario I'm painting here is one of the more positive ones you could expect.

The problem is, at the end of those three years, I would not have a day job, would have no guarantee that I would be able to make money off of the game that I spent a year making, and would have burned through most of the money that I had saved up. So, I would have a 12-month game, but no money, no job, and no reassurance of income. I would probably have to go hunting for a new day-job, and then spend my free time promoting the game that I had produced, while working a full-time day job. And again, this is one of the rosier and more secure scenarios I can project.

Throwing yourself into this craft full-time is a huge financial risk if you don't have something to fall back on. It would be nice to see a little bit more of the old "patronage" system come into play. Perhaps we'll see more of that as time goes on. Once upon a time, it was not unusual for promising artists to find wealthy patrons who would underwrite their living expenses so that they could focus entirely on their work. As video games become a more widespread media in modern culture, I could easily imagine this sort of scenario happening more often.

 

Absolutely. Be the same for me. I've done it before (not for game dev but other business ventures in IT) and yes it takes some preparation and it is always a feast or famine thing.

This is why I think high school kids may be the mainstream "real" Indie devs of the future. We are seeing more and more teens get into this and there are several advantages they have. Mainly a lot more free time, their bills are already paid and they have a roof over their head with no thinking even required on their part. And Unity seems to be pushing this with the youngsters as well with the latest Unite showing some games made by students.

 

Nah. Cos kids these days don't want to put any effort in. There's still the thing about actually finishing a game. I don't think the amount of finishers looks like it's going up.

 

Thanks for sharing this. It is always good to see a more of the picture. It seems like all we normally hear about are the success stories and I am sure for every one of those there are numerous stories of someone who has spent a lot of time and effort making a game only for it to flop.

The amount of effort this guy went into is just huge. From what I remember when I was an Independent IT Consultant it sounds spot on. Just a massive amount of effort and energy needed from beginning to end.

And for all of that effort and time he spent he was rewarded with about 5,000 sales. I think basically because as he briefly mentioned there are just so many games out there the effort and time you put in really is irrelevant anyway. It really all comes down to contacts and marketing.

Like he said when he was working at a company making games that were less fun, not as good, they commonly sold more than 100,000 copies.

It was a great article that makes perfect sense. And in the end he is back working for a different company now. But at least he has the experience of having done it.

 

Having run my own consulting company before and then going back to the easy corporate life I can relate. The potential is there to make a lot more money, but it is like 10x the work and stress. At least that was my experience. Despite all that I still miss it often.

 

http://madewith.unity.com/ is close.

 

Personally, I think this is great. Also, I am more than a little envious of the youngsters today. The kind of tools and resources that they have access to is mind-blowing compared to what I had growing up. If I had what they have, I would have been able to get into game development at a much younger age. (and definitely would have)

It wouldn't surprise me if some of the next big experiments came out of high-school age kids who had been learning how to do this since they were in elementary.

 

I agree and kids can accomplish a lot more than people give them credit for. Again probably due to the amount of free time available to pour into things they are passionate about. I was programming in Assembly language on my C64 when I was late 15 or early 16 (looked it up... at 14 I was using the TI-99/4a). Learned it so well I knew exactly how many clock cycles every CPU instruction took. Yet despite that still had time to spend an hour or two outside playing football with my friends every afternoon.

Interestingly I actually messed around with the C64 again last night and wrote a little machine code program for it. Was amazed I still remembered the instructions but that is just how engrained it was in my mind as a teen.

They can accomplish great things if they channel their energy and time into it.

 

I don't think so much the idea of being a successful indie dev is really that far fetched.

If you have a dream and truly believe in that dream, and treat that dream with respect, it will happen, just when is the question.

Of course a new comer isn't gonna reach their dream as soon as they start, they have to earn their way through the loops and so on. But heck I'm going on two years coming up (in Unity) and never once released anything serious.
I've been modding for nearly 20 years. So I've definitely put my time in to take my path to the next step.

Point of my life story - didn't rush to make a quick buck. Took my time and learned as much as possible to get where I'm at now. And now it's paying off on its own self.
Not sure how easy it is to get into the top 100 on IndieDB, but my game did at least temporarily (lack of updates to show). But I felt really good to see it made it that high on the charts.

So I'm making my game, I will sell it, but even if it doesn't make me much or anything, I at least gave it my all.
I'm not making some cheap piece of crap game and expecting a million dollars.
I rarely purchase anything on the asset store, like ever. So I'm creating everything on my own, and I love to do it, it makes me feel really good to create everything on my own. Like the serious game I'm making now, all created by me and nothing outside to help.

But I think it just depends on like the 3 L's of a business (location, location, location) - meaning 3 U's (Unique, Unique, Unique), quit making the same thing thousands of other companies have done, make something unique (like I am doing). and actually take it serious and tell the world about it.

Like I said, the top 100 on indieDB meant a lot to me, I felt like I achieved the impossible and it made me feel better than a million bucks. But not sure if it's really that special, but it was to me lol.

 

So everyone is making side scroller / puzzle games in 8 weeks, and this guy decided to take it to the next level and make it for 3 years instead. Sure it looks like a pretty amazing game, but it should have been a mobile game not a PC game for one. Also he decided to throw himself in a competition where 1000s of people do the same thing everyday. The core game was the same as everyone else's, just 3 more years of content. The expected outcome seems obvious here, I wish this would not be the case as it is really sad.

Btw this proved my point more about the side scroller / puzzle games, not on a Final Fantasy spin off for 3 years.

 

This kind of thing (larger scale games) is definitely better than platformers. But it's also changing pretty rapidly.

When I started taking my project seriously (a little over a year ago) the RPG space and the like looked pretty great. About 6 months ago, it was still pretty good. Recently the rate of new entries on Steam at least is rapidly increasing as is quality.

My guess is that more teams and studios are shooting higher in the effort to evacuate the flooded arcade market. In another year - it will be across the board. There's just a lot of people who want to make games.

 

Kind of like wild animals running from a raging forest fire. lol

Eventually there will be no place left to run to. It's easy to look at a puzzle game and think "ah geesh what did they expect? Of course that will fail". Then next month we may well read about the new smash hit simple puzzle game. Platformers seem to be another easy target "well everybody is making them" and yet there will be success stories from these too. And there will be plenty of RPGs that fail. I am sure there already have been and they just failed so miserably that we do not even know about them. If RPGs really are the last great sanctuary then yes, as you mentioned already seeing, soon it will be overcrowded as well and where will everyone will run to then?

I think it makes as much sense for people to just focus on making the kind of games they want to make. If you love puzzle games then make a puzzle game. If platform games are your gaming addiction then make a platformer. At least then you get the satisfaction of developing something you really enjoy and will have a game you can play. You'll also have as much of a chance to make a bit of money because you're building something you know very well and enjoy. So you'll probably make a better game then if you just made a RPG hoping to get in the last sanctuary before it too is overflowing.

The only real solution is when the time eventually comes that most people get burnt out on chasing this Indie Goldmine Dream and move on to other things. It has happened many times before. It will happen again. Before this it was Indie Music I believe. Before that it was Indie Book Authors. Before that it was the Internet Gold Rush build a website and make money online! Before that it was Day Trading as I recall. And before that it was Real Estate Riches. They might be out of order as I cannot remember exactly how they occurred but the point is people are always chasing money and this is no different. And there will be something else sooner or later.

 

In a way I hope it does exactly what you said @GarBenjamin that way once all the loosers finally make it reach that point, we can purge all the stupid games from the markets and bring it back to the golden age bwa haha

 

Not really. There are a lot of peoples who want to make money and think game dev is easy money. Just look at endless "I want to make an MMO" posts.

 

Exactly. This won't kill the indie market, it'll just chase away those who failed to make it. Less competition is fine by me.

 

Yup yup yup.. Lets start releasing 50 useless games daily. To help flood it faster ba haahahaa. jk.

 

Sadly fifty games isn't all that many per day at this point.

 

You probable didn't see Android market.. Probable are 100 apps per hour now.. haha

 

Dang it's gotten that bad now?

 

Is like Spam x 100 show.

 

Yeah. I've got a friend who wants to get into game development. It took one look at Android for him to decide to completely skip the market. He felt it simply was a waste of time. He's aiming at PC instead.

 

Last stats I read a week ago said there are now about 25 games released every hour.

Think about that for a second.

If it doesn't collapse first by next spring 1 game per minute seems entirely realistic.

Insane... but realistic.

 

The economy isn't doing better also, at least in Europe. But of course we are all to busy to update Facebook status and Twetter a few hundred times per day

 

Crazy man, didn't realize it was that bad yet... Do I want the market to crash, no not really. But it might be useful to like I said, purge the useless stuff, E.G. - Games that been on market for 2 years with virtually no downloads - get rid of it. Or make it like some automated pruning system like forums can do. E.G. - this old delete it (if less than so many downloads).

 

Ha ha ha! You know it is funny you mention that. I have thought about just for the hell of it doing like 2 to 4 hour game projects and throwing them out on Mobile. lol

Do my part to help bring on the crash a bit sooner. And also to help show how stupid it is to not have any barriers to entry other than keeping "mature" games off the market.

I was thinking I could take a few rocks and draw faces on them. Take photos of those rocks and make a whole line of games featuring them. Maybe take some photos of sticks for enemies.

 

Ba hahahaahhaahaaha..
That would be hilarious. Then do like a small 100 dollar thing to get 40,000 downloads and rates lmao. People start it up and it just a rock face and nothing else ba haahahahaahahaha lol.
(Just to prove a point).

 

I would laugh so hard if it backfired. If you made a small fortune and it encouraged everyone else to try for a while longer increasing the life of the mobile market.

 

@Ryiah - Stop, just stop ruining our sinister plans to conquer the market and purge the ones who don't posses the the telepathic power to enhance computer functions! lol.

 

Would just be manipulated by the developers. Perhaps create a free 'bundle' with other crappy games, discount it to next to zero $ and pay people to download them or similar such scams.

Better to just expand the filter options so I can narrow or expand my searches as I like, such as to let me select as many curators as I please to filter the results on, etc.

 

That would help a lot. I've said before a big issue we have is the technology for properly serving up relevant games is just not there. But at the same time there really is no way to do that. Ultimately, the search has to be based on some criteria and that criteria is game name, genre and tags. To try to show up developers often use many different tags even if they only apply to about 5% to the game. People use tricks for names, tricks for tags, whatever they can think of to try to give them an advantage. These tricks work only until they become so commonplace that a lot of people are using them. Then the tricks are no longer effective. The real problem they are trying to overcome is due to the amount of games available.

The thing is no matter how good a search engine is there can only be 10 games brought back for the top 10 results in a search. And only 100 games brought back for the top 100 results in a search. So it basically ends up being like searching for information on Google or other search engines. The items listed on the first page (especially the top) will get the bulk of the attention. The next batch (page or "see more") will get less exposure and so on.

So ultimately it all comes back to the same thing in the end. There is just no way to effectively deal with the massive number of games out there.

The only real near-term solution (because I cannot see the gold rush ending anytime soon) is for the app markets to hire people to check each and every game. That would filter out 99% of them I am sure. Unfortunately, that also brings its own problems because there would still be people involved. People who dislike certain genres would likely not approve many games in that genre. People who dislike certain graphics styles would likely not approve games using that style. People who are on good terms with a developer will likely approve their games.

Still at least this would help to some degree. Ultimately, it seems like we are seeing the same kind of issue as 30 years ago where gamers are being presented with so many different choices it is very difficult to actually know what games to check out and which to skip. Back then we went to the mags of the time to get some guidance. These days people are going to YouTubers and curators lists for the same. Despite having the mags back then the crash still happened as people basically just got burnt out on so many games coming out faster than they could even process it all. Information is much faster & easier to get these days and games are designed as F2P on mobile from the start or I think we'd already have seen another crash by this point.

I still think the crash can happen from simple burnout. I base this on the fact that I have been a gamer for decades. Always loved playing games and the more I see game after game after game announcement here on these forums and elsewhere the more they all seem like the same thing. The less excitement there is for any of them. When things are rare they are more exciting to hear about. When they are less common they have more value or at least more perceived value. When there are tons of such things readily available (such as blades of grass, leaves, common rocks) their monetary value and ability to excite people is greatly reduced.

 

Those search filters might include filters to for only 'apps whose publishers paid for advertising with the search engine provider - for any app' and only 'apps that whose publish have never paid for any advertising for any app' and there you have it - a quick and effective filter. Of course they could also add filters on apps for how much was spent in advertising on each app too.

Those things don't address the real problem though - this is the search engines return results for those that have paid for advertising over the results of those that haven't paid for advertising while ignoring the relevance of the search terms to the results they are providing.

The way to stop SEO abuses is not to punish the crowd and reward the rich but to actually stop SEO abuses. They have the raw data to do they if they wished.

 

You need money to make money. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer. The have's and the have nots

Something does not come from nothing.

Radical success does not come from making a great game.

Riches and a perfect life does not come from being a great person.

Everything is manipulated, everything is not quite what it seems. It is what you know that it is without thinking.

It's not what you know, it's who you know. It's not the class of the work you do, it's the class you are a part of.

If you can find a publisher and hire people to make a game, you can find someone to be the "face" of the game and call it "indie". It's not real. None of it is real. Read about ghostwriting. Read about collaborative fiction.

The more you know....... *

 

I did a quick search to see how much talk there is among gamers about too many games coming out.

One of the first things I found was a related article.

When you start seeing things like this you can be sure the problem is real.

http://mashable.com/2015/03/17/too-many-games-too-little-time/#0FnD9YKQFZqt

I thought it was interesting they are advising people to stay away from MMOs and RPGs due to the amount of time they require. Ha ha! Anything to keep the "disposable quick and be done with it so you can buy another one" mindset alive and well.

 

succes is getting down seven times but getting up eight

 

The hardest working people on earth are migrant workers, sweatshop workers, slaves, and prisoners.

Work does not create prosperity, work is what must be done to survive. The more you must work to survive, then the poorer you probably are to begin with.

You can spend a million dollars to make a million dollars. You can spend a thousand to make a thousand. You can spend a dollar to make a dollar.

The more you have, the more you can get. The less you have, the more leverage those who have more than you have to take what little you have.

Rich people create barriers to enter markets to keep poor people out. If they can't do that, then they create media and make agreements with those operating the markets to gain exposure for their products.

Everybody knows what they have and they're using it to get as much as possible for themselves.

You make then richer the harder you try.

 

The surplus of games is not the problem. The problem is poor search and poor recommendations in Steam and other app stores. Steam does a terrible job of recommending games to me despite the fact Steam knows more about my gaming habits than anybody. Steam know what games I own, how long I have played each game, what achievements I completed, where I play, what my computer hardware specs are, etc. Steam can even track which games I look at but do not buy, how long I looked at each one, and how I have rated games. Steam has the ability to collect enough information about me that Steam should be able to perfectly nail the recommendations. Steam utterly fails to do this properly, despite having all of that data available to themselves.

Contrast that experience with other companies in similar data relationships with their customers. Amazon perfectly nails recommendations. As does Netflix. Yet Steam cannot figure out how to thrive in a Long Tail environment, despite having plenty of customer information.

 

very true, but we enter a very political subject, and i guess moderators will soon end it.

but to second what you said, one said "if you want to be a millionnaire you need to be a billionnaire"

and to be a little more positive , i'd say "success is a fraud, happyness is all you need"

 

For some reason, this seems to be a common misconception. When people say, "It takes hard work" they aren't referring to physical labor. It takes hard work to become an artist, but going outside and picking up a boulder repeatedly for 8 hours a day isn't going to make you an artist. "Hard work" refers to work towards your goal. You can have a demanding job and still not be working towards a goal that will better your life. Through no fault of their own, none of the people you mentioned are working towards something that will better their life.

In the case of game development "hard work" doesn't mean cranking out a ton of crap, even though you may spend a ton of time doing that. It means taking the time to understand how game play mechanics work, what makes games fun, what doesn't. It means learning to create art or postpone a commercial release until such time as you can acquire art. It means meticulously tracking down bugs, trying to improve framerates, and being on the constant lookout for new techniques and technologies that can push your games further. It means being honest with yourself about the quality of a project. If you were working for a client instead of yourself, would they deem your work good enough, or would they tell you to improve it? All of that is hard work, which is why so many games are coming out that obviously lack that discipline.

That article makes gaming sound a awful lot like the types of things that people don't want to do. It might as well have been an article on how to stick to a workout or a diet. That doesn't really bode well for the industry, I think. The more something feels like work, the less people are going to do it.

 

This may make things a bit better for the gamer I agree. Still it is very limited in how much it can do. Let's say you buy or look at a game and Steam has hundreds of recommendations of other games you may also like.

How many will you look at? How many games will a gamer actually check out before they all start looking the same? If you show maybe 5 games and a person sees one they like thay may well buy it. If you show 50 games and they actually look at them all and see 6 that look interesting they may end up buying none because they cannot decide which 1 or 2 to get.

And in both cases we are still looking at a tiny % of the number of games actually available.

 

Well the thing is that can make a stream strictly sorted by time published, genre, search terms, and ad spend and have the results slowly stream by your monitor like a slide show so you can focus on glancing at what's new without dedicating yourself to sorting what's being pushed. They can have a wish list tag and an investigate tag as well as the shopping cart. They can also have a non interested tag that removes results out of your search stream for good that's kept in another list for possible review by you later. You can bet they will be investigating what goes into those various lists. In essence you are giving them a free simple rating of their advertising presentation.

 

That remind my of 2007 crisis, and the years before. None of the world millionaires+ lost anything. I was in Spain in that period, and I've seen peoples losing houses to banks, small company's going bankrupt, unemployed everywhere.

Oh, and that's not politics, are facts.

Does not apply to software development. Is the only industry where you can make money from nothing.

 

@HemiMG

It's only a misconception if we redefine the meaning of words to fit your personal interpretation of what they should mean. So, I would imagine the majority of people out there aren't experiencing your same level of confusion about what "hard work" means.

 

Although far more often you make nothing from a whole lot of something.

Also, you being alive has a cost. That you can freely spend your time plugging away at software and thinking that is "nothing" shows a fundamental disconnect with where money comes from.