Indiepocalypse

The apocalypse is nearing!
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I was reading some posts on Gamasutra this morning, like every morning. And I came across this article. So he goes on GameSpy and gets the number of indie games released during the years greenlight went live, and over time the number of indie games on steam rises and the number of successful indie games crashes. So the idea in the article is that there is much less of a chance of being successful in the indie dev game, but I think that this is not actually the case, good games are actually succeeding while the lousy and uncompleted games are getting next to zero sales. The infamous Digital Homicide has a reputation for making "bad" games, in just the current year they have released over 10 games to steam greenlight! I'm sure there are many many other "companies" like Digital Homicide making dozens of games a year and generating little sales from these games, while there are companies like That Game Company and The Behemoth building super games for periods of 1-2 years adding uniqueness into their games and testing the game before releasing to avoid a crash when you select a level. This just seems like its being blown a bit out of proportion. I can plant 1,000 oak trees but not all of them will grow to be healthy because I won't be able to care for or water each one and give it the attention it needs to grow into a big strong oak.

So what is your opinion on the "Indiepocalypse". Is it something to worry about? Do you have any experiences with Greenlight and the overwhelming amount of competitors? Please share.

 

The whole idea is stupid. There was a good thread about it on reddit ages ago.

Buy into it as much as you want. The market isnt about to crash, its just an ongoing saturated market where the tendency is to sink.

The only indie-apocalypse is that the market is flooded with people releasing low quality S*** thinking they have the next viral success.

 

The market isn't about to crash. There will still be successful indie titles. In fact, I would argue that there will soon be more than there ever have been before. The indie market isn't going to suddenly shrink, it's going to be steadily growing over the next decade.

What most people are fretting about at the moment is the recent glut of competition that has flooded into the indie space, and continues to provide significant pressure from below. While this is a very real concern, it simply means that existing indie developers won't be having a cushy time of it. There will be no resting on laurels, and competitive indies will have to stay on their toes and contend with ambitious start-ups constantly scrapping for a piece of their market-share.

The panic we're seeing is simply a response to how crowded things seem to suddenly be getting. It's also a natural reaction to the sudden nature of this change. This shift has been precipitated over the course of two-three years. In that time we've seen the number of people actively pursuing indie game publishing skyrocket. Steam is partially to blame for this, by releasing a means for people to publish very early-stage works and charge for access to them. Unity also shares some of the blame for the current situation, by providing a viable plug-and-play approach to game development through their engine, toolset, and Asset Store. (a potent combination for beginning and budget developers)

And more than anything, people are reacting to indie developers being affected by a symptom that the larger-scale industry has known of for a very long time. (and that most experienced indies are well-acquainted with) Repeatable success.

Putting out one game that has financial and/or critical success is one thing. But can you do that more than once? How about three or four times? How do you adjust your development approach and schedule to account for the unpredictable nature of the market? How do these changes affect your creative process, and the ultimate design of your games? The changes in the market are forcing a lot of indie developers to take these questions into account, and re-evaluate their business models.

 

I've said it time and time again.

Produce something worth getting, if it's worth getting, people will get it.
If someone likes it they'll be like "Hey try this game" and so on and so on.

Don't need a million dollars for advertising, well it does help. But not needed.
But anywho, don't produce crap things or you're game will be treated as such..... - *crap*.

 

Most of those gold-digging crapware developers/companies are the ones getting out of business now due to market saturation caused by their own crap and they want to bring everyone else down with them.
No sorry I don't buy into that.

 

Times may be hard but I think it's a bit alarmist to say it's the indie apocalypse because of more competition. Such thing will occur only if demands dies, maybe replaced by demand for something else... like the good'ol VHS, so to speak.

 

Seems like everyone is agreeing that it's over hyped and is just raising alarm because of the quantity of games being released but they are ignoring the quality aspect of it. Will articles like these make people more weary of trying to do game development as a hobby or as a living?

 

Hopefully.

 

mm interesting article with stats. .. it seems like there is always going to still be an audience for a certain amount of games and maybe that audience is even increasing... and yet at the same time, there is a growing amount of less-than-good games..... sort of like the `long-tail` is growing longer, but the head is remaining about the same. Probably if you make a reasonable good game and market it well it should hopefully float above the rest of the noise?

 

It will cull out some of the more opportunistic gold-rushers. But it won't appreciably decrease the number of people wanting to make games. And frankly, there's nothing wrong with people wanting to do this as a hobby. Since there's way less expense involved, almost anyone these days can dapple in developing games as a hobby.

The fact of the matter is that developing games is fascinating, and there are aspects of it that can appeal to an incredibly diverse set of skills. You want to make a game that is almost entirely art? There's a game to be made there. You want to make a game that is almost entirely writing? There's a game to be made there. You want to make a game that's almost entirely code? Yup, you can do that. Performance? Yup. Music? Yup. Rhythm? Yup. If you have a particular skill or talent, it is possible to translate that into a game of one sort or another.

As an amalgamation of different disciplines, game development is really quite keen. And the creative potential they represent is staggering. Some will be deterred when they realize that this is no cake walk. But quite a few are going to develop a taste for this medium. And once you have the hunger, it never goes away.

 

If you ever looked at silver dollar games they made a lot of bad games, Im talking an insane amount and finally made one finger death punch. And the other one was milkstone studios that made the game ziggarut.
http://www.milkstonestudios.com/games/
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=silver+dollar+games

 

We're in a crowded and maturing market now and we have to deal with that. We need to invest in marketing just like every other industry in the world, unlike previously where you had to make a friend in the right place to get your game noticed and published on a store ahead of the rest.

I'd much rather my fate be in my own hands via marketing than in the hands of store curators before even being launched.

 

This article says... roughly... what I'd say in response.

 

Nice article. I may switch to calling myself an amateur now instead of a hobbyist. I'll have to think on that for a while.

I have a day job. As long as people still want to eat, there will still be demand for my skills. Game dev doesn't pay my bills. So the market can go do what it likes.

As long as Unity or some equivalent hangs around, I'll probably still be making games, probably for nothing. They will probably still only get a few hundred plays from my friends and associates. To be honest I don't really care.

Good luck to the rest of you.

 

I'm perfectly fine and have no concern about any bubble popping or doomsday predictions. September has passed and the sky hasn't fallen.

 

Well, the Mayan calendar my be correct, because we may be looking at it upside down!
and may be the year 4024!

Guess we wait a couple more millenniums to find out haha.

 

Aren't they the same thing? The point that he's making is that if you're not treating it like a business then you're not a professional*, and thus shouldn't expect to pull in a professional level of income, and thus shouldn't get upset and look for an external cause when you don't.

That's the main distinction for me between my professional work and what I call my hobby projects.

* "Professional" in this context has nothing to do with skill level, they are a "person who earns their living from a specified activity" (definition from Wikipedia).

 

But then that gets into cases of Flappy Bird. Didn't he make the game in 3 days and made a whopping like 60 grand a day in ad revenue and iap's practically over night? I wish I could make a game in 3 days and make that kinda money lol.

("I have a dream, I have a dream that one day, that indies stop crap games, I have a dream that getting rich isn't the sole reason to develop, to one day go on the internet and find my game at #1 in the stores and ratings, I have a dream that one day our kids will wake up and play my game - I have a dream"). lol.

 

None of that has anything to do with whether he was working professionally or not, though. I don't know if he was working on his games professionally or not, but there's nothing to stop someone who isn't from getting lucky.

 

I believe flappy bird was out for a while before it went viral. I dont think it was develop, release, cash money in 3 days.

I think it got picked up by a video blogger or something.

 

Tell the rest of the story. It wasn't his first game. He was hardly an amatuer. It wasn't an overnight success, the game had been out for a while already. The game went viral, the dev suddenly started making unprecedented amounts of money. The dev was then pretty much unable to deal with the stress (including such things as death threats) and pulled the game from the store. Eventually he relented and re-released the game. By this point the masses had moved on to other things, and the game had thousands of clones up. The re-release barely made a splash.

The story, as it normally is, is more complex then it first appears.

 

I hear ya Angry. Just wish I would get lucky haha.

James yeah I assumed the same, just I've read so many stories and every says practically overnight, guess it's a figure of speech lol.

Bored - I wasn't sure if it was his first game or not, I've read all the other stuff though.
I just know every story I've ever read said as I said before was practically an overnight success according to just random articles I've read, but wasn't sure how true any of it was, but it's the only thing I've ever read though, so figured it was true haha.

 

I suspect it's a misconception rather than a figure of speech. Many people believe it's true, in any case. I've looked into a bunch of "overnight success" stories (using public info available to anyone who bothers to use it),and I don't think any of them were actually that when you look past the surface. Some such stories probably do exist, but they're an extreme minority within an already minority set, and surely they're 99% luck (because by definition they can't have had prior success to have built on).

The bit that tricks people is that you don't hear of things until they've become successful. Nobody heard of the games prior to Flappy Bird or Meat Boy or (insert other story here) because they weren't successes. Then because they hadn't heard of them they assumed they didn't exist and that the success was "overnight".

The success wasn't overnight, the news of the success was.

 

You make a very strong valid point. Makes total sense.

 

I wish some popular video blogger would play my game so I could laugh all the way to the bank.

Oh well. big update coming to Hardkour soon (the last probably). Will see what that brings. Oh, and of course the mandatory postmortem to talk about all that money I made.

 

Flappy Bird is actually a great study of what makes a successful game. Attention. Marketing. Exposure. Whatever you wanna call it. From what I have read about it the dramatic success was directly tied to PewDiePie or one of the other big YouTubers covering the game as @JamesLeeNZ mentioned. Literally the next day or so downloads took off significantly and continued and because of it taking off it was newsworthy. Not the game itself. The fact that it was getting so many downloads and didn't seem like it should. That was the newsworthy part. So then sites started covering it. That brought more attention to the game and so on.

I think 90% of success in this is just from the marketing. The actual game is maybe 10%. The thing that makes success involve a lot of luck is that you cannot manufacture these things. You cannot control which games these big YouTubers decide to cover. Well, I suppose if you have enough money you might be able to. But I do not look at that because most people won't have that kind of money. So it comes down to it could have been any game that was covered but something about that video made people decide to check it out. Maybe he said this games sucks so bad you have to check it out. Or maybe he said it is very frustrating but kind of fun. I don't know. Never watched the video.

So as @angrypenguin mentioned there is always the chance for luck to make a game made by anybody become a huge success. It is not really luck in that there are reasons for it. At the same time it is luck because you have no real control over it. If a big website or YouTuber happens to cover your game you will be far ahead of the thousands of other games released each week that do not get that lucky break.

 

James - Yeah it would be nice eh? lol. Hope the update goes swell for ya.

Gar - I completely hear you on that one. All we can do is hope we can get that lucky one day haha.

 

It would be so nice, although im sure you would all miss me

 

Bahahahaha

 

I agree with the article linked in the OP (I know the discussion has drifted a little bit). It seems to come down to one of the basic concepts I was taught in engineering (in terms of project tenders etc) that you have order qualifiers and order winners.

The qualifiers here are the basics that mean you meet the base level target to sell a game. This is a little varied here due to the variety of games but for a roguelike it would be something like perma death, random map/dungeon/loot drops, progression system through levels/equipment and so on. Games in general might just need a decent control system, no game breaking bugs etc.

The order winners would be things like multiplayer, gamepad support, high quality art/music/sounds, unique/new mechanics introduced for the genre (but only if it works well!).

The important thing the article does is look at games with a 70% or higher rating, thus defining this as an order qualifier to sell games. He's taking the game quality into account, likely the majority of games with less than 70% don't actually meet all of the basic order qualifiers and hence don't get (as many) sales.

It all makes fairly logical sense, and while the total number of indie games released on steam has increased I'd hazard a guess that the percentage of that total which don't meet all of the order qualifiers has also increased. This would be from the amateurs/get rich quick devs that are pushing out poor quality games due to the low barrier of entry. Those are the games I see a vast majority of whenever looking at indie games on steam.

Boils down to less sales per game total but roughly equivalent sales for the "good games" as the article has concluded.

 

They will if you pay them enough.

 

So if the key to success is a big YouTuber perhaps I should forget game dev and focus more on becoming a big YouTuber.

 

Thank you Unity - for providing a viable approach to game development for artists like me to create - not for the blame part.

Disclosure - Im the one guy who never played flappy bird. I saw an animated gif of it and knew it wasnt appealing to me.
Imo - If it wasnt for the youtuber flappy bird would never have made any money.

 

Not only that, but prior to his indie endeavors, he was a top developer at the one of the top game companies in his country. Flappy was one in a string of experiments he was doing in simple games.

 

Yup. I'd actually be curious to hear stories of someone that genuinely 'won the lottery' with game development. As in accidentally made a hit on a first game.

Most of these 'overnight' successes don't seem to actually be overnight when you dig into them. There is always a dev that has been working away for years on dozens of titles. Or has left another company to strike out on their own.

I'm not saying that experiance is a guarantee of success. I will contend that success is impossible without that experiance. I'll stand by that statement until someone comes up with a case study proving me wrong.

 

Even though it is lucky that a youtuber picked up flappy bird, it's not luck that they made a video of it. Why would a youtuber make a video of them playing a game if the game wasn't fun or genuinely addicting. In the pewdiepie video (yes I watched it, I bled 3 times) he tells his viewer to not download the game because it is too addicting. I was hooked for a short while, though this happens with most games I play. Maybe it really isn't addicting and people were just driven to play it because they saw their friends playing it or were swayed by youtubers. Either way it wasn't the developer's first game, he knew what he was doing and made a simple fun game.

 

Flappy bird was picked up because pewdiepie decided to play the game, and do a video on it, that seems very luck of the draw to me. If you look at something like shower with your dad simulator, this is another really simple game but at least they had a few "hooks" to try and people interested -- the games "controversial", they had a bunch of stupid things that could hook yotubuers, they had a stupid songs in there greenlight trailer (they probably spent longer on that then the actual game).

 

I rather wonder where all these game developers are coming from. I have some ideas, but not sure.

Some are opportunists, who saw a growing industry and hopped aboard, some with talent, some just hoping to make big bucks. As the market saturates and profits fall, those folks will move on to something else. These are the same folks who jump on trends, make money, and move on. I imagine many are not actually game developers but hire developers or buy finished games to put on the market.

Some are people who grew up as kids playing games. You know that kid, the one that did nothing but play games? I have one of those in my house and he is now studying computer science and hopes to make his own games someday. There is an entire generation of young people now who are starting their careers. Games were and are their hobbies and it is what they love. Some of them will make great games, some not. Most of them will eventually move on to something else when the game industry can't support their changing lives...wife, children, mortgage, etc. In the meantime, we get to sample a bunch of games made by high school, college, and young adults...not at all a bad thing. Then they go on to get jobs at AAA companies, IT companies, businesses, etc....to pay their bills.

Of course, some of us have already done the kids, mortgage thing and are now doing something we love, maybe as a hobby, maybe to earn some money for retirement, or maybe because we feel we have something to share. Some of those games will also end up on the market, labors of love. Again, there might be some good games in there. We have the luxury of having a stable income from a day job or investments or whatever. I imagine our games are a tiny drop compared to the others.

Finally, we have the "real" Indie developers. The ones who own tax paying companies, make profits, and hire experienced developers to work for them. These guys NEED to make a profit because they have a company to run. So they often make games that their marketing research has told them will sell. Most likely they do, and some of them come up with GREAT games. Some of them make clones. These are the guys whose companies might grow and get eaten up by bigger companies until they are no longer called indies.

I am sure there are other "groups" out there making games and I have missed some. This is stereotyping, meant only as an example and some of us may not fit into any of those groups. I do believe eventually things will balance out. The market seems to do that. There was a time when pen and paper games were prolific, everyone making their own, but now it has leveled and while new games come out, they are usually of highly quality. The market shifted to many mediocre to fewer decent quality games. Same will happen to video games...or at the very least, the next great technology will pull some away.

Of course, this is just my own observations...could be completely wrong.

 

I could not say it better that @Teila

Also.. another "indie" thread ..

 

I am not saying FB was terrible or great. I see it as just a game. The point is do you honestly believe that Flappy Bird was so much better than all of the hundreds or thousands of other games released in the same week and month? That is the point I was getting at. It is not about "the best game wins". Not at all. The truth is he could have covered any of countless other games and caused the same sensation for one of those.

 

But would any other game have gotten as huge as FB? Pewdiepie reviews countless of new games but how many of them have you actually heard of? The cynicalbrit made a video where he explained that in his WTF videos the game being talked about most times don't make many sales, while others do receive a major spike in sales. Those games probably are better than the others because they had a hook of some sort to draw the viewer into buying or downloading the game. How many YouTube videos do you watch of games then downloaded or buy? I don't know about you but I rarely do that. So no FB may not have been better than the countless other apps released on the same day but it had something to draw in the player.

 

Well I think it's cool that a bunch of neighborhood people can make a game or app that's relevant only to their niche and distribute it on the app stores. Can you imagine them trying to convince all of those people that might be interested in such an app they need to learn rudimentary skills of development and systems administration just to install an app that is useful to them or that they like?

 

I dunno. I still think flappy bird was a pretty land mark game. It was the first mobile game I played that felt like it was a mobile game first and foremost, instead of a port from an existing game style else where. Even now there are very few games that feel like they belong on mobile, as opposed to being cut down PC titles.

 

It could be. Perhaps Flappy Bird really was a standout game. Unfortunately, I am a terrible judge of mobile games because I don't like them. I only know there seems to be masses of them that all seem to look and play basically the same. I thought FB itself was just a sort of clone of another game. Maybe that is not the case or maybe flappy improved a lot on the other one.

I just find it strange that Flappy Bird would truly represent one of the greatest mobile games ever created and that is why it is a success. I guess I better give it a try.

 

It does not by any means represent one of the greatest mobile games ever lol. Just because it was successful doesn't mean it was great I was just saying that it was paired with a good voice and a hook which led it to its success.

 

I'm not arguing that its the greatest. I am arguing that at the time of its launch, it had a particular combination of things that made it great amongst the other games of the time. Sure the features of the game might not have been enough on its own to go viral. But without them the success never would have happened.

Features that I'm referring to specifically are:

• Simple one touch interface
• Quick play iteration
• No menu screen
• Simple and clean graphics

These are all the hallmark features of Crossy Road. Another mobile game hitting success. Coincidence?

 

Yes, it is luck. At least to some degree. Someone else said it in different words earlier:
1. There's a quality and presentation bar that you absolutely have to meet. That bit is in your control. It is not luck.
2. You can position yourself to take the best advantage of opportunities. Have marketing collateral. A website. A honed message. Be at the right places at the right times. That is in your control. It is not luck.
3. If you've met 1 and are working on 2 then, on top of that, things that are outside of your control can happen that turn a might-succeed into a does-succeed, or an already-succeeding into a freakin-awesome. In the case of Flappy Bird, the PewDiePie video was that thing outside of his control. That is the "luck".

Don't let confirmation bias fool you with point 3 there. Yes, we mostly only hear about examples of the people who actually get lucky, but the sample of people we see suffers from exceptionally bad selection bias - we hear about them because they're already successful. Items 1 and 2 make item 3 more likely and they increase the payoff if it comes along, but they can't guarantee that it will happen.

 

I see what you are saying. I just checked out the game a bit ago. It definitely has a clear goal, quick play iteration and good clean graphics. I agree

I guess I keep thinking surely there must have been loads of other games on mobile that also had these things. I mean it seems like almost necessity for mobile games. If there were (and are) not it makes me wonder what in heck people are actually making for mobile. Whenever I have checked out mobile games they always look clean, simple, fast to get into and out of.

Not sure of course but I just think there has to be more to it.

For example, I just did some checking on Android marketplace all for Galaga / Galaxian style games.

Alien Swarm 1 Million to 5 Million downloads

Space Intruders 1 Million to 5 Million downloads

Galatic Attack 1 Million to 5 Million downloads

They seem to all be simple, challenging, fun games and are clearly popular.

We see three different games that are very similar to each other. Does this mean that if a person creates a game along these lines it will do as well? If so, then why in heck are people wasting time on original stuff and not knocking out games like these?

To help answer the question I did some more digging and found these two:

Rewind Invaders 10,000 to 50,000 downloads

C.S.I. Invaders 10,000 to 50,000 downloads

In both cases this developer has tried to use some creativity to offer a unique twist on the original gameplay. Unfortunately, apparently the mobile gamers do not want that stuff rewarding the dev with far less downloads. lol In fairness though, it does appear the first of these two last two games are suffering from some kind of performance problem. They seem slow and not what you'd expect from a fast action arcade game. However, then the last game the dev actually made that as the unique twist. Slow it down or speed it up to your liking.

Seriously, though looking out there it does make me think the markets are flooded with a lot of weird games or very poorly done games. If that is the case, then perhaps a person could simply knock out a little "old school" style shmup and get 1 million downloads.

It is almost tempting enough to give it a try due to how simple it would be to make such a game. The thing I do not get is I have seen many games over in the Showcase forum that look to me to be every bit as good as these games are and yet they have like 500 downloads or less. So if it really is the game itself that leads to success then I do not understand why those games are struggling to break 500 downloads (even 50 downloads in some cases!)

So... what do we take away from this? Maybe mobile gamers have attracted a lot of retro gamers and they just want "old school" style games the simpler the better? I have no idea really. I find it odd because I am a retro gamer and I don't care for mobile games because the controls generally suck. I guess something like a space invaders or galaxian style game might work well though.

Maybe we should find someone willing to give it a try. Do our own market test right here in the forums and find out if a good solid game will make it on its own or not.

Anyone want to take a crack at making a simple (straightforward no innovation please) solid tight control old school style shmup for Android and see if it can get maybe 250,000 downloads by the end of the year?

 

Gameplay twists are awesome, but look at the screenies. I'm not saying that they look bad, but if I saw that in a lineup with screenies from a dozen other games why would I click on it? I've seen Space Invaders graphics thousands of times in the four decades since it was a thing. There is nothing there to catch my attention.

Same deal with simple-graphics-indie-games in general. It's not that any one of them looks bad. That's not the issue. As a group they just all look really samey. Yes, they all have their own style and twists and so on, but put a thumbnail amongst a bunch of other thumbnails and it's just too subtle for purchasing customers to notice, let alone care.

It's (comparatively) easy to make good looking simple graphics. The downside to that is that lots of people are doing it, which pushes the quality bar exceptionally high while also diluting attention between more titles.

 

In this case though, do the graphics really stand out as being better in Space Intruders and Alien Swarm? Both of which are in the 1 Million to 5 Million downloads level.





The only thing about the graphics that I find weird in CSI Invaders is the turtle and the car.
I get what they are going for with the speed indicators but the images just do not fit in.
I think a single engine spaceship for slow would be good and a ship with maybe 4 engines for the fast image would be better.

Actually, nevermind. I think the turtle and the car do kind of ruin the look of the whole game. It actually looks like a long ad at the top at first glance. lol Would have made more sense to put that on a config screen away from the gameplay screen.