Jeff Vogel: The Indie bubble is popping
This is an argument that has been elsewhere numerous times, but I feel Jeff Vogel -a long time indie dev himself- has made the strongest arguments and points I've seen on the matter.
So. read the piece (it's pretty great) then discuss:
a) Is the indie bubble popping?
b) If it is, what can we do/should we do.
So. read the piece (it's pretty great) then discuss:
a) Is the indie bubble popping?
b) If it is, what can we do/should we do.
Thanked by 1TheFuntastic
Comments
What we do about it is build good games and don't rely on other people to make your sales for you. Essentially, you can't ignore the business part of being indie anymore and just hope that you get on Steam and make money that way (I say this fully aware that QCF has earned most of it's money via Steam) - although this has already been happening: The repeat successes come from studios like Vlambeer that build a name for themselves that players can recognise, the continual success are studios like Positech that try to own their players instead of simply let them be carried away by other distributors (that used to be portal sites in the old days, most recently it's Steam and Humble).
You build your own community of players, you win awards, you encourage and foster fans... All of this stuff has never been a bad idea, it's just more needed now so that you're visible. But the first step is still just "Build a good game and only really invest in something that you can prove is special".
I agree that some easy money has gone off the table. It was easy money only available to a selection of developers that Steam curated. It wasn't like that money was being distributed to all developers. (Jeff Vogel does point this out) But it's quite certain that many developers are making more money now due to being on Steam at all than they would have prior to Steam opening the floodgates and their game never reaching Steam. For a new developer without major expenses there's never been a better time to get distributed.
And like @Dislekcia said. The rules for being successful haven't changed.
I disagree somewhat with to Jeff Vogel's maths claim, I don't think that there is fixed pool of money for more developers because:
A ) The amount of money spent on indie games has been steadily growing (unless this trend has suddenly stopped or reversed in 2014 ??). I'd expect the AAA indie developers (as Jeff Vogel terms them) to do better this year than any year prior.
B ) People don't spent X amount per year on games except when the people are statistics. Real people buy games when they want them. If they don't want any indie games they'll spend their money on something they do want. A truly great game can make its own market (just like games like Castle Crashers and Braid did in the first place). The money that people can spend on your game isn't a limited resource that other games are eating into. The X money divided by Y games assumes that gamers will spend that money regardless of there being games they want, which I don't think is the way the market actually behaves.
Somewhat separate to Jeff Vogel's predictions, I do have the fear that having less curation on Steam will burn consumers (if they buy games that they don't enjoy) and there will be a shift away from untested indies as consumer trust decreases. But I haven't seen any evidence of this so far.
Having said all of that... Steam does still hand out easy money in the curation of their front page... Steam are very much still in the business of easy money generation, and I believe Sony and Microsoft have similar programs for their consoles.
Microsoft's front page seems terrible right now, all those ads have killed a lot of games. I have no idea how Sony's performs, but I'd argue that relying on front page featuring is a bad idea - if it happens, great, you still have to do all the other stuff necessary to sell your game yourself anyway first :) It feels like all of this is just a warning against relying on luck.
I am drawing a parallel to the Indie scene. SMB, Minecraft, Fez even Braid were massively popular without Steam. Although the glut of terrible games may make it harder for casual gamers to find gems it will require more from Developers in terms of marketing and building a base before launching.
Regarding Steam and Sony and Microsoft. "King Making" or "Golden Touch" might have been better phrasing than "Easy Money".
The point I thought was interesting is that there still are distributors giving out golden touches. The system that they employ to do that is different now, but I'm not certain Steam opening up it's platform changes much for the games that were getting a lot of golden touching before.
I'm not too sure how Sony's front page works. The PS Vita front page apparently gets a fair number of sales (though not nearly as much as Steam), I'd expect the PS4/PS3 front page to be similar. But in addition to that Sony gives out great steaming wads of cash to developers who sign up to their PS Plus program (which is another kind of golden touch).
So I'm wondering whether making money off of a *good* game is actually significantly harder post-Greenlight than it was pre-Greenlight? (and who is affected)
(There are obviously other effects that Jeff was talking about, like the proliferation of Bundles, and people have been predicting that that spells out doom for some time now, and it might very well drive prices and the quality of games down).
In any case. Maybe all this is moot and in 10 years time everything will be free-to-play anyway : )
With steam I think we are in an interesting transition period. Race to the bottom is in full effect (humble, deals, sales, etc). Curation is something Valve seem to be shying away from. The question becomes what will Gabe's "Curated storefronts" look like? I feel like youtube personalities will become the king makers - but even there's evidence of youtubers experiencing fatigue when it comes to new games and focusing on safer bets as mentioned in the article. At least fans bash down the door when a personality doesn't review a hot new game.
People will always want good games, and (hopefully) remain prepared to pay for that. I think there's always going to be money on the table, but reliably accessing that money is going to be a matter of very shrewd business and effective marketing over the period of many years.
Interesting times.
I think @BlackShipsFilltheSky has it right with the idea of Kingmakers. The thing people seem to be bemoaning is that the new kings aren't making as much money as the old kings. That may well be true seeing as those Kingmakers make money no matter how many kings they make... So the obvious question to me becomes: "How do we become our own Kingmakers?"
@TheFuntastic, mobile scares me as a business owner. I don't want to release there without knowing that somehow people are going to be looking for what I'm making. At the same time, I think it's kinda fair that Valve steps away from curation if they possibly can - it's not fair on Valve that all the ire from games they don't feature gets lumped on them. Apple might be enough of a monolith to effectively not give a fuck (which they've proven over and over again by shutting down apps for super flimsy reasons), but Valve is a lot more personal. It's got to weigh on them as a company, knowing that they might be damaging people's potential livelihoods by not knowing enough about a game to want to feature it. I get the feeling that if they could feature way more stuff, they would.
Youtubers are also probably not a great solution - especially with some of them starting to charge for covering games now. It's on the path to being just like the app store: To be visible, you'll need money. Maybe there will be a larger backlash because Youtube is inherently more open than a single storefront, so maybe viewers will prefer youtubers that don't charge devs. I dunno.
Yes, there's definitely money on the table, I don't think it was ever that easy to access - I think that some people just got luckier than others. I don't begrudge that luck, especially seeing as I've had more than my fair share. I just want to figure out how not to need it in future - the best way to do that seems to pay attention and have plans. I also don't begrudge the opening of platforms: Without that happening there's no way a studio from SA would ever have been able to release like we did. I also feel like, maybe we're all kingmakers in our own way - if we all help each other, maybe more kings can happen and it doesn't have to be quite so hard the next time around.
Had Steam been this open a few years back there's a chance that a couple of my earlier prototypes may have found their way onto the platform (if they'd had a bit of polish thrown at them). That would have been sweet.
Now that the serious stuff is out of the way...
That was a great read. I was on my way to make sure it was posted here, but I see everything's covered already. I don't think I really have anything much to contribute.
This has been simmering away for a while now, though. I do think "bubble bursting" implies the wrong meaning. That makes it sound more like a crash whereas this is more gradual.
Isn't this really a case of lots of people attracted by the apparent gold rush and now there is a lot more competition?
Lots more hands to grab the low hanging fruit. I am very interested to see how this plays out. Games are not comparable simply on price where one game is equal to another game like commodities. Personally, I'd happily pay $30 for a game I want rather than get 100 $1 games for $10.
Related: I'd be interested to see if just the price of a game changes the perceived value of it.
I keep drawing parallels between online distro and the shareware environment back in the 90s, where small teams and solo devs were churning out games on BBSes and demo discs and trying to get noticed the way Wolf 3D and Doom had been in order to win those sweet, sweet registration monies. And just like those teams, now it's time to pull on the business pants - a mature approach to a mature competitive environment is required. It's funny how the shareware games that had a lot of word-of-mouth or were well-marketed by, say, Apogee happened to do better...
http://store.steampowered.com/app/295810/
There is also the stat doing the rounds that in the first four months of 2014 steam released more games than they did in the whole of 2013. The floodgates, they would seem, are open.
Haven't had a chance to read it yet, but thought I'd just mention it here quickly.
What I gather from the many articles thrown on these forums and around the inter web from well known devs to business analysts to that-guy-that-made-that-really-cool-game-when-the-bubble-still-existed is that it's just not that easy to make money/living from indie game dev. Key word being EASY not impossible and that's what's got people panicking and scrambling around looking for the next magic potion to make a quick buck, be it drive volume sales from discount prices etc.
In my opinion people the people who started doing game dev for that quick buck will probably disappear from the scene based on the articles but those that love it will make a fucking plan. Invest more time in the actual buisinessy side of the industry. Which in turn will help the nurture solid companies moving forward.
At the end of the day, I never thought it would be easy, so from what I read and see, the "easy money" was never a real option. What's worth doing is never easy, and making stuff I love making is certainly worth doing, or I wouldn't be here in the first place :)
So thanks for everyone's input into this, and reaffirming my belief that we're here because we love it, not because OMG BUBBLE :)
(I understand the importance of business, so the landscape and the market is definitely worth knowing and understanding for sure!)