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Steam's "indiepocalypse"

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No, Twitter and Facebook in general generate very few sales. It has nothing to do with Steam.

Look at the two threads in the OP. They show the impact of sales, media blitz, and the Steam recommendations before and after the change. Before the change, there was this constant growing trickle of sales. After the change, the sales are almost completely gone.

Think of Steam like a brick and mortar grocery store. Products place at the ends of rows tend to sell better than items in rows due to placement. Indies used to get end rows on rotation, now they don't.

Most indies can't even afford to make the game, nevermind creating ("investing in") a distribution platform too. Not to mention, look at the outcry at EGS. A lot of people don't want more distribution software installed on their computer and more user credentials to manage.

Am I missing something? The only thing I see in those links are graphs indicating the effects of STEAM's practices. Nothing to do with any other distribution source. Those graphs do not account for anything except steam sales, which are irrelevant to what I'm saying.

You're saying that Steam is like a store, and products near the end of the row sell better... which is true. I'm saying don't sell your stuff at that store at all. If the store isn't putting your stuff on the display, there's no point paying them to house it in the back of the warehouse where someone *might* ask for it by name. That's what I'm trying to say, that you don't seem to be getting... you are saying that Steam isn't hawking their product, then basically saying they have no other choice but to use steam... Bad news for you, Steam will do what Steam wants to do, and they have every right to do so, damn what other people think or who it hurts. If Steam isn't serving indie developers, then indie developers should LEAVE STEAM. That's all there is to it.

If I can afford a website with a download link, an indie dev can too. I'll have to buy more bandwidth as sales ramp up and I get more traffic, sure.
 

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Most indies are only on Steam because that's where the most exposure was. Now they're kind of stuck with it. Other distributors don't want a game that failed on Steam. They also don't have the money to pursue something else.

2017, PC gaming was a $32.3 billion market and Steam was $4.3 billion of that or 13%. Boxes (out of reach for indies) was $3.2 billion or 10%, browser games (indies can't monetize that without a publisher) was $5.2 billion or 16%, and Tenacent by itself made over $8 billion in six months or 25%. That leaves 36% which mostly went to games like Ghost Recon: Wildlands (Ubisoft), World of Warcraft (Blizzard), Overwatch (Blizzard), and a bunch of South Korean MMOs.

There's no where else to go and that's the point.

Minecraft was the last successful, completely independent game there was and that was released in 2009. Back when forums were popular, Facebook was a year away from passing up eBay in popularity, websites weren't a convoluted mess of JavaScript, Myspace didn't start declining yet, and Twitter was starting to catch on. Hell the iPhone released in 2007. It's a completely different world today. There cannot be another Minecraft now.


Imagine this: I tell you got a game I'm working on and you have to get it from insertdomainnamehere.com. Would you? Or would you be like most people and think two things: a) that's a shifty website and b) my backlog of games is so big I don't want anymore. Good luck getting more than a 1000 downloads for free; nevermind, getting paid for any of it. This is the world we live in today. Everyone has the attention span of a goldfish.
 
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There's no where else to go and that's the point.

That's where we disagree then. There is absolutely somewhere to go. Sit in the back of the warehouse and don't make sales on Steam, or get out and make your own way, and potentially sell some games. As I said, in a world where you can reach a hundred million people within minutes, there is absolutely a way. Just have some imagination, or at least some balls.

Remember that Minecraft originally uploaded to a forum as a preview, then sold from direct distribution from Notch's blog.

...Notch is a billionaire now, by the way...
 

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Marketing costs money, a lot of it, and indies often don't have enough money to finish the game, nevermind market it. I know a lot of indie devs with good games and not one of them is able to even balance the books from game sales. Almost all are having to take on third-party contract work to pay the bills and keep food on the table.

There will never be another Minecraft and I explained why in my last post.

Blogs...another relic of the past.
 
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Marketing costs money, a lot of it, and indies often don't have enough money to finish the game, nevermind market it. I know a lot of indie devs with good games and not one of them is able to even balance the books from game sales. Almost all are having to take on third-party contract work to pay the bills and keep food on the table.

There will never be another Minecraft and I explained why in my last post.

"It's hard, and a long shot, so I should complain about how steam treats me instead."

Gotcha. With that mindset, I suppose scraps from steam is the best you'll ever do, sure. All those changes that make it a different world, are all tools that will make the next minecraft easier to get out. I'm sure the complaining will put food on the table though. :rolleyes:

(to be clear, I'm not saying you can't complain... I'm saying indie devs should have the gumption to DO something about it rather than JUST complaining.)
 

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Off the top of my head, here's games in my Steam library that have been abandoned:
FRONTIERS - Game has severe performance problems. Too costly to fix for the amount of revenue the game gets.
Stellar Overload - Game cost 1.6 million Euros to get to the point it is and the developer said they need double that to finish it. The company declared bankruptcy. The IP is in legal limbo because of that so it can no longer be sold.
Godus - Who doesn't know about this one?
Godus Wars - A competitive spin-off of Godus. A cheap attempt to generate a second revenue stream to finish both games. Failed miserably.
Space Station Alpha - Think this one was more of a scam than anything. Kickstarter -> one month or so of updates -> abandoned. Developer calls it finished. I completely disagree.
Spacebase DF-9 - Double Fine's abandonware. I think the argument was it wasn't selling well enough to warrant investing money in. Sad.
StarForge - Only got four updates before abandoned.
Spintires - Abandoned because of a fallout between publisher and developer. Developer went to Focus Home Entertainment and is now publishing under Mudrunner. Spintires is no longer getting updates so...
Edge of Space - Dev took contract work (to pay the bills) which had a confidentiality clause. He couldn't work on nor talk about Edge of Space until the contract was completed, which took years. By the time the contract was expired, Unity Engine moved so far on that updating the game to work on the latest version would take as much effort as starting over. He may have started over, I don't know. Edge of Space is effectively dead either way.
Towns - Apparently sold 200,000 copies. Wasn't enough to finish it.

Gotcha. With that mindset, I suppose scraps from steam is the best you'll ever do, sure. All those changes that make it a different world, are all tools that will make the next minecraft easier to get out. I'm sure the complaining will put food on the table though. :rolleyes:
There's like 100 Minecraft's out there now and I can name two off the top of my head: Stellar Overload (see above, bankrupt) and FortressCraft: Evolved (lived off the generosity of Patrons, barely). Without Patrons, FortressCraft: Evolved would have become abandonware too. The only one I can think of that met with much success is 7 Days to Die. Why was it successful where the rest have failed? No idea.


Getting the point yet? For every one success story, there's nine failure stories. And that's just in Steam Early Access. Crowdfunding is just as bad in terms of failure rates and these are games that never even reach Steam Early Access. Steam Early Access...is like a graveyard where ideas go undeveloped.

As I pointed out previously, Fig saw all of this and is trying a different approach to fund indies. Judging by Vagrus (the first to use this new Open Access model), it isn't working either.
 
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The only one I can think of that met with much success is 7 Days to Die. Why was it successful where the rest have failed? No idea.

Simply because it was one of the first. But 7DtD is on extended life support anyway, it's been in alpha for half a decade now and is only being worked on by 1 person, despite all the Kickstarter money they raised.
 
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Off the top of my head, here's games in my Steam library that have been abandoned:
FRONTIERS - Game has severe performance problems. Too costly to fix for the amount of revenue the game gets.
Stellar Overload - Game cost 1.6 million Euros to get to the point it is and the developer said they need double that to finish it. The company declared bankruptcy. The IP is in legal limbo because of that so it can no longer be sold.
Godus - Who doesn't know about this one?
Godus Wars - A competitive spin-off of Godus. A cheap attempt to generate a second revenue stream to finish both games. Failed miserably.
Space Station Alpha - Think this one was more of a scam than anything. Kickstarter -> one month or so of updates -> abandoned. Developer calls it finished. I completely disagree.
Spacebase DF-9 - Double Fine's abandonware. I think the argument was it wasn't selling well enough to warrant investing money in. Sad.
StarForge - Only got four updates before abandoned.
Spintires - Abandoned because of a fallout between publisher and developer. Developer went to Focus Home Entertainment and is now publishing under Mudrunner. Spintires is no longer getting updates so...
Edge of Space - Dev took contract work (to pay the bills) which had a confidentiality clause. He couldn't work on nor talk about Edge of Space until the contract was completed, which took years. By the time the contract was expired, Unity Engine moved so far on that updating the game to work on the latest version would take as much effort as starting over. He may have started over, I don't know. Edge of Space is effectively dead either way.
Towns - Apparently sold 200,000 copies. Wasn't enough to finish it.


There's like 100 Minecraft's out there now and I can name two off the top of my head: Stellar Overload (see above, bankrupt) and FortressCraft: Evolved (lived off the generosity of Patrons, barely). Without Patrons, FortressCraft: Evolved would have become abandonware too. The only one I can think of that met with much success is 7 Days to Die. Why was it successful where the rest have failed? No idea.


Getting the point yet? For every one success story, there's nine failure stories. And that's just in Steam Early Access. Crowdfunding is just as bad in terms of failure rates and these are games that never even reach Steam Early Access. Steam Early Access...is like a graveyard where ideas go undeveloped.

As I pointed out previously, Fig saw all of this and is trying a different approach to fund indies. Judging by Vagrus (the first to use this new Open Access model), it isn't working either.

Lol, "next Minecraft" doesn't mean "Minecraft clone"... You're being purposefully obtuse now... I mean the next huge indie hit, and you know it. All those Minecraft clones died because they never lived in the first place. They were crappy games. They died because they were crappy knockoffs, and crappy games in general. They were serving a market that was already served. That's opposite of what I'm talking about... Having a little imagination. Shovelware has no place in this discussion. 7 days to die was a relative success because it offers features that the rest of them don't, and was a decent game relative to the rest of the drivel that's part of the Minecraft clone genre.

Regardless, whether the failure was because of lack of marketing or because it was a bad game, steam didn't save the ones that were released there ... So that in no way invalidates my point.
 
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Worse thing is the scene releases tons of these games.
 

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Simply because it was one of the first. But 7DtD is on extended life support anyway, it's been in alpha for half a decade now and is only being worked on by 1 person, despite all the Kickstarter money they raised.
So even that one is on the verge of becoming abandonware. Sad. :(

I don't. Never heard of it...
22cans was founded by Peter Molineux whom was the creative mind behind Populous and Black & White. He practically invented the god game genre.

Godus is basically like Populous but designed for touch screens. Watch a video of it with the terrain manipulation...that's basically what the game is. Make flat space, they build hut, and you keep expanding, then recruit an army, and take on rival tribes. I liked it. The problem was that Molineux could never leave well enough alone. He kept reinventing what the game was about. Makes fell into feature creep coupled with poor sales.

Looked at all the rest. Meh...
FRONTIERS has a fast travel that blew me away. You're literally moving in fast forward along paths. The story was pretty good too...but performance tanks so bad, the game becomes unplayable.

Stellar Overload (formerly Planets Cubed) was to be the Minecraft game to end all Minecraft games. Weapons that don't break, small voxel size, Unreal Engine 4, planets, vehicles, plot, multiplayer, surprises in the world, and so on. And that's all in the game as it stands. Woe is me.

…

Suffice it to say that all of the games had some attractive feature but none of them got an audience big enough to sustain development.


That just life. Again, you're not making any earth-shattering points here.
There's no financial reason for anyone to make an indie title now. It's basically a fire pit to fling your money into. Doesn't really matter how good the game is, odds are it's going to fail because most of the money is going into known quantities like League of Legends, Fortnite, and PUBG.


Lol, "next Minecraft" doesn't mean "Minecraft clone"... You're being purposefully obtuse now... I mean the next huge indie hit, and you know it. All those Minecraft clones died because they never lived in the first place. They were crappy games. They died because they were crappy knockoffs, and crappy games in general.
I consider Minecraft crappy next to FortressCraft: Evolved and especially Stellar Overload.

They were serving a market that was already served.
So does every Doom clone, Rogue-like, and GTA clone. Yet, many have found success. Even Fortnite following PUBG. TL;DR: You don't know when proverbial lightning will strike a game until after the fact.

7 days to die was a relative success because it offers features that the rest of them don't, and was a decent game relative to the rest of the drivel that's part of the Minecraft clone genre.
*cough* Stellar Overload *cough*

Regardless, whether the failure was because of lack of marketing or because it was a bad game, steam didn't save the ones that were released there ... So that in no way invalidates my point.
You can probably count the number of successful Early Access games on your fingers and toes. Again, lightning.


Consortium is a new type of game simply because of the depth of narrative. When I ran a program through a simplified narrative tree from it, it had over 2 million possibilities it examined which took almost four hours to examine. It didn't sell well despite being a really good game. There's a post-mortem available by the developer if you're interested:

And this is a veteran game developer. He did a lot of work on Scarface: The World is Yours.


The market has to *want* your game at the time it is available; otherwise, it's all for naught. Example: Vampire the Masquerade Bloodlines sales were decimated by launching at the same time Half-Life 2 did (because both were Source engine and Steam forbade Bloodlines being the launch title). You can do everything right but release at the wrong hour on the right day and have the game flop (Super Meatboy almost suffered that fate).


I can go on forever. Point is, Steam is now hurting indies more than it helps and there's really no viable alternatives that aren't also floundering. It's a terrible time to be an indie dev.
 
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I give up...
 
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And if the games suddenly disappear from the store he bought them? Backups are a good thing.
I see both sides and used to back up my games but when they started to get into the terra-bytes and trying to keep two backups in case of a hard drive failure, well it got to be a pain and I didnt want to invest in more hard drives. So I kinda just gave up and delete them when I am done.
 
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Yes, no, no and yes. Not all kids are pathetic, self-destructive rebels.

Hey now. There is nothing wrong with Porn, cigarettes, and narcotics. Only when they are used inappropriately.
 
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I see both sides and used to back up my games but when they started to get into the terra-bytes and trying to keep two backups in case of a hard drive failure, well it got to be a pain and I didn't want to invest in more hard drives. So I kinda just gave up and delete them when I am done.
Have not looked in a while but its now at 436 steam games. Not counting Epic, Origin or the others.
 

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That in no way guarantees market proliferation. I explained this.
Neither does publishing on steam.... especially considering that steam is explicitly not serving these developers. So what's your point???

Dang I said I was done with this... It's like you just say whatever will refute the post you're replying to without having a coherent end result in mind... Seems the only aim you have here is to complain about Steam, but when people suggest possible solutions, you refuse them all, basically saying that there is no possible alternative. So again... what's the point?
 

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How many times do I have to repeat myself? Let me be real clear:
1) Steam was initially great (2007~2012) for indies because they could reach a large audience without a publisher.
2) Steam Greenlight happened in 2012 and the controlled curation stopped. The small pool of money which went to a small pool of indies is now getting spread thin.
3) In an attempt to stop Greenlight games from not even reaching the store because of funding shortages, they introduced Steam Early Access in 2013. This was great for early indie developers because the excitement around the concept got money flowing but then, games like Godus gave the platform a bad reputation and the funds dried up. Only those that laid their roots in the initial funding frenzy (like Rimworld and Prison Architect) really found success in the end.
4) 2014 marked the beginning of the plateau for indie games on Steam. This is when sales event that were relatively equal opportunity (indies could show up in flash sales next to AAA games) turned into mainly promotions for big franchises from Ubisoft, Square Enix, 2K, and so on.
5) Then comes 2018 and the "indiepocalypse." What few avenues Steam had left to promote indies got closed in favor of promoting AAA games to prevent losing more games to EGS exclusivity contracts. Steam claimed to shift the algorithms to better favor indies but in practice, indies aren't seeing sales recover.

Steam is no longer a good platform for indies. GOG has fairly tight curation standards. EGS has even tighter curation standards. Publishers (Private Division, Humble Bundle, Focus Home Entertainment, Paradox Interactive, Microsoft, etc.) already have full portfolios and they're risk averse. There's no money and no interest in creating more game distribution platforms. All this combined...Steam started the "indiepocalypse" but it's now true of the entire market. It's about the worst time ever to be an indie game developer. The market is too crowded and there's enough money to go around.

The point is we're seeing mostly sequels and shovelware because the indie scene is gasping for air: the "indiepocalyspe."
 
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So basically, all complaining, and any solutions that are suggested will be met with cynicism and refusal to adapt. Gotcha. My apologies for suggesting that indie developers, known for innovation in the gaming industry, might somehow innovate and come up with a solution.

Since we're not interested in solutions here, I suppose I really am done then.
 

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All solutions you suggested have been tried (social media, independent distribution, etc.). I really think EGS is providing the best model to fund indies (prepaid sales) but curation and risk management are a problem.
 
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That in no way guarantees market proliferation. I explained this.
True, but it helps a lot to have a great idea and solid gameplay to begin with. There are lots of indie games that show little in the way of creativity and even fewer that show the polish of hard work and refinement.
 
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All solutions you suggested have been tried (social media, independent distribution, etc.).

And been proven successful, but apparently you think that data reflecting only steam sales and the effect of steam's policies refutes that, and ignored when I pointed out the problem with that claim... Whatever. :rolleyes:
 

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Here we go again with the broken record...

Define "successful." Just because a media blitz gets you 1000 sales doesn't mean it's enough to continue development. Social media is generally only as effective as the number of followers and likes the account has. Indies don't have much in the first place; ergo, social media response is weak at best. Every indie developer does these things you said to little affect.

Most indie games are available exclusively on Steam via Early Access until they reach gold. They're not accepted anywhere else.

You act like these beaten-to-death ideas are new. They are not. As I said before, viral marketing is like lightning striking. It rarely strikes for indie developers and it is not something they can control.


Let me give you a dose of reality: the reason why publishers were a big deal for the last three decades because marketing for a game is 40-60% of the entire budget for a game. That is to say, marketing for a game would cost more than the game itself to produce and distribute. You can have the best product in the world but if people don't know about it or can't find it, it may as well not even exist. The vast majority of indie games only have a few thousand dollars at best for a marketing budget. It's never enough and because publishers are busy trying to keep their own IPs aloft, they aren't looking to contract indie developers either. There are incubators and other investment firms that attempt to address the marketing problem but they're generally failing because it's not profitable if they can't get lightning to strike.


All indies have left these days is persistence and hope that it eventually pays off.
 
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Define "successful." Just because a media blitz gets you 1000 sales doesn't mean it's enough to continue development.
Therein is the problem. Many of the indie devs start asking for money before they have a product that is even near finished. Let's talk about games that are actually finished before we talk about success or failure.
They're not accepted anywhere else.
And that's a good thing.
 
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