Here is my favorite dumb reaction:
With this addressed, Galyonkin's figures show that the number of indie games releasing on Steam is continuing to rise, but revenues for the average developer fail to match that growth. ... The total naive sales showed a 49% increase over 2015 to 2.9m copies shifted, and total naive revenue rose by 25% to $28m. However, this is where the growth ends. ... [F]or the average developer, statistics are a bit more disappointing.
Literally the entire article reads like the guy thinks that price rises with supply, and that something
really weird is going on, because in this Twilight Zone of indie gaming, a glut of supply is modestly reducing price.
As for the overall state of affairs, I've written my views about it here before, but I still think this is all a little silly. The median indie game on Steam is objectively terrible, and still manages to make $350. In this case, the two games on either side of the median threshold are Lycah (an RPGMaker game that "is an episodic saga from the team behind the Thorne series that puts you in the role of Lycah, a young woman troubled by her past") and Chicken Labyrinth Puzzles (a 10-level, early-access Unity game with stock art in which you guide a chicken through mazes, described by one reviewer as the product of a programmer completing "a maze tutorial"). Here are some screenshots of other median-level games:
If anything, it's extraordinary to me that the median income is greater than zero (incidentally, the median number of citations for a law review article). Who pays for
any of these games?!
There was a period in which Steam maintained a cartel for indie developers, and if you were part of the cartel, you benefited enormously. Steam relaxed the system to remove the cartel aspects, and now people make less, but many more people can participate. Probably the people most hurt by this were those who just barely squeaked in under the old cartel system. But low-performing indie games of today don't have any valid claim for injury; they wouldn't have made it over the Greenlight hurdle and thus never would've benefited from the cartel system. The idea that these absurd games would have (let alone
should have) thrived in 2012 seems dubious to say the least.
As for the book vs. games argument, I think
Davaris is somewhat right with respect to the present e-book market, but until very recently a book required a huge industry to bring it to market -- not just the writer, editor, agent, publicist, cover artist, proofreaders, but also all the business people who are responsible for the supply chain of printing, binding, shipping, etc. the books, not to mention the screening apparatus to separate wheat from chaff as manuscripts come in. Ebooks have made it easier to get into the market, but I'm not sure that books are "easier to make." I know I spent a huge number of hours writing novels (which never sold at all), short stories (which sold, but mostly for pittances) in hopes of getting a pedigree to get me an agent who could sell my novels, cover letters to said agents and short-story markets, etc., etc., none of which yielded anything. My hours invested in writing that crap far exceeds the hours I spent on Primordia, but I made ~100 times as much on Primordia as I made on those books/stories/poems. Overall, I've probably now spent more time making games than writing fiction, but I've made ~250 times as much on games as on fiction. I suspect you'd find this is true for lots of folks because, at least for a time, it was stupidly easy to get a game design job or to sell indie titles for good money, but basically impossible to make money writing genre fiction. (I remember learning at one point that a successful fantasy author I admired made <$100k a year working full-time at it. Perfectly fine money, but not what you expect near the top of the heap -- a tiny fraction of what, say, WEG brings in for Dave a year, let alone what runaway indie successes make.)
