The Indiepocalypse happened - we are now in the Indie Post-Apocalypse

[Infinitron]

What's a good game? What sort of good game has the best chance of succeeding?

If my model of "optimizing for time usage" has any validity, then I think an indie game worth emulating is Hotline Miami. Easy to pick up and play, self-contained missions, no procedural stuff that requires all sorts of random grinding - in short, the kind of thing that's perfect for when you're between sessions of a larger, more time-consuming game.

Now maybe I'm wrong, but despite the popularity of Hotline Miami, there seem to be remarkably few subsequent games that really tried to copy that model. I'm sure there are indie games with similar basic mechanics, but my impression is that indies these days invariably try to stick in all sorts of RPG/roguelite elements for you to mess around with. In other words they're trying to become timesinks, in effect engaging in a hopeless competition for player time with the AAAs.

No-bullshit mission-based story-driven action games. Is that really too much to ask for? I thought this was the sort of thing "indie hipsters" liked. Did the ones who like narrative all try to get into the walking sim business and flame out?

 

[Gerrard]

>28 likes
If this doesn't explain it to you then I don't know what will.

 

[Infinitron]

^I don't think that tweet is by the developer of the game. He's talking about somebody else's game.

 

[Generic-Giant-Spider]

Yes, Hotline Miami was a fun game because it set out to be fun at the core and didn't try to give itself fake depth with these goofy RPG features that makes things feel more like a Frankenstein's monster than anything coherent. Could you imagine if Hotline Miami had something like a talent tree to improve your character, and the enemies became bullet sponges? It would lose its entire pacing, the whole game would collapse and be forgettable. It succeeds precisely because it's very arcadey and in-your-face. It was a game made that wanted to capture the excitement of an adrenaline rush and while that may look simple on paper, sometimes doing a simple idea really good is better than trying to make a jigsaw out of a colouring book.

 

[Gerrard]

I thought it was about his game.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

I hate Infinitron's practice of mentioning me, then deleting the mention. :shakesfist:

So THAT'S why I'm sometimes getting "name drops" on my feed from Infinitron that lead to nothing.

Hey Infinitron! Yer a cunt! Leave the references there for all to see or don't fucking bother!

This is happening in every medium that can be cheaply released via digital distribution: news reporting, genre novels, spoken-word talk shows, etc.

I agree with this.

It's naive to think that we're escaping cartelism and favoritism, though. ("HA! We destroyed newspapers!" they cried, until it turned out that Big Tech now decides what "citizen journalism" actually is visible.) Today, games depend a lot on Youtubers paying attention to them, for instance, and that creates lots of unpleasant distortions, too. You also have to accept on some level that people with the money/power/access/cleverness to exploit the cartel of 20XX will also manage to work out how to exploit the cartel of 20XX+n. At the end of the day, transferring power from IGN to some YTer is probably not going to hobble giant publishers for very long, since they can just coopt the YTer as they did journalists.

And this.

"I deserve to be able to support myself through working from home at my hobby" is fabulously utopian, and the fact that it seems like a plausible demand shows us how materially rich the developed world is at this moment of history. If you have a passion to make point-and-click adventure games, you should pursue that passion. Just as my grandfathers weren't able to earn a living whittling lovespoons, raising homing pigeons, or playing Cassino, but instead had to find work in engineering and law, kids today shouldn't think that they are entitled to get rich making visual novels or Metroidvanias. In college, I wrote two fantasy novels that not only sold zero copies but were only ever read by six people total (apologies are probably owed to the five of them that aren't me). That is almost certainly the fate of most people who have written fantasy (or other) novels. The median number of citations for a law review article is zero. We are all voices crying in the wilderness. Unless you enjoy crying, you should just save your throat and find some other hobby.

And especially this.

Acknowledgement of existance of user

(Seriously, what else did you expect with that username? )

 

[Burning Bridges]

Indies Schmindies ..

Just for the record, I have been playing popamole games lately (GTA V).

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

Let's see if this works.

 

[Bester]

It's a deluge that's going up and up. First to drown were pixel games, platformers, indie looking shit, any game that mixes genres and tries to be something new, etc. Next in line - AA looking 2d games. Then 3d. Last stop will be - MMOs. And then the apocalypse will be complete.

 

[Bester]

It's naive to assume that once we hit rock bottom, we'll bounce back.

As long as game making tools are so readily available, we'll live on rock bottom. Most people think they can win in capitalism, that they're smarter than average. Same thing with indies, they think they've got a better than average game. They'll keep living like bums, working for 7 years on a game and flooding the market with their shit. It's never going to stop now. You're soon going to be as discouraged from making games on your own as you were 15 years ago. The only difference, is that now you'll still make them and end up poor for real.

 

[MRY]

By the way, this reminds me of a scene in the amazing documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi. (The movie is amazing mostly because it is about someone whose aspirations are simultaneously incredibly conventional and incredibly intense; hard to really articulate.) Anyway, the scene is amazing for a different reason:

It's a feel-bad/feel-good scene where the hero talks about overfishing, and how terrible it is, and how the great fish that generation 20XX-n enjoyed are gone and now we're using inferior fish of 20XX and soon we'll be stuck with even worse fish in 20XX+n. But not for a second does the hero consider that he might stop serving tuna, sea bass, etc. His sushi art deserves these great fish, and so do his discerning customers. It's not waste or overfishing when he does it. In fact, the documentarian seems oblivious to this hypocrisy, too. To him, it's entirely "feel good that the hero is denouncing this problem, feel bad that the problem exists," with absolutely no "feel uneasy that the hero is part of the problem."

Anyway, I've never once read an Indiepocalypse article where the author suggests that his game shouldn't be made. For instance, this article doesn't suggest that Omnochronom is causing the problem; instead, it views this ugly, jargony, self-describedly-derivative, incomplete game as a victim of the problem. "If only the other ranchers stopped grazing their cattle in the commons, imagine how fat and sleek my beeves would be!" It seems to me that either you believe that we should all get to make and release our games and market share be damned (my view) or you have to put Omnochronom in the "you must die so other can live" camp.

 

[The Brazilian Slaughter]

Does that mean indie games will now be made with scraps and parts looted from other indie games, indie devs look like motorbike punks and greasers, indie devs will kill each other for base resources and Steam Greenlight Raiders will terrorize the online market places?

 

[Agame]

Before the Indiepocalypse: make a good game
During the Indiepocalypse: make a good game
After the Indiepocalypse: make a good game

So simple and yet a lot of people don't get it.

Yep, all this angst is rather amusing.

Its the same thing artists have been dealing with for hundreds of years:

If you love it do it, and only a tiny percentage will receive fame and fortune.

But "the sky is falling" is always great clickbait news...

 

[someone else]

Solution: we need a larger human population to sustain the indie-game market.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

Well I tagged everybody in this thread and removed it and no one is mad.

I am disappoint.

 

[Hobo Elf]

>28 likes
If this doesn't explain it to you then I don't know what will.

Golden Krone Hotel did okay in the Roguelike community. The steam post isn't about that game.

 

[Tiospo]

 

[Zenith]

could there be a way of more deliberately designing a game in such a way that makes it particularly appealing to play in between rounds of the larger, more time-consuming games?

No-bullshit mission-based story-driven action games.

Not sure you aren't being dense on purpose, but you must have heard of "mid-core" - used to be all the rage right after "mobile&social". With the whole point being, you can cover busy people with jobs if you design your game to have really short play sessions, 10-20min tops. Then you let the autists play 25 hours a day while those same busy people with jobs can pay to win. A lot of "time sink" games (in-between which you want to fit indie games) already fit your description, and are as popular as they are partially because of it (F2P shooters and card games, in particular). Another thing that fits is the rogue-like/lite/whatever games with permadeath.
The only thing I don't get is where you got the "story-driven" part. Short sessions means less involved, and possibly repetitive as well. How does story fit into that?

 

[J_C]

I don't really have too much sympathy for people who suddenly quit their day jobs and go full on indie, then they cry that they can't support themselves. Welcome to 2018 genius, where you can't take the success on Steam granted. Even if you are a talented dev, you shouldn't go full-time indie, if you don't have enough money in the bank to support yourself for at least a year, or even 2 years, preparing for the worst if your game flops.

And if you are a startup indie-dev, then please for the love of God, do it as a hobby. That doesn't mean that you can't ask money for the game at the end, I do it myself, just don't depend on that money. If you only sell 10 copies, tough luck, but look at this way: 10 people were willing to pay real cash for your hobbyist game. How cool is that!

Also, how many of these people complaining did real, actual marketing for their game? Not just posting a few screenshots and a trailer, but actually building a website, a landing page, continuously connecting with people on social media, going out and getting people to review their game on sites and youtube, and if they have the money, buy ads? Marketing sucks, I hate doing it and I don't think I'm doing a good job with it at the moment, but then again, I don't expect my game to sell 10.000 copies for the first week. But I have a feeling that the people who are parroting indiepocalypse didn't either. A good game will only rarely sell in itself, but a well-marketed game, which actually has a market will at least sell decently.

And I know it is hard to sell on Steam, it is flooded with crap. But whose fault is that? Valve's. I don't blame a single wannabe developer on Steam, who put their games on steam. Why wouldn't they? They would be stupid not to use this opportunity. If Valve shuts out these indies, raising the price of submission for 10.000 dollars for example, I won't say a word. I don't have that money to submit that game, so I won't put my games there. It was good while it lasted, bon voyage.

So what does indipocalypse even mean? That there will be sooo many indie games on the market that 90% of them fill flop and drive out their developers from the market? And that is bad because....? That just means that the market regulated itself. Too much supply, not enough demand. After these developers left the market (which is sad, because I'm sure there are talented people there), the supply will decrease, so it will be easier for the indies to make better sales. If you were a hobbyist, you are lucky, you can still make games and possibly put them on Steam, and it will be easier to get sales. But if you were a full-time indie, and you weren't prepared for the worst, I'm sorry. But look at the good side, you can go and take a full-time job at a bigger game dev studio, or in a completely different industry, and you can still make your small indie game as a hobby.

As for those gamers who are not even game developers, yet they are whining about the indiepocalypse...shut the *+#&@÷& up. It doesn't affect you one bit. You still have dozens of good AAA, AA, A and indie games to play with. "Oh, but it is hard to find good games amidst all the crap." Get out of here and *#/#&@÷& you! If you can't find good games in this day and age, using the internet and Steam, then go and */#&@÷&˘yourself.

Now excuse me, I must go and work on my indie shovelware, to reap some easy Steam money.

(Almost forgot: FUCK YOU Valve that you only feature games in the main window which are already selling pretty good. Just randomly giving a few hours of feature time to small indies would mean a lot to their sales.)

 

[Curratum]

Why are these sad, boring indie devs always crying like bitches?

Your games are shit, they are creatively void, look like shit, try to mimic certain genres whose appeal and strengths the devs usually don't fully understand. Why the fuck are you so surprised nobody is buying?

This is also partly Steam's fault because you cannot get any sort of exposure with 20+ new games coming out every day. You literally won't fit in the main store page's "New" section.

 

[Fedora Master]

If you're a successful dev and make a good game yet nobody bothers to talk about it, maybe the game just isn't that good? Naaah, can't be.

 

[laclongquan]

The indie devs have noone else to blame but themselves.

If they make games for gamers, well, where is my turnbased squadbased inventory management, recruit management, gunporn of a RPG? We've been crying for it since 2007 (the completion of Silent Storm Sentinels and Hammer Sickle were in 2004).

If they make games for the mass, then fuck them, they are no indie.

If they make games for themselse, ie art, then they have no one else to blame but themselves. History show artists (make things for themselves) die poor and unacknowledged.

Whether they are indie or AAA, they make games for gamers. Indie just mean they make games for a selected, probabbly small, audience. Doesnt mean they can escape that assignment.

 

[some funny shit]

New indie strategy(?): Not every game has to be a timesink that you play all day, let's make games that target a niche of the audience's time.

But makert is flooded with small free indie games: https://itch.io/
Every game jam brings at least 10 small interesting and good quality free games.


MRY tries to defend his existence as gamedev and existence of his new game that is probably doomed for 99%.



The point is: Market is oversaturated and if you dont have a budget for a team of at least 10 talented people working on your game for at least 2 years to produce a good modern looking game, you are fucked for 99%!!!

This potato game is made by such team:

 

[Mark Richard]

Many folk are still wrestling with the idea that every game holds intrinsic value, a concept which has become outdated with the advent of digital distribution and accessible development tools. Eliminating scarcity and lowering the bar for entry has brought us to a point where roguelike 20459 holds no more worldly value than a child's doodle. The parents may fawn over it, but to achieve success outside of those immediate surroundings, they have to produce something the market actually wants.

 

[adrix89]

Solution: we need a larger human population to sustain the indie-game market.

The problem is not the human population. The problem is they are dirt poor. All that indie games money goes to rent.