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

[Infinitron]

https://www.goldenkronehotel.com/wp/2018/08/26/the-indie-post-apocalypse/

The Indie Post-apocalypse


It was 3 years ago when the term “Indiepocalypse” blew up overnight. Because 3 years before that, Steam Greenlight launched. It took a while, but in September 2015 it was suddenly becoming clear that the massive deluge of games hitting Steam wasn’t a fluke.

Releases on Steam per year

The number of games released tripled from 2013 to 2014. Then almost doubled again in 2015. We heard about Airscape, which sold about 150 sales on launch, and innumerable games like it. And then we heard the predictions about what was to come. The warnings. The lamentations.

“If you are thinking of quitting your AAA job to go indie, you probably missed the bus by 3-4 years at this point” – Jonathan Blow

Well, we’re 3 years on. The indiepocalypse isn’t happening. It happened. It’s over and what happens after an apocalypse is of course the post-apocalypse.

There is a persistent belief that nothing much has changed and all you have to do is make a good game, market it, and stay persistent. I’m not quite convinced.

Just make a good game

This one pisses me off because it’s a tautology. If a game sells well, that is taken as evidence that it’s good and if a game sells poorly, it’s not good. This is circular. It’s survivorship bias.

I see good games failing all the time and the same reasons given for why those games failed can be applied equally to huge hits.

If Undertale came out today and it flopped, they would simply say “it has crappy art. No wonder it failed”. If Dead Cells had flopped, they would say “people are tired of roguelikes.” If Celeste sold poorly, they would say “pixel art platformer is a saturated genre.”

Just market it

I consider most of the advice on marketing to be total garbage unless you are already successful: start a website (no one will ever find it), write a press release (no one cares), post on reddit (woops, totally against their strict self promotion rules).



Only restricting ourselves to the decent advice (i.e. promoting your game to the right influencers), well that stuff is massively harder than it was only a few years ago. The market being flooded is only the start. Consumers have a ton more games vying for their attention, but so do journalists. So do streamers. Their inboxes are absolutely slammed with hundreds of emails on a daily basis. One thing I did while promoting Golden Krone Hotel is search for journalists who had reviewed traditional roguelikes before. I quickly noticed that, while Dungeons of Dredmor (2011) had 18 reviews on Metacritic, I couldn’t find a single new roguelike with any Metacritic reviews. It seems that niche games that could easily get press attention a few years ago can’t get any now.

Even if you do catch the attention of the press or a large twitch or youtube personality, there’s no guarantee you’ll get any sales out of it.

Aztez had five years of positive press coverage and a respectable Metacritic score of 81%. It flopped hard.

Just keep going

I see too many examples of seasoned game developers doing worse and worse. Gone Home selling about 700,000 units vs Tacoma selling 10,000 is probably the poster child, but there are many more.

Even so, I admit that building a reputation is probably the best tool indie developers have at their disposal.

Consider Into the Breach. A turn based tactics game with middling pixel art played on small grid and with permadeath? I don’t think Subset Games would have gotten the attention of anybody if it wasn’t for them having made FTL as their previous game.

Containing My Burguning Schadenfreude

So how bad can things get? Do small developers still have a shot by keeping at it? Those questions brings me to Keith Burgun.

It all started some years ago while trying to find a podcast. I enjoy listening to podcasts and for some reason it’s super hard to find a consistent game development podcast. My favorites tend to close up shop as soon as I start listening. Keith Burgun had a podcast calledClockwork Game Design. It was fairly consistent and it was one of the only podcasts to focus on design specifically, which I liked.

Over time though I started to get annoyed. I disagreed, vehemently, with practically everything Keith was saying. He hated “classics” like Go and made an unconvincing argument that new games are always dramatically better than older ones. He said “reading” (as in reading your opponent in games like poker or Yomi) wasn’t a real thing. He tended to categorize any game other than the kind he was making as a “toy” instead of a real game. Finally, he took a massive dump on the entire genre of roguelikes and called them Skinner boxes. That was really strange considering roguelikes were the only kind of game Keith had made and it really set me off because I was working on one myself.

Reader, I was ready for the schadenfreude. This guy was attacking the things I liked on a fundamental level and my stupid monkey brain wanted to see him fail. I’m not proud of it.

But then something unexpected happened. On a whim, I decided to play the last game designed by Keith Burgun and I loved it! Auro is one of my favorite PC games. Ever. It’s tightly designed, easy to learn, beautiful, deep, and really compelling. I don’t put a lot of hours into any single game these days and I’ve clocked over 100 into Auro. The worst thing I can say is it has a few bugs, but I still recommend it to anyone.

I realized that I can strongly disagree with someone and still acknowledge that they’re great at what they do. I became very curious about his next game…

So here we are. Keith Burgun’s latest game, Escape the Omnochronom!, came out last Thursday. ETO is ambitious. It’s designed to be a combination of two genres that I don’t recall ever having been mixed: roguelike and MOBA.

Take a guess then. How well do you think ETO did in its first 72 hours on sale?

While you’re pondering that, a quick diversion into estimating sales on Steam.

Reasonable ignorance

Valve doesn’t publish sales data. We had SteamSpy, but it’s sort of defunct now. We had an ingenious way of finding exact player counts using achievements and that was shut down. We’re pretty much left with one method and it’s actually not too bad. It’s called the Boxleiter Method and it goes like this.

One piece of data Valve does share publicly is review count. Even better is that those reviews are guaranteed to be from people who have bought the game directly on Steam (and not through say a heavily discounted bundle), something SteamSpy couldn’t suss out.

Since a certain percentage of purchases will leave reviews, we can simply multiply the number of reviews by a certain factor and come up with an estimate of units sold. That factor appears to be roughly 50 or 2% of players leaving reviews. Remember, it’s just an estimate but it tends to be a fairly reasonable rule of thumb

If a game has 1 review, it most likely has not sold more than 50 copies. The factor should be much lower in the beginning, since your voice counts for more when there are few reviews. If a game has 20 reviews it has probably sold about 1,000 copies. 200 reviews means 10,000 copies. If a game has 10,000 reviews, it’s sold half a million copies and has almost certainly made millions of dollars. So on and so on.

I would go even further and tell you my personal rule of thumb: if a $10 indie game doesn’t have over 300 reviews, it was probably a financial failure. That is it hasn’t provided the equivalent of what someone could make in industry in a single year.

(300*50*$10 – Valve’s cut) = ~$100,000

And that’s rather conservative because it doesn’t account for discounts or multiple developers or development cycles longer than a year. Add all that in and 300 reviews probably means minimum wage or worse for all those involved. Remember Aztez, a game two guys worked on for seven years? 71 reviews.

Is this normal?

Using reviews as a proxy for sales, how many reviews do you think Escape the Omnochronom! has generated in its opening weekend (which could account for more than 10% of its annual revenue).

Is it a smash hit with thousands of reviews? Or is it at least on the way to a nice break even at 300 reviews?

Keep in mind Keith has 1500 twitter followers, over 6000 youtube subscribers, 43 patrons, and a popular podcast. He’s written a well received book on game design and his games have been played by thousands if not tens of thousands of gamers. His last game had a fricking 91% on Metacritic. This is what we talked about earlier: keeping at it. Building a reputation and amassing a following.

But also remember something else. It’s 2018.

Let’s Be Realistic: A Deep Dive into How Games Are Selling on Steam

Do you have the answer yet? In reviews? Sales? Dollars? Actually it doesn’t matter what units you chose. Because to a first approximation they’re all the same.

• Zero reviews
• Zero comments on announcements of the game launching
• One curator, who has depressingly enough not even played the game
• Two comments in the entire forum section

Things have been asymptotically approaching zero. Now we’ve arrived. We’ve arrived at the worst it can get because you can’t sell less than zero. An experienced game designer with multiple shipped titles and a moderately sized following shouting into the void and getting no response whatsoever….

I guess that’s the new normal, but something about that doesn’t seem normal to me at all.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

We're not in the post-Indiepocalypse era just yet, but it doesn't seem to be far off now. Months at the most, maybe a year.

The problem is that most people don't notice these signs because PC gaming (at least) is riding high on the PUGB/Fortnite wave. When that wave recedes (and if there's not another wave immediately coming after) then we'll at least see some serious damage.

 

[Lahey]

muh shovelware

 

[Explorerbc]

There is not really much to say on the subject that hasn't already been said countless of times before.

It was fun while it lasted, but things will have to get back to normal.

It is kinda depressing however to think of all the potential gems that will never be made because the market couldn't support them.

 

[Spectacle]

One factor that's often overlooked is that AAA and AA games have significantly increased in quality since the popamole heyday of the 00's and the indie glory days. Nowadays there are plenty of high-budget games that are actually fun to play and have production values that indies can only dream of.

 

[MRY]

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

(2) "Now that Steam sells every hobbyist game ever made, median sales have gone down, how could this be?"

(3) If Game X sells less in 20XX than it would have sold in 20XX-n because a cartel is broken and shelf space is no longer artificially restricted, that is certainly a tragedy for Developer X. But if Game ~X sells any copies in 20XX when it would not have been allowed to be sold in any major portal in 20XX-n, that is hardly a tragedy for Developer ~X. "Things have really gotten worse since we let the riffraff in," thinks every person born at the right time and place in all of history to enjoy special access to a restricted good. I certainly enjoyed the Greenlight country club, but at least I have the self-awareness to acknowledge it for what it was.

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

(5) 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.

(6) "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.

 

[vonAchdorf]

Steam is now where the App stores have been since 2011.

 

[vonAchdorf]

(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.

This may be so 2016 though, I remember reading an article by an indie dev, that youtube didn't have a great influence on copies sold (might be anecdotal wisdom specific to the game).

 

[Infinitron]

Something I haven't really seen examined so much is the concept of designing games to fit players' time usage. Most people think about games in terms of value for money, when perhaps they should instead be thinking in terms of value for time.

It seems to go something like this. Players have one big game that they play. For some of them it may be the same game over a period of years, an MMO, MOBA or multiplayer shooter that they spend their lives in. Others might be hopping from one big AAA open world game to the next. What these games have in common is that they consume a lot of the player's time.

So the question is, if you're not a massive multiplayer game or an AAA, where do you slot into that?

Indie games are often small of course, but 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?

If I were the publisher of one of those time-guzzling games, I would investigate that question and attempt to release such a smaller game myself, to try to monopolize as much of my audience's time as possible. And perhaps this is what they do when they release mobile tie-in games and such.

 

[MRY]

(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.

This may be so 2016 though, I remember reading an article by an indie dev, that youtube didn't have a great influence on copies sold (might be anecdotal wisdom specific to the game).

I can't keep track. Maybe today it all depends on hiring a firm that upvotes your positive reviews and downvotes your negative ones.

 

[vonAchdorf]

Indie games are often small of course, but 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?

If I were the publisher of one of those time-guzzling games, I would investigate that question and attempt to release such a smaller game myself, to try to monopolize as much of my audience's time as possible. And perhaps this is what they do when they release mobile tie-in games and such.

In F2P mobile games, developers went beyond simply fitting their games into the free time of the players, they try to steer the player to specific playtime time intervals (harvesting your fields / mines / log-in bonuses) - short at first (minutes), then laters hours and even days.

In a way the success of the switch may be the result of serving both "AAA" time and in-between / mobile time.

 

[Humanity has risen!]

The reason people are tired of indie games is because they never, ever have the polish and depth of features that games made in an actual studio with an actual budget.

People buy Japanese console games with peace of mind because they know that no matter what it is, it will be polished, it will be fully realized and it will be a fun experience.

With indie games because they are made by few people with a shoestring budget and by people who often collaborate with each other only through the Internet, it always suffers in the end.

 

[Infinitron]

Continuing that train of thought -

Old indie strategy: Not every game has to be a mass market title that sells millions, let's make lower budget games that target a niche of the audience.

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.

The corollary of this theorem - attempting to make big, long, engrossing games on a budget is generally a bad idea. Not because their graphics aren't good enough, but primarily because your audience doesn't have time to play them.

 

[Strange Fellow]

I find that line of thought ironic, since when I play AAA titles it's usually as a break from more demanding games, for times when I want to learn back, turn my brain off and enjoy the fireworks for a while. I only ever play them in short bursts.

 

[DeepOcean]

I don't get why those people are complaining, nobody has a right for sales and those talks of wanting steam to limit the number of games seems like anti consumer practice disguised as caring with mah poor indie developers. Wanna people to buy your game? Give them a reason to. Oh, did you get zero sales of your shitty platformer made on Unity? Tough luck, I don't feel motivated by your tears.

 

[vonAchdorf]

Continuing that train of thought -

Old: Not every game has to be a mass market title that sells millions, let's make lower budget games that target a niche of the audience.

New: 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.

The corollary of this theorem - attempting to make big, long, engrossing games on a budget is a bad idea. Not because their graphics aren't good enough, but primarily because your audience doesn't have time to play them.

This and your theory about monopolizing the players' time might be an explanation for companies pushing game passes / subscriptions to access a "vault" of games.

 

[Shinji]

Escape the Omnochronom!, the game in question:

Also:



Fine, I get it, it's not as easy to sell a game as before. I agree with that.

But honestly, there's nothing at first glance in this game that screams "buy it, it's worth it!". It looks like every other indie pixel art game out there, and the marketing the guy did doesn't even give me an idea of what this game is about to begin with.

The game industry is highly competitive nowadays -- which is something good to begin with -- so you can't just make a game on a budget and expect it to sell millions.

 

[Tigranes]

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

(5) 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.

Yep. Get rid of the publishers and distributors and stores, we said, we'll create a great new world where they won't stop cool niche games from being made. Now, we're dependent on Gabe and a gaggle of incoherent Youtubers who are working round the clock for their own dorito tubes.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

Lmao, cry me a river. Anybody who actually believed the dream of "quit my job at evil corporation and become filthy rich by making indie games from home" probably didn't have any business sense in a first place. Those few years when the indie market exploded was the exception, not the rule. It was just a matter of time before the market corrects. It has now gone the way of the publishing businesses, and guess what. Most books ever written don't get published and those that do get published, end up flopping. Some people make decent money writing 50 page ebooks for Amazon, but they're skilled and exploiting that business model and benefits of digital distribution.

And the end it's just competition like any other. The difference is, entertainment industry was always one of the most brutal and selective. For every Justin Bieber there's 20 Rebeccas Black who had massive corporate money for promotion pumped into them and still flop without a trace.

Market can open up only if a big transformation occurs. The transition to digital distribution, the invention of mp3s, the switch from traditional press to YouTubers and streamers. If you can get there early and exploit it, good for you. Otherwise, it's survival of the fittest. Welcome to Darwin, dear aspiring indie developer.

 

[Generic-Giant-Spider]

HEY GUYS DO YOU LIKE L00T?!?!

DO YOU LIKE ROGUELIKES?!

DEEP CRAFTING?!?!

SKILL TREES?!

SOULS COMBAT/DIFFICULTY?!?!

MAJESTIC PIXEL ART?!

THEN YOU'RE GONNA LOVE MY GAME.

AND EVERY FUCKING OTHER INDIE GAME SINCE 2012.

 

[agentorange]

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

 

[Mortmal]

Theres no such thing as indiepocalypse, its more like shovelwarepocalypse. There will be always sales for quality indies. Most of the indie stuff on steam, no one will even bother it to torrent...Can someone mention something really good with very poor sales on steam ?

 

[CyberWhale]

1) If you have zero sales than you obviously haven't done any market research. When you start developing a project, you should probably find some kind of a community that would love to play a similar game and serve as the potential customer base.

2) If your first game is a relatively large success, you should invest that money in a business/property that is not related to game development. That way you can collect enough profit/rent for the living costs and focus your energy on making the game you want without having to constantly worry how it will do financially.

 

[Viata]

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.

 

[MRY]

Escape the Omnochronom!, the game in question:

I'm sure this game has a great deal to recommend it, but everything about what you posted is a tremendous turn off -- little things like inconsistent resolution between fonts, portraits, and sprites; cluttered and amateurish UI; advertising your game as a competitor to the leading title in a nearly winner-take-all genre; etc. The developer basically picked a genre in which he couldn't possibly win, made a game that is visually unappealing, and then made the game's only selling point a lack of "toxicity" when it is obviously inferior in the two substantive aspects of the genre (balance and player base) as well as in polish. Even the title of the game is basically a "only come here for ironic insecurity" kind of title. I couldn't even manage to read all the way to the end of the last word in the title.

But wait, there's more!

I defy you to actually imagine what this game is. Here is its Steam description:

It's a Rogue-like DotA! Escape the Omnochronom! is a turn based single-player strategy game

DOTA is a real-time, multiplayer, tactical* game. (* At most.)

Would you like to know more?

Why Early Access?
“We want to get the game into people's hands as soon as possible, to start getting feedback. We believe that really, game design truly starts once playtesters get a hold of your game, and that is especially true the weirder your game is. This is a pretty weird game and we want to make sure that, even if it isn't totally where it needs to get yet, people can see the potential and enjoy what's there.”

I hope this guy gets to keep making games, lives his loves, and finds riches in his hobby. But to be honest, everything about this combines market-chasing (ROGUE LIKE! MOBA! DOTA! TOXICITY! EARLY ACCESS!) with self-indulgence. I don't come away from this feeling like someone poured his heart and soul into a project and was ground down by capitalism, but like someone tried to moneyball the market and didn't succeed.