The "Indiepocalypse" is now a thing

[Pope Amole II]

I'd say that this whole thing is just a very successfull shit stir to propel this game into some actual sales. I think it's rather safe to expect, especially in the current "bleeding heart" western society, that the sales of that game will soon "somewhat" exceed the initial 150 copies. Doesn't mean that there's no problem with the market saturation, but that's really not the point here - it's a rather genius marketing maneuver, tbh.

 

[Damned Registrations]

That said, if you make a good game, it will still stand out -- word of mouth spreads quickly on the internet.

That really isn't the case. It certainly helps; but I'd say over half of my favourite games released in the last 10 years or so are still pretty much entirely off the radar, generally speaking.

Hell, consider the slew of Binding of Isaac clones. At least a couple of those are probably just as good, if not better, than the game they're aping. BoI was an excellent concept, but it wasn't executed perfectly by any means, even after 2 re-releases. But you don't hear anything about any of them for the same reason Diablo 3 dominates the market- a game made more popular mostly by marketing, luck, and other factors aside from quality is just squatting on top of the hill, and won't let anybody else get their 15 minutes of fame.

Internet gives you the chance to go viral and become popular, and being a good game helps, but quality is neither a requirement nor a guarantee of popularity. For every Terraria there is also a KotC (and lets not pretend KotC would sell a million copies just because it was on steam.)

 

[thesoup]

I only look forward to public internet meltdowns on twitter once indie devs realize they will have to get a proper job because they're 30 and their parents had enough of paying their rent.

 

[Mustawd]

Just had a thought...since this is the indiepocalypse...does that mean that Cleve, the one with the only legit Australian fallout shelter, will be the sole survivor?

 

[Gozma]

That really isn't the case. It certainly helps; but I'd say over half of my favourite games released in the last 10 years or so are still pretty much entirely off the radar, generally speaking.

Hell, consider the slew of Binding of Isaac clones. At least a couple of those are probably just as good, if not better, than the game they're aping. BoI was an excellent concept, but it wasn't executed perfectly by any means, even after 2 re-releases. But you don't hear anything about any of them for the same reason Diablo 3 dominates the market- a game made more popular mostly by marketing, luck, and other factors aside from quality is just squatting on top of the hill, and won't let anybody else get their 15 minutes of fame.

Internet gives you the chance to go viral and become popular, and being a good game helps, but quality is neither a requirement nor a guarantee of popularity. For every Terraria there is also a KotC (and lets not pretend KotC would sell a million copies just because it was on steam.)

What are the BoI clones?

How am I missing BoI/FTL/other non-memegame "indie hit" clones, which I assume exist? I haven't seen any in my Steam consumer adventures and I do stuff like follow a few game-recommenders and do the Steam recommends queue thing sometimes. That's how I found Axiom Verge. Even if I didn't buy them I'd think I'd have seen them.

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

What are the BoI clones?

Well. There is Our Darker Purpose http://store.steampowered.com/app/262790 and perhaps Nuclear Throne counts.

But this "indiepocalypse" is just over saturation in certain genres. This is not the first time that 2d platformers or puzzle games or whatever have been declared dead.

 

[you know what time it is]

So shovelware doesn't sell well, who would have thought.

 

[Zorba the Hutt]

Just had a thought...since this is the indiepocalypse...does that mean that Cleve, the one with the only legit Australian fallout shelter, will be the sole survivor?

The beauty of a multi-decade development cycle is you don't have to give a shit about short-term manboon fads.

 

[Zarniwoop]

Today you have many more ways to know if a game is shit before buying it, that was not really true in the 80's, so it's not so problematic.

More games are released and the average game sell less copies. OK. The real question is if they are many good games which are lost in the mass, which is not sure. I am sure that Serpent in the Staglands wouldn't sell better if there were less crap on Steam. I don't think that it's such a horrible thing that everything ressembling a game get some visibility and players must choose what to play (particularly if we talk about niche games). The important thing is that Neo Scavenger, Paper Sorcerer or Antharion can get released, they are indie RPGs so anyway they won't sell a lot.

You are wrong. Plenty of games get bought by people who don't know any better. I can't say how many because I have no idea. But there are definitely people out there that just buy whatever comes out due to the marketing materials or the trailer looks nice or whatever. We on places like the Codex are pretty careful buyers, meticulously researching things before we buy, yes. But we are the exception. Most of the public is not like that.

And no, it's not easy for the average person to truly know if a game is shit or not. The very people who are supposed to tell you what's shit or not are complete sycophants these days. Every high-budget game is MAJESTIC, GOTY, 95%+ material, even if it's ludicrously buggy, comes with a shitton of DLC and eats your cat. Every indie game is INNOVATIVE, DARING, or A NEW TWIST on something. In the old days when games were harder to release, you'd have at least some peace of mind knowing that people wouldn't waste all that effort on making something shitty. When photography was an expensive and time-consuming process, people picked good subjects and put an effort in. Now there are billions angsty teenagers posting ZOMG SO ARTISTIC pictures of their lunch all the damn time.

Fact is, the overabundance of crap combinded with marketing hype and constantly praising reviews mean that people are getting fed up with, and losing confidence in, the gaming industry and so they will give up trying to find the good stuff among the turds and buy less stuff. It's already starting to happen with Kickstarter (and I predict it will get much worse when all the idiots realise just how much they've been duped with Star Citizen).

And that's exactly what happened in the 80s.

 

[a Goat]

and I predict it will get much worse when all the idiots realise just how much they've been duped with Star Citizen

Star Citizen will come out... eventually. Kinda like Grimwah.

And that's exactly what happened in the 80s.

No.

In the 80's, outside of software dump, you've had hardware dump. Everybody and his dog tried to make a console and games for them which resulted in bizarre platforms that didn't had single worthwhile title outside of Pong clone(I guess?).

Nowadays it seems that dedicated gaming hardware is on the way out, as multi-purpose machines became better and cheaper than them(be it mobiles or PC's). The dump is mostly limited to those devices as well.

ZX spectrum had about as much shovelware as all 2nd gen consoles together and more, yet it went down when Commodore killed it with better specs/price, instead of being flooded by shovelware and loosing consummer's trust. C64 had even more shovelware and it didn't died from it either.

While it would may kill a gaming-only platform(why own a console when all it's good for is "shovelware or not" gamble?), android/iOS phones/tablets or PC's will do just as good as they've used to regardless of it.

The shovelware flood and lost of trust was only one, relatively minor reason why the crash has happened.

The main, #1 primo reason why American console gaming crashed in 1983 was that it was a bubble. Too much money got invested in a market that couldn't possibly sustain so many competitors.
You may say - buy hey, isn't indie gaming a bubble - yes it is! But its crash won't lead to wide-spread crash, in fact a lot of indie devs won't even notice it. What will crash is the market that lived off un-refundable indie platformers/crap sold in bundles.

 

[rado907]

Yeah, too much trash on Steam nowadays. Unity has made it possible for anyone to slap together a few sprites and release his take on Mario or Monkey Island. Well boohoo. There's a reason people stopped playing adventures and scrollers back in the day.

What I want and would pay money for is more strategy games, RPG's and Roguelikes. More games like TOME, Wesnoth and Dwarf Fortress. More Transport and Rollercoaster Tycoons and Warlords and Crusader Kings. A few Civilization clones here and there. (C-Evo and FreeCiv did it.) Maybe even a few RTS games that take advantage of modern computing power. A few city builders. (Prison Architect and Banished are both excellent, for example.) But such games are hard to make - they require actual knowledge of programming and mathematics.

 

[Metro]

That really isn't the case. It certainly helps; but I'd say over half of my favourite games released in the last 10 years or so are still pretty much entirely off the radar, generally speaking.

The explanation is your favorite games are bad~

 

[Gozma]

What are some clearly good recent games that have done mediocre business on Steam? I think Codex people consider Invisible Inc. really good. I thought Axiom Verge probably couldn't be a big mainstream indie hit but it should have done... I dunno, 100k?

OTOH I think Darkest Dungeon is just decent but it was a pretty big hit because of skillful indie flavored marketing. Probably a lot of things that are off my radar do well.

 

[Perkel]

HEY BROS I HAVE NEW PLATFORMER ON STEAM AND IOS> I MADE IT IN MY SPARE TIME> I DON"T WORK AND LIVE WITH MY PARENTS> HOLY FUCK GAME NO ONE CARES ABOUT MY GAME !!!!!!!>>>!!!!>>!!

WHY WHYY SUCH A GOOD PLATFORMER WHY U NO RIKE PLATFORMERS ! YOU DISCRIMINATE ME ! RACISTS !

 

[HanoverF]

TotalBiscuits thoughts about this

Game looks nauseating as fuck.

 

[Lyric Suite]

You don't care about games period.

Because i don't want indie shovelware to pollute shit i'm actually interested in? GoG should have just made a subsection for that crap.

You are totally deluded if you think the average indie game with its 2 people working on it part time and a budget of -$50000 can have the production values of a something like Fallout.

Go suck a dick then. Who the fuck wants your shit if you can't produce something good? Nice strawman there anyway.

Maybe you should take a look at the credits the next time you run a game, if that ever happens

https://www.mobygames.com/game/windows/fallout-2/credits

I don't know man, some indie devs are actually capable of churning out good shit:

Not the best ever mind you, but at least in the vein of what we used to have. It seems the moral of the story for indie devs is simply to git gud or fuck off.

Are you ever going to stop whining about Sunset?

No. Not after the big stink the devs and the the entire SJW media made about its failure.

But I guess that's what you do when you don't care about games

You keep repeating this like it is supposed to be such a damning accusation. Seriously, fuck games. You do realize that in the grand scheme of things this shit doesn't mean a whole lot, right? It is just some stupid entertainment form many of us are comfortable with because we've been playing games since we were little. It is not like we are talking about some important cultural phenomenon.

Weird though I never saw you types complaining about games like Ethnic Clensing or White Law - clearly political statements more than games. I guess it's only bad when it doesn't jive with your own fucked up views?

Never heard of them but just from the titles i can tell they are probably troll games meant to piss of people like you. Even so, that's hardly comparable because racists don't have the support of the entire fucking mainstream media. Not like your Marxist friends do.

 

[Machocruz]

Just give me Barkley 2 faggots.

 

[Bubbles]

Maybe you should take a look at the credits the next time you run a game, if that ever happens

https://www.mobygames.com/game/windows/fallout-2/credits

I'm not sure if hiring 7 people to do foley work is really a necessary outlay for an indie RPG.

 

[Damned Registrations]

Well. There is Our Darker Purpose http://store.steampowered.com/app/262790 and perhaps Nuclear Throne counts.

But this "indiepocalypse" is just over saturation in certain genres. This is not the first time that 2d platformers or puzzle games or whatever have been declared dead.

What are the BoI clones?

There's also "A Wizard's Lizard" (tried it briefly, didn't seem promising), a more recent game called "The Weaponographist" or something like that, some older game I can't recall that had a more asian theme, again, didn't seem promising.

I find a lot of stuff because I like browsing the Twitch pages where people have <10 viewers or so. Sometimes I find someone playing something I have a lot of nostalgia for, sometimes I find a new game that isn't some shitty MMO or online pvp garbage. I've found it pretty difficult to actually search for games on steam. The tags are too varied to have any meaning. Two very similar games might share no tags at all, because one is 'pixel' and 'indie' and 'roguelike' while another is '2D' and "platformer" and "retro" - even though they're both in the style of Spelunky with similar graphics. Steam needs to focus on streamlining that shit, if anything.

 

[Daemongar]

I always just assumed that peoples resources for games was pretty fixed, and the more games, shitty or not, the less overall any one developer could glom onto. That is, with so much choice and a fixed amount of money folks are willing to spend available, all games would suffer.

But it appears here that AAA games are still selling strong while "indie" games are floundering. So maybe folks are just more risk averse with their limited gaming dollars, and are unwilling to gamble on something that does not guarantee some return on the investment. I wouldn't spend $20 on an indie game unless it was seriously good (is Elite: Dangerous indie?.) However, in the past I would spend $5 each on 2 or 3 indie games in a Steam sale, but again they would have to be good.

Or it could be that people purchased one too many shit indie games and are associating (like me) indie with garbage. Myself, I bought "Gone Home" when it was on sale on Steam and actually played it because of the glowing reviews. Even though that was 15 months ago, I still wouldn't touch an indie game with a 10 foot pole, regardless of metacritic score.

 

[Turjan]

We on places like the Codex are pretty careful buyers, meticulously researching things before we buy, yes.

 

[DeepOcean]

Indieapocalypse? What bullshit is this?

Stop making shitty platformers, hipster walking simulators and shitty rogue likes you fucks and maybe you will sell something.

Don't expect your "I'm still learning how to be a gamming developer. " project to sell anything on the age of bundles, greenlight and Early Access.

 

[Renegen]

Back in high school, I knew a handful of people who wanted to make games: these include Jeff Hangartner ("Tsugumo"), who I taught some Quick Basic tricks to so that he could make an RPG -- he now supports himself making indie games; Derek Yu (a classmate of mine), who is now a bazillionaire off of Spelunky (back then, he and another classmate of mine were making Eternal Daughter, his first indie game); and Tom Cadwell (whom I met at a summer camp), who's now VP of Design at Riot Games, and got a job at Blizzard off the strength of his indie game Strifeshadow. To be sure, there were some who dabbled in game creation but turned to other pursuits in college -- they're now professors, lawyers, coders at Google, etc. It's not like the "success" rate was 100% -- but it was probably around 20%. I also knew lots of guys in bands, amateur actors, poets and writers -- none of them parlayed that into any meaningful money. No matter how hard you work in those fields, you don't make thousands of dollars unless lightning strikes.

Damn, what high school did you go to in order to have so many successful people? And how come all these nerds know each other and aren't basement dwellers

 

[Darth Roxor]

Damn, what high school did you go to in order to have so many successful people?

the illuminati-sponsored one

 

[potatojohn]

You keep repeating this like it is supposed to be such a damning accusation. Seriously, fuck games. You do realize that in the grand scheme of things this shit doesn't mean a whole lot, right? It is just some stupid entertainment form many of us are comfortable with because we've been playing games since we were little. It is not like we are talking about some important cultural phenomenon.

Nice bait and switch, but you're the one with 20,000 posts on one gaming forum, with half of them inanely ranting about "cultural marxists" infiltrating gaming. If it doesn't matter why are you so mad?

It's so unimportant to you that you feel one "marxist" game condemns all indie games.

Who the fuck wants your shit if you can't produce something good

You should ask yourself that question brah. You've been shitposting on the codex daily for almost a decade. Do you think those brofists mean you're making a good point? Or are people just egging you on for the lulz to see how insane you'll get?