The money spent is tied in the mega-platforms like Steam, GOG etc. Getting any promo of any kind through these platforms, or being ranked high for a few hours, automatically propels the title in sales, regardless of the quality.
Count me a cynic at this stage but I have done my share of commercially released indie title, and for one man shows, it's a dry lake for dead fish.
The industry doesn't need fixing. It's working perfectly well.
Working hard, very hard, producing something means nothing. As a producer you have no rights. You are making something that exists in an absolute sea of similar hard work. A market where supply stunningly overwhelms demand.
This is to be expected. When I was 11 years old I was playing games, dreaming of being a programmer. I picked up a book and started learning. The next 6 years were mostly spent writing games. For reasons that won't shock you I didn't immediately think of writing a new spreadsheet program. The one exception was a program I wrote for school - and it failed.
People write games because it's fun writing a game. Because it's a good way to learn how to write code. Because one's immediate circle are impressed.
But the market for indie games is tiny. And every wannabee programmer is making them. Somewhere along the way you discover the laws of supply and demand.
You'll also discover that a business is one part product, one part support, three parts marketing. Marketing is waaaay more valuable, and important, than product.
Sure there are exceptions. There are stories of some random game with no marketing going viral. It happens. There are also stories of people winning the lottery. One of those is more likely.
The indie game market works completely as designed. Low startup costs. Accessible to anyone. A fun way to get into programming. A cool way to impress your friends. A fantastic hobby where you can have more fun in the process than the result.
I would not say the market is small by any possible stretch of the imagination. Minecraft, a game made by one guy in his spire time, is obviously the definition of an outlier. However, it's relevant to note that it sold over 238 million copies. And that's not even scratching the surface of potential, especially globally. The market for games of all sorts is just crazy huge. For some scale, the PS2 is the best selling console of all time (by a wide margin) at 159 million units shipped, the best selling Call of Duty and Elder Scrolls (Skyrim) games both sold "only" about 30 million units a piece.
I think the real issue is that most games are mostly just uninspired knock offs of other games. And this includes AAA games. And here marketing is absolutely critical, because your game may be fun but it doesn't really stand out on its own in any meaningful way. By contrast games that have distinct identities (and, critically, are also fun!) tend to have extremely long tailed success where word of mouth is vastly more important than marketing. An amusing example is Kenshi [1]. The guy went from tens of people playing his game while working as a security guard to make ends meet, to making millions from the game.
And I don't think those examples are particularly rare either, certainly nothing like winning the lottery. But coming up with an idea that's both unique and fun isn't easy.
When you are in an over-supplied environment, then marketing becomes more crucial.
Indie games are massively over supplied. Thus to get traction you need to be out-marketing (not necessarily out-spending) the other guy.
In one sense building the game is the easy part. Selling it is the hard part. It's a crowded market, and most games are, well, not great. It takes time, effort, and yes money, to market well, and get any kind of traction.
Arguably OS/2 was better than Windows 95, but MS spent a billion $ marketing it, and today OS/2 is a history footnote, if you've heard of it at all.
The more compeditive the market, the more marketing matters.
Yeah, I don't disagree on why the marketing is needed. I still think it shows something broken about our system when the majority of the time is spent marketing and not producing the product and supporting the customers. In the same way that it is usually a bad sign when the financial markets starts to become too big in comparison to the rest of the economy.
The thing is it's super easy for indie to get the other parts of the business today.
There's loads publisher that focus on some indie niche, and they will do the things that indie dev don't like / don't know how to do.
But indie dev don't like to hear their game sucks, because an indie dev put his heart and soul into production. So they stay well away from the well established publishing pathways
If you have a field of dreams mentality it certainly is.
If you are ready to hustle for marketing your game I disagree.
I have launched more small and medium games on Steam than most people, and if you are using the right strategy for the game you're launching you can make decent revenue even if the game sucks.
Assuming your game is coming out on switch there is almost certainly tons of money to be made by constantly deal discounting a game to 50 cents or less. When this used to be allowed on Steam we made over a million dollars a year deep discounting tiny games.
The market size of gamers with almost no money is endless.
Prior to "Buy, Try, Return" the sub-dollar games were pure joy. I didn't care that some were shit; most were more than enjoyable enough to satisfy spending a few quarters on them for a brief period.
What I didn't like is that they stuck around my steam library. What I wanted was to throw some quarters at a short-lived arcade experience. I didn't want my library polluted with shovelware.
It really depends on your price point and the game. But assuming very small with little prelaunch marketing you really need to focus on getting on the new & trending list at launch. How do you do that?
You want a lot of people to buy the game quickly at launch. The best way to do that is building up wishlists prelaunch. That has organic second order effects that are helpful, but there are other ways to get lots of sales at launch...
A bit offtopic, but considering your approach, do you use a game engine ala Unity to create your games as fast as possible or do you create your own little engine?
I don't make tiny games really. Defy gravity is the only small game I ever made. I make bigger games.
But the answer is use an engine.
I used to both buy the rights and lease the rights to tons of small games though and then release them on steam. They were all made in an engine(unity, rpgmaker, xna, etc)
I'm more interested in making a game so good that millions of gamers will willingly crawl through proverbial broken glass to participate in the experience. Think of games like PUBG - which was a horrific performance/laggy mess at launch but the gameplay was so novel that everyone put up with it and it went viral overnight.
I don't need some 3rd party platform to sugar coat my creative experience. If it's good, it will ship of its own accord.
The gameplay wasn't novel in PUBG. Battle Royale games (mostly from the same Brendan Greene) were a thing for years before that, and they were massively popular, enough to set the hype train running. The only relatively novel thing compared to the previous games was their solution to the teaming issue, as they separated solo and team modes.
What made the game go viral was their marketing strategy - they were one of the first who bought Twitch streamers en masse, and paid a lot of money for that. In fact they triggered a gold rush of a sort with everyone doing it. This isn't to say that the gameplay wasn't good - it absolutely was. But the viral growth wasn't due to that, without marketing it would have been just like the other Greene's games, maybe a bit more popular, but surely not 3 million simultaneous players popular.
And before PUBG, he proved his design viable in the original ArmA Battle Royale mod, in the H1Z1 Battle Royale game mode, and in a myriad other games in which the devs suddenly added battle royale modes - in other words, on another platforms.
You’ve very much got some survivorship bias and distorted facts here. It’s easy to look at PUBG, Minecraft, and Stardew Valley then assume that a one-man show that’s good enough will naturally sell a million copies. The reality is that those are exceptions with their own unique stories, lots of embedded marketing/existing following, and “right time right place” luck. You don’t see the mountain of great, but failed indie games that creators worked just as hard on.
The world is not the field of dreams. Don't move forward with a plan like this.
Pubg was made by an extremely well known modder with a huge following.
So many people have the mistaken impression that marketing doesn't matter. There is a reason companies like Google can make billions of dollars a year selling ads. It is because marketing is actually incredibly important.
Indie games HAVE made it on those platforms though?
If they were actively sabotaging games, then sure, that's true. But most platforms have a vested interest in good recommendation systems. Think steam for you.
It's more the cruel and brutal reality of creative fields, only a very small number ever make it.
Recently I spoke with a dev that was about to launch a game in steam and itch I asked her where She would prefer people to buy it, although She said itch was better for them but they preferred Steam that way they would get a better numbers and a bigger promotion.
The money spent is tied in the mega-platforms like Steam, GOG etc. Getting any promo of any kind through these platforms, or being ranked high for a few hours, automatically propels the title in sales, regardless of the quality.
Count me a cynic at this stage but I have done my share of commercially released indie title, and for one man shows, it's a dry lake for dead fish.