Any hope for Indie developers?

It's the same kind of endeavour as painting was in the 17th century. I think there's no hope now.

It depends on how you define "indie". Back in the day, we used to call the serious-hobbyist types "garage developers" -- dedicated enough to set up a work space in their garage, but not serious enough to actually be throwing enough money at their hobby to turn it into a business.

Most "indies" fall into this category -- hobbyists. You should not expect to make (much) money from any hobby. You can sell your macrame and quilts at the local maker's market too, but it's not going to pay for 100% of your living expenses. IMHO that's an abuse of the word -- hobbyists are not "indies", they're hobbyists!

If you define "indies" as small self-owned businesses though, then sure, plenty do succeed. I know plenty of indie studios in my town who reliably get every one of their games onto a Google Play and and iTunes "featured" slot, and into the top 10 charts, which gets them enough downloads to earn an income good enough to pay for a handful of full-time staff members. They do this by choosing to run a business professionally, not just make games as a hobby. This unfortunately requires money (capital) -- this is the way the world works for ANY business, you need seed capital to make more capital.

There's also no reason to go it alone with the $132 in your bank account. Lots of cities have booming 'startup' scenes. You can go to silicon valley and come back with a million dollars (and a lot of contractual obligations) pretty easily, assuming you're taking your job seriously. Or even just getting a business loan from a bank (assuming you've got a serious business plan). Or applying for government (local/state/federal) grants and subsidies. Or just taking your business plan to friends and family and begging for startup capital... but again, this is what separates the business people from the hobbyists.

If you want to make games as a hobby, accept that it's a hobby.

If you want to make games as a self-owned business, accept that you're now an entrepreneur with a start-up business, not a game developer.

You don't get into indie dev because you're hopeful for the future, you get into it because you have no hope left. Nothing matters. We're all going to die, specially you.

Make some games.

2 hours ago, Hodgman said:

There's also no reason to go it alone with the $132 in your bank account. Lots of cities have booming 'startup' scenes. You can go to silicon valley and come back with a million dollars (and a lot of contractual obligations) pretty easily, assuming you're taking your job seriously. Or even just getting a business loan from a bank (assuming you've got a serious business plan). Or applying for government (local/state/federal) grants and subsidies. Or just taking your business plan to friends and family and begging for startup capital... but again, this is what separates the business people from the hobbyists.

If you want to make games as a hobby, accept that it's a hobby.

If you want to make games as a self-owned business, accept that you're now an entrepreneur with a start-up business, not a game developer.

I don't disagree with this at all. But this is not the same as I completely agree. Why? Because of the exclusions

1. It is the quality of developers that matters, independent of whether they seek investment or not

2. By using their garage (or working from their homes) they have effectively cut out around £2000.00 office rental per month plus other energy bills (depending on where you rent)

3. By using their old computers and laptops they have also saved £10,000

4. By working as a group of friends and living in their garages (or with mum and dad), they have cut out the need for very expensive monthly salaries plus home rental expenses - and this can very easily run into several hundreds of £££

5. Not to mention that investors, banks and other loanees are business people and are involved to make money, so conservatively I will that cuts-out another 25% of your capital. As for the banks, you have to start paying back the loan bit by bit almost immediately

6. Time pressure is good... to some extent. But it could also be a serious distraction which could adversely affect the development. The burden of serious pressure - which is what you get from greedy investors these days could hamper development

Lists of those who have created mega-companies, but started out in their garages is a long one. I'm not even going to start naming them because they are household names and we all know them

So I see no reason why the model you described cannot be bettered by cash-strapped developers. Not saying it not a good and workable model but I'm saying its probably wasteful and could be bettered with those working out of their garage

As for OP's original question

2 hours ago, sysads said:

What hope does the rest of us have?

• Are there any strategies we need to look at to help with exposure?
• Most youtubers I have seen with lots of followers tends to only demo trending games

Despite my objection to Hodgman's post, the clue imho lies in his post. Even if you start on your own or with a group of friends working from your homes or a garage,

1. think big, plan big (realistically big), work like full fledged professional(s)

2. be creative , find the special thing that would make your game stand out. If you don't find that special thing don't start. If that means writing your own in-house engine , please do

3. so that still some marketing strategy with little or no funds, here again you have to be creative.

1 hour ago, TheChubu said:

You don't get into indie dev because you're hopeful for the future, you get into it because you have no hope left. Nothing matters. We're all going to die, specially you.

Funny enough those of us who have gotten to and have tasted that state of no hope, have become fearless. When nothing hurts you anymore, when nothing matters anymore... you just go flat-out

3 hours ago, sysads said:

Are there any strategies we need to look at to help with exposure?

... A lot of developers have dropped along the way while some keep having hope for one break-through like me

So you're saying the reason you make games is not because you love making games. If you love making games, keep making games.

If you only make games in hopes that lightning will strike your game, well... you have to understand that the chances of that are slim.

hahahaha I am loving some of the responses, very infomative.

@TheChubu no one is going to die, not me and I hope not you too .

I hope others who might be reading this find some comments helpful and hopefully re-think about the foundation of why they took to game development and workout what will work for them and plan towards it with everything they've got.

6 hours ago, sysads said:

no one is going to die, not me and I hope not you too

You must be really young.

A couple of things I learn here on to board. I'm trying to sell and indie game maker but I realize something:

1. You're competing with many other people so your stuff must look better.

2. You're doing the project to pay bills and stuff - really gay.

3. People can criticize your stuff to the point where you feel like giving up.

So I'll use my experience as an example. Ok, here we go...

I'm developing a version of Mario Maker and Mario Paint that I find to be really cool. You can not only create graphics and levels but your own characters and program them. So what's so innovative about this? Nothing really but I thought it would be cool to do it because just like creating your own editor for your own needs creating my own Mario Maker is just plain cool.

So why did I go through the trouble to create Mario Maker again besides it being cool? Well, the thing is that I wanted to create my own games and play them and then create a small community of people to create levels for me so that I can play them. So the point is that hobby projects or indie stuff are mostly about you and it is hard to tell what people want. The average joe likes stupid stuff like mindless shooting and complicated game development tools that are hard to use. No simplicity anymore!

I've taken advice and am going with what my real passion is: make stuff that I can personally use and share it with people. So when it comes to money I think, well, this is to pay for stuff that is not cool like rent and bills and taxes. Food is cool so if I got payed in pizza I would take that!

Not trying to deter you from indie stuff but its hard. It's just those masses of people and how to please them and your passion is going into paying rent and utilities - doing it for some tool.

I think main trap that most indies have fallen is "making yet another of a game" , most games around are in fashion of "hey we have unity so why not a game".

If I'm not mistaken , Stardew Valley is made by one person on a very average AMD laptop in few years but it was success from my POV with few millions of revenue. Because it wasn't yet another platformer with even cooler graphics or tower defence wonder.

6 hours ago, SotarOraiste said:

I think main trap that most indies have fallen is "making yet another of a game" , most games around are in fashion of "hey we have unity so why not a game".

If I'm not mistaken , Stardew Valley is made by one person on a very average AMD laptop in few years but it was success from my POV with few millions of revenue. Because it wasn't yet another platformer with even cooler graphics or tower defence wonder.

That cat copied off of Harvest Moon. Now that's what I call business!

9 minutes ago, francoisdiy said:

That cat copied off of Harvest Moon. Now that's what I call business!

I had heard that it's "heavily influenced" of Harvest Moon. As long as Harvest Moon is Nintendo specific and "a Nintendo game" , it's no problem.

Indies don't need to make amazing inventions all the time, just focusing on rather niche genres have merit imo.

1 minute ago, SotarOraiste said:

I had heard that it's "heavily influenced" of Harvest Moon. As long as Harvest Moon is Nintendo specific and "a Nintendo game" , it's no problem.

Indies don't need to make amazing inventions all the time, just focusing on rather niche genres have merit imo.

Now that's confusing. This industry stuff is wack!

Just now, francoisdiy said:

Now that's confusing. This industry stuff is wack!

Well ... I never played Harvest Moon (checked few times only via youtube) , even if it is based on same idea and similar mechanics, I doubt it is a blatant ripoff.

On my own I prefer indies to go after well made niche games rather than yet another mediocre 3D game or whatever popular at the time. Even revival of "oldies but goldies" is a nice strategy, unless you're Sony backed "No Man's Land" people don't have super high expectations from indies.

When I read the OP, I guess we are talking about mobile games.

My 2 cents: move over to PC or Console, and let the mobile sector alone for now. Mobile Games are dead for devs that cannot compete with the likes of King or the other top 5 or 10 in terms of ads and market research. True, there are the lucky guys like the flappy bird dev, but way to many shovelware and to little moderation by Apple and Google to ever be able to muscle you way to a good position with hard work alone.

While Steam has also become a cesspool of shovelware garbage and bad devs trying to make a quick buck, at least Steam seems to be moving in to do something about it... at the speed of a glacier, mind you. But in contrast to Google and Apple their thing is games front and center, thus if their games market suffers, they suffer.

Same with the Console e-stores really. Sony has left some pretty shady games unto their platform as of lately, but I would guess that at some point they will also have to step in and put some measures in to stop the flood of garbage. Additionally AFAIK it is still not such a no-questions-asked thing to publish a console game like it is on the mobile app stores.

Just let the mobile market run its course, and either be on the right side of the fence when it finally collapses, or swoop back in when it starts to cool down again. I would guess a lot of the shady business does NOT pay out as well as the garbage devs might think, and a small change by the platform holder or the worldwide economy will destroy the loopholes they are currently trying to abuse (like Steam rolling back their trading card system. Now if they also change the rules for achievements (like capping the amount of max achievements per game, or something like that), the bad devs will have to go back to putting ads into their games and try to maximize play time per player).

This ain't the Indieapocalypse if you ask me... its a liberal market running wild, and platform holders being slow in recognizing that they need to regulate it to some extent or risk people loosing interest in said market.

I know I lost a lot of interest in Steam. Besides the flood of garbage its the flood of bad ports, and me not really being interested in all the Steam side functions... but certainly, having to wade through a sea of garbage to find the pearls if I for once not search for a specific game certainly does not make me want to start up a steam store search. Back to my Retro games and the few PS4 diamonds I guess.

EDIT:

Oh, and another thing....

You know how many startup companys will make a profit within 2 years? Almost none. When you build up your own company, you have to be ready to go through multiple years of negative figures while you try to find the winning formula, make connections and find clients.

Maybe you (and many others I guess) went into this with the wrong idea? I know, there will be guys who prove my point wrong because they managed to make a profit within 6 months, but for MOST startups, that ain't the case. Even high profile startups like facebook where in the red for 5+ years while they cranked up their business and muscled their way to the top.

You should have savings in your bank account to pay the bills for multiple years, a steady stream of income either with a day job or occasional side gigs for clients, or just the ability to live dirt cheap to even consider starting up your own company... else you are just hoping for having luck and winning the lottery, which is never a wise decision.

On the flipside that means you need patience... more patience than most people could have, to see your company slowly grow to a profitable entity. 2 years of famine is nothing in the world of self employment... its just a sign that your probably have to re-adjust the way you do business to not eat into your savings another year.

Maybe read "the lean startup"... the core principle of that is to try a lot, fail quickly and pivot in a different direction if you do. If you do mobile development, I guess you can crank out a game within 3-6 months. If you have not found the winning formula for 2 years you either have tried 4 times already and now know a lot about what NOT to do in the current mobile app store ecosystem, or you did something wrong (like spending too long on a title, or trying the same thing over and over again).

IMO of course....

8 hours ago, SotarOraiste said:

Well ... I never played Harvest Moon (checked few times only via youtube) , even if it is based on same idea and similar mechanics, I doubt it is a blatant ripoff.

It's a blatant rip-off. It's great.

Regarding Steam and the app stores and the insipid, petulant cry for "regulation"...

Think about 10 years ago. How often did you come across a good game? How often is it now? No, really. Go look at your accounts and actually count them. If you're still a gamer then there are more now than there were then. Why? Because the entire market is expanding. The old model could NEVER have sustained this growth, so why the hell would we go backwards? For every whiner who gets butt-hurt about games they don't want to play and leaves there are 100 new customers buying games that they do want to play. It doesn't matter how badly you want it, this distribution market is not collapsing any time soon. These people are making more money than god EVERY SINGLE DAY.

If you can get over the irrational resentment about someone other than you making money then the upshot of this situation is that you have the opportunity to very, very easily find and buy more and better games than before for less money. If you don't want to "wade through a sea of garbage" then try thinking about an actual search strategy rather than diving thoughtlessly into the unsorted mass. Scan the top seller/top rated lists for genres that interest you. Find a curator who shares your tastes, either on Steam or on YouTube. Watch E3 indies videos and jot down things that interest you.

Most importantly, stop caring about shit that doesn't interest you. It doesn't cost you anything unless you decide to sit there and fuss about it like a child. The complaints on Steam are absolutely ridiculous. Most days SUF is nothing but asshole after delusional asshole sitting there just drenched in entitlement and nerd rage. This one wants to ban anime games, this one wants to ban indie games, this one wants to ban early access, this one wants to ban Call of Duty, for fuck's sake. A cacophony of drooling, authoritarian pricks who can't tolerate a world that doesn't cater exclusively to their preferences.

The environment has changed, and you can adapt or you can suffer. The only reason to just wade blindly into the database is if you've got the bizarre idea that you're going to find some tragically undersold, low-rated game that just happens to be a misplaced gem. It's not going to happen. There are people all over the world looking at these games day in and day out with literally autistic dedication. If there's something even remotely worthwhile in a niche you're even passively interested in, a trivially strategic search will reveal it to you. If you actually look for things that you're interested in rather than throwing yourself at the DB sideways then you'll very likely hear about it 6 to 12 months prior to its release. But hey, even if you can't be assed to make an effort what are you missing comparatively? Don't even look then, just make note of things that other people talk about and check on what interests you... You know, like you did when it was brick and mortar? That still works too. Jesus fucking Christ, you don't even have to get out of your god damned chair anymore!

So the idea that these markets should or will change to accommodate severely outdated notions of content delivery is ridiculous. These people opened the floodgates and the result is that they're drowning in cash. Why the hell would they do anything to change that? Even Steam Direct isn't about getting rid of meta-marketers or ensuring quality; it's about making even more money for Valve. The scuttlebutt is near-transparent publicity because it's TRIVIALLY SIMPLE to whip the idiot army into a frenzy over nothing at all and then sell them a solution which, "Oops!" just happens to make you a hell of a lot more money. So if you're sincerely thinking that this is some kind of progress or some powerful blow for your authoritarian view of what games people should be allowed to sell or play, well... The one that got played was you.

@Khatharr:

While I do agree with many of your statements, that leaves out the fact that there are a F*ckton of games on thes storefront nowadays that are what Valve now classifies as "fake games". Games that never have been made to be real functional games, just simple scams to abuse loopholes. Are these a problem if looked at with your world view? Probably not. They still clog up the store and benefit no-one (besides, jsut maybe, the dev, and then the store owner).

And there IS the fact you leave out one simple thing: someone else has to do the work so you can just use your clever search strategy and get the good games without the effort. So these guys have no right to complain that the current situation makes their "job" of finding the good games harder? They are not paid by you or Valve or anyone to do their job, and even if they were, they had all the right in the world to complain about a situation which makes finding good games harder than finding gold in the earth, for the guy that does not just want to leech, but add some new finds to the general list of good games.

And then we as a group of mostly hardcore gamers who spend a lot of time informing us about the games that are worth the money often forget that many less hardcore gamers still buy games based on the box art or some other metric we know is stupid (for example based on earlier titles in the series... did this myself back when I bought CoD:MW3).

Sure they should invest more time when making ANY purchase. Sure they get exactly out what they put in in effort. Still, lets not forget about the "casual plebs"

Some people blow the situation out of proportion, yes. The situation is still a problem for many people. I don't think any SANE person would want to go back to walled gardens and publishers having to vouch for devs to get them unto any platform besides PC.

SOME regulation doesn't hurt. As usual, ANY of the extremes is bad. Overregulation just as much as completly open markets. I guess we still need to find the golden middle ground. But letting markets run wild usually is not leading anywhere good, IMO.

EDIT:

watched a totalbiscuit youtube vid yesterday that seems relevant to the topic:

He makes a ton of good points.

You have to please the crowds. Sometimes the crowds like dumb things like Flappy Bird which is simple but dumb and repetitive. Look at Angry Birds and talk about repetitive game play. Release something different and more complex the crowds might not like it. It may not appeal to the crowds but that does not mean that the game is bad. I personally don't care crowds of people like my games. For me as long as even one other person likes it besides me that's good enough. I typically like to establish a fan base of 2 - 6 people. So basically as long as I like the game and another person likes it too I did a good job. Now for the issue of money... that's a stumper. I think that when you mix money with fun it takes to value from the game itself. For instance, I find more solace in playing the game myself and having people create levels for me and challenging a couple of others in the game itself. So creating games for fun is my thing and I don't care for the what the crowds think.

On another note my project has gotten me a job so indirectly it make me money!

He's da formula for making money on games:

Ok, here I go. Get a notepad or something to write this down.

1. First off you need to find a popular game that people like.

2. Make a game just like that but add a few different things.

3. Say that you came up with it.

4. Harvest Moon.

5. A lot of this is luck at the end of the day.

I suggest quit crying about lack of success and grab a couple of friends, make your game, and enjoy sharing the game with others. That's the way I'm taking it now.

money = rent + utilities <- Do you really want to put so much effort into games for this?

making games + sharing with friends = good time fun

I found out that creating games is cool because I can create stuff of myself and friends. I love showing people that I communicate with my games and having them play the games and then listening to their opinions on the games and fixing them. Then most fun comes from challenging others in the game itself. Like, for example, creating a battle game and challenging a friend in it but then the friend not knowing what hidden easter eggs there are in the game and you knowing. Gaming is fun but I think maybe don't have unrealistic expectations and don't get upset if you don't make money on the game. Just realize that money is only good for living expenses and that a job will always be more stable than freelance. You also meet people at work and socialize. Not a terrible environment. I personally don't mind working but I do have fun writing games but not necessarily to pay my bills.

Don't take life to seriously and have fun... like these guys... http://www.smwcentral.net

Although people may earn money from games they throw up while making or selling, I think pleasing crowds no longer works because that market especially casual one is quite saturated. I'm not saying make yet another Europe Universalis but not Frappy Bird either.

There is always hope... Given most of the post I see on this and other forum especially in the technical dept that usually goes.." I'm working on this game...but how do I do XYZ " where XYZ are sometimes fundamental concepts that should have been acquired before even going down that road, I'm going to go off on a limb and say there are plenty people out there that have in their head some "get rich quick" indie scheme. Not saying this is your approach as no knowledge of your intent, but if you enter the field with some "get rich quick" scheme in mind, then prepare to be disappointed. Lets say you make a game and its not doing so well sales wise, we all want to recoup our development cost, but at same time, you have to be realistic or set realistic goals. If you are going to dwell on sale figures vs making the games you love, then to answer your question, all hope is lost. Whenever becomes more about money rather than passion, then all hope is lost...my 2cents..