I spent two years on this :(

Szlia_sl said:

Shower with your dad is a disappointment because the game itself is really lame. Seeing the trailer I thought it would be something over the top crazy likeMuscle March on the Wii, but nope.

Click to expand...

LISA on Steam

Earthbound meets Fist of the North Star.

(Also: Not funny, except for this bits which are)

He was trying way too hard.

Celestein_sl said:

You didn't refute it at all, you emphasized the point. There's a HANDFUL of successful indie games that come out, but the perception of a boom was a few successes at the same time. There has never been more than a handful of successes compared to the 5000+ that are released. Games like Papers Please were great but didn't make millions of dollars like the games I've referring to, it was a "mild" success.

Click to expand...

I think we are at odds here because we are not seeing eye to eye on what "success" means in that context. If you mean commercial success, I guess it always was obvious to everyone involved that indie games were not and are not the goose laying the golden eggs, but there really are few of those geese in the video game industry (basically: sequels to well established franchises). For me, "success" in this context is the reception: be it positive reviews from institutional sources or for the fact the games of found a niche, an enthusiastic audience, as long as it is bigger than the dev team! In that sense, the indie boom is undeniable, there constantly are dozens and dozens of games that are good enough to get nods and find communities that simply would not have been made a decade ago. It's a boom in content, not in bucks in most of indie devs' pockets!


From a purely economic standpoint, I also disagree with Siddar. In the same way the movie industry is not only made out of majors, the video game industry will not see indies disappear. It is certain that the ever increasing number of indie games creates a number of new challenges for indie devs and highlights a number of unhealthy aspects of the industry (like the power of the black boxes that are store fronts), but solutions will be found. Solutions by devs, that will find ways to stand out to be noticed or to find their audience directly, but also solutions by middle men that will specialize in promoting indie games (labels, curators, etc).

There's really only one indie game I consider a "success", meaning that it's even begun to seep out into the wider culture.

Minecraft

I'm obviously leaving out mobile games because they're an entirely different animal, much more prone to fads.

Minecraft also pioneered Kickstarter before Kickstarter even existed. Natural Selection 2 had a similar model of using the then-unheard of concept of "Give us money now for a video game later."

Some days the struggles of clearing the shit away from Steam's Queue is real.

I've decided that there are four user tags that will instantly get something punted into the Not Interested category regardless of any redeeming qualities a game may have. Free-To-Play, MMO, Indie and (This last one really isn't a category) Pixel Art which is mostly synonymous with Indie these days.

But there are ton of good F2P games?

Tenks_sl said:

But there are ton of good F2P games?

Click to expand...

They tend to be MOBAs or MMO/Multiplayer centric games. Both genres I don't play so I'm not really missing much I otherwise would have liked. I'm not saying that any of those four categories it absolute trash for everyone but for me it's a pretty easy tag to use as a filter.

Celestein_sl said:

That's basically how I feel, as an "indie dev"(bleh) myself I'm absolutely disgusted at the sheer horse-shit that's put out these days with the authors thinking they're making some mass contribution to art just because they released ANYTHING.

Someone else said this awhile ago, but I tend to agree that the indie boom never actually happened. We just had a historical coincidence where literally a handful of indie games were abnormally successful around the same time...and that's it. The rest is just an un-ending heap of shovelware and always has been.

Spoiler

100% confident I'll groan at saying this when I eventually release my own game and it's just another turd on the pile!

In all seriousness, there's this weird under-current in the (mostly)west coast gamedev scene where a lot of indies feel like the world *owes them* success just because they managed to finish something. It's this false sense of entitlement I see constantly that is just completely irrational.

Click to expand...

This is how it is for every creative field though.
Comics. Mountains of shit. Very very very few are successful. those that ARE are so, due to luck, nepotism, brand/name reckognion, etc. rarely does quality have any sort of impact.
Music. same deal. Theres a reason "live performances" are major factor for income for your average musician. Same can be said for comics really... fanart, commissions, etc are a huge money maker for day/day for many/most artists.


Games need some sort of private commission.

Static to noise is rough with these indie games though. It's worse than it is for the other accessible internet arts. My guess is that it's because you can just sit in your office and do it in your hobby time, never having to interact with anyone else that might just tell you, "This is shit. Stop. Just stop." Comics had the publisher to vet the artists, and you can't really get away with it for music either.

I guess graphic design and visual art would be similar. But that's way more tolerable since it takes all of 2 seconds to look at an image that someone barfed up.

Troll_sl said:

There's really only one indie game I consider a "success", meaning that it's even begun to seep out into the wider culture.

Minecraft

I'm obviously leaving out mobile games because they're an entirely different animal, much more prone to fads.

Click to expand...

That's hilarious. It has to be a nationwide cultural phenomenon to be a "success."

I think any game that allows a developer to continue making games is a success. Also, saying something like Papers, Please is a mild success is ludicrous. It was one guy and across all platforms it has sold at least 500K (and that was from last year so probably a lot more now). That dude is a millionaire now. That's a fucking success.

Iannis_sl said:

Static to noise is rough with these indie games though. It's worse than it is for the other accessible internet arts. My guess is that it's because you can just sit in your office and do it in your hobby time, never having to interact with anyone else that might just tell you, "This is shit. Stop. Just stop." Comics had the publisher to vet the artists, and you can't really get away with it for music either.

I guess graphic design and visual art would be similar. But that's way more tolerable since it takes all of 2 seconds to look at an image that someone barfed up.

Click to expand...

you are talking as if "comics" are only DC and marvel. Creator owned don't vet anything. They publish based on that brand recognition mostly. Image, Darkhorse, Arcana, etc. These publishers are 90% people that already have been working in the field, and can sell books on name recognition. but then, there is also, everyone else. Self publishing, lesser known publishers, web comics.


Image comics this week.
Elephantmen, Emptyzone, invisible Republic, IXth Generations, The Manhattan projetcs, Mythic, Nameless, Oddly Normal, Reyn, Rumble, Tech JAcket, Theif of Theives, The Tithe, Witch blade, Wofl.
15 comics. this WEEK, from Image alone.

I mean, look at the comic sales charts. top 300. it STOPS at 300, there are way more then 300 a month published, in actual stores. Nevermind digital, or webcomics.
Look at the breakdowns. Note, everything selling less then 15k at a major house, DC/Marvel is losing money. anything less then 10k at a smaller like Image is losing money. Any from a publisher you never heard of selling less then 5k, is losing money.
Comic Book Sales Figures for August 2015

Comics have their own problems of course. Shelve space is still one. Wherein of course indie games, don't even consider trying to get into stores, and compete on shelves.

Lets look at digital.
Featured Digital Comics - Comics by comiXology
79 new items this week.
125 last week.

Comixology Submit. (comixologys greenlight.)
172 items. This week.

you can see it in the sales charts. comics as an industry, are a WHOLE lot of people outright losing money. with very very few, collecting the entirety of the pie.
We can look at patreon,kickstarter for comics and see the same thing.
1 inexplicably shitty artist getting retarded amounts of cash for their bad webcomic..
Support Jeph Jacques creating Comics

others.. not so much.
Support Ashley creating Unsounded, an internet comic
Support ABBADON creating Kill Six Billion Demons
(note these are still actual successes...)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon's_law

I repeat Sturgeon's Revelation, which was wrung out of me after twenty years of wearying defense of science fiction against attacks of people who used the worst examples of the field for ammunition, and whose conclusion was that ninety percent of SF is crud. Using the same standards that categorize 90% of science fiction as trash, crud, or crap, it can be argued that 90% of film, literature, consumer goods, etc. is crap. In other words, the claim (or fact) that 90% of science fiction is crap is ultimately uninformative, because science fiction conforms to the same trends of quality as all other artforms

Click to expand...

Well I remember when you could buy every single monthly marvel title for less then $40. Marvel had less then 40 books a month and DC had maybe 30 a month. Then the indie books were another thirty are so a month. There were likely more indie books then but shops didn't carry every indie book. So you had less then a hundred new books total a month.

I expect if they went back to that set up industry would be a lot healthier. But flooding market with product in order to starve your opponents to death even if you starve with them as well seems to be the new way of doing things.

Caliane_sl said:

This is how it is for every creative field though.
Comics. Mountains of shit. Very very very few are successful. those that ARE are so, due to luck, nepotism, brand/name reckognion, etc. rarely does quality have any sort of impact.
Music. same deal. Theres a reason "live performances" are major factor for income for your average musician. Same can be said for comics really... fanart, commissions, etc are a huge money maker for day/day for many/most artists.


Games need some sort of private commission.

Click to expand...

I fully expect VR experiences/games to be ripe for personalization, for a fee of course. It doesn't necessarily have to be straight porn, but I'm pretty sure it will be off the charts for creepiness.