Although I am glad to see other people finally writing articles saying the same things I was posting over a year ago I do wonder what took them so long to see it. lol
Anyway, this is great news that over this past year popular websites have finally started realizing the reality or at least finally started writing about it. As more and more people come to this realization it will be a fantastic thing.
Realizing they wonāt be making a living (and probably wonāt be making any worthwhile amount of money either) from game development their goals and general view of this will change. They will think of better ways to spend their time. Perhaps still making games but truly doing it only because of the personal satisfaction and not expecting to make any money. Or perhaps realizing if money is their true priority it makes much more sense to come up with services and products to sell to all of the Indie Game Dev Dreamers.
The odds are just so high against making a living as a full-time indie game developer or even making any worthwhile money period yet those same odds can be flipped around in your favor by no longer making games and instead making things that help to make games. Shovels. Boots. There is a hell of a huge market and as of right now at least it appears to be far more lucrative than actually making games.
Anyway, give it a read if you like and feel free to share your view on the article or blast me for my own opinions, etc.
Reads like a complaint that a bunch of people producing marginal content got marginalized and will need to work 9 - 5.
Indies, and sensibly one should now say hobbyists or amateurs, are required to make content that isnāt so derivative of what the turn-key people can now do with the free game engines and assets stores or they will need to be celebrities ala PewDiePie.
For me treating this as a hobby has been the key to enjoying it and being realistic about goals and lack of earnings and restraining overspending. Will I still have the faƧade of a business? Yes, but thatās for tax and privacy reasons, and because creating that faƧade is cheap.
I will try personally to adapt games that are better suited for that anyway but itās still a hobby. It that happens for me, it will be in the right place at the right time and not a case of advertising expenditure.
Hey, as long as the hobbyist scene is still a thing Iām cool. Although if we could keep the indie dream alive for a few years longer that would be cool too. Iām quite enjoying making YouTube videos. And demand will drop off once people realise there is no money in game dev.
No one actually needs to make money, I just need the dream to hang around.
In short weāve gone full circleā¦ Back a couple of decades ago, there was no Steam or direct publishing outlets. Fronting costās for mass CD media was silly and Indieās had little or no chance of getting their foot through the door anywhere.
So err yeah, same problem, different causeā¦ Back to work!.
1st indie game I played was a shareware I was given on floppy disk called Wolfenstein 3D. Unbeknownst to me they were in Mesquite too and in an brown brick office building near I635, awful location but expensive, so maybe that exceeds some folks definition of Indie. To think I was driving 60 miles one way to Ft Worth everyday and when there was a SW company locally, ugh! id paid nothing for distribution for most of the people that eventually played Wolfenstein 3D but thatās a bit longer than 20 years.
Speaking purely of one man development teams, the article fits quiet well. The flooding of the market requires distinguishing oneself either with a novel idea, which may or may not work at the risk of wasting significant resources depending on the amount of work required to implement said idea. Or to produce works of higher quality which is oriented towards larger teams and is physically impossible for a single person.
Usually the solution to such problems is the formation of larger teams to improve the odds and the competitiveness, and perhaps this sort of professional matchmaking service is lacking. Using the word āProfessionalā because grouping of random unknown entities through forums rarely works.
Could you call wolfenstien indie? From my memory it was the state of the art tech at the time. It was developed by ID and published by Apogee. While neither of them are around any more, I wouldnāt have classed either as indie.
I may be wrong, I didnāt actually pay that much attention to the business side of games back as a kid. I just wanted to play.
Well thatās the size and type operation many are calling indie now. Iād even call them smaller then that in 1991 when I moved to Mesquite after graduating.
Apogee was shoestring then too, for a business at least. They really were people that took their prior experience and then expanded on what they knew in their spare time and used that to found a business:
Their business succeeded by virtue of their game not by virtue of access to advertising dollars or knowing Ivy League or Sanford business leaders. I canāt remember one other time a computer game was offered to me for free unsolicited and told that it was fun to play. I was actually given the floppy disk waiting in line at the bank. Arcades and games from big businesses yes, but they came recommended at a cost of lots of money by the business.
You might be able to claim that Id Software was an indie developer. Their only product prior to Wolfenstein was the Commander Keen series. Apogee though had developed sixteen games and published ten prior to publishing Wolfenstein so they werenāt really an indie at that point.
By the way I believe Id Software is still in business, theyāre just owned by Zenimax Media.
Articles like that really bother me when they are filled with comments passed off as hard facts, when in reality they are simply ONE personās opinions. Itās especially troubling when they are generally negative (and bitter) in nature, because to me, it always feels like the person behind that article is just trying to bring people down with their pessimism and often inaccurate, āworld-wearyā ideas. There is enough stress and worry to trying to make a success of yourself without allowing these doomsday thoughts to further shake your confidence.
Is it wise to throw away your day job and just jump into being a full-time indie developer? Maybe. Maybe not. It depends entirely on where your game development business is RIGHT NOW. Are you making money? Enough to sustain yourself? Then sure, maybe you should take a gamble and try switching to full-time. Are you a new developer working on your first game? Then no - itās probably not wise to put all your eggs in that basket until you really know what youāre doing. Itās all just very simple common sense - thereās no great science to it.
My advice: ignore these types of articles and any of this negative kind of shit that people put out there. You know yourself what youāre capable of, you see the evidence - or lack of evidence - in the reviews and comments of your players, and in your bank account, and you make your decisions for your future based on that evidence. Do whatās right for you and whatās working for you. If things arenāt working, re-evaluate and evolve. But donāt change because of one personās ramblings in some random article.
Anyone who has any hope of making it as an indie can also make it as a freelancer. I hate doing freelance work, so Iām content to be poor until the time comes that I really need to make money, then I take a job. Now that I finally have proper tools for modern game development, Iām hoping to have to take less jobs. If not, itās fine because Iāll have the tools to get better jobs, and better prove my worth.
So anyone who has any business trying to make it as an indie will probably be fine. The shovelware developers, probably not so much. But once they are culled off, the rest of us can get back to work. I see no impending disaster from an ability to earn a living standpoint. Only conditions that must be adapted to.
