Why for indie before the grass was greener
I am sure many habrovchane love the production of independent studios and developers, or, in common, indie products. Surely, almost everyone at the mention of this term pops up fond memories of some game that was created contrary to the laws dictated by the market.
But have you ever thought that the best days of indie development are over? I would like this thought to be wrong, but Google Trends for the “indie games” query were merciless:
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And similar statistics can be seen in almost any query regarding the indie industry. Also not uncommon are articles about the fall in average incomes of indie developers like this .
Under the cut try to understand the reasons for the decaying popularity of indie.
I will try to separate all the problems depending on their source.
The game developers themselves are still suffering from postponing release dates (a recent example of Prey for the Gods) or do not call them at all, which in principle is normal for limited resources and working conscientiously. But the scarcity of good ideas and new mechanics is more and more noticeable. It has become very frequent cases when a studio that has released a good game just continues to make new levels and locations in the next part. And sometimes it works well (The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth - but then there is an amendment to the fact that she came out when the indies were still in fashion), and sometimes not very (Nidhogg 2). Super Meat Boy Forever the world remains to be seen, but so far everything indicates that the game will differ little from the first part. Do developers become so similar to companies that annually stamp a new version of their bestseller, while rarely getting better reviews than the previous part?
A good example of creating a high-quality product is not the Star Star developers, who did not fixate on creating a DLC, but created not very successful, but still quite good Oxygen Not Included, in a relatively new studio genre.
Consumers began to pay less attention to indie, as evidenced by sales. And here it would be possible to refer to the decline in the quality of games, but there are examples that were obviously forgotten not deserved. Pinstripe fascinated the story of development by one person, conducted a successful campaign on Kickstarter and received good reviews and awards at conferences even before its release. Habré also has an article about this game and its development, which received very warm feedback from the community. But as a result, when the game came out in the 2017th year, its sales were very mediocre.
And you can hope that the game was not as intense as, for example, Cuphead, which came out in the same year and already sold more than 3 million copies, but is it really so indie industry so rich in such stories that some of them just ignore?
Sites still did not give birth to love for indie developers (however, why would you suddenly). The transition from Steam Greenlight to Steam Direct is hard to call a good event for indie, because before you could gather an audience of the game even before it was released on Steam. Google Play and the Apple Store are still continuing to ignore the fact that some games are created by large corporations, and some by small studios or developers altogether. In addition, advertising inside the stores makes it more popular than the one who pays more. And this seems to be quite natural, but before all were at least in the same conditions.
Game giants are just getting better. AAA games have become more, among them more and more products made with soul (which is worth Witcher 3), significant discounts and key distribution to old games have become not uncommon. Although there is not without a spoon of tar in the form of pulling money through the DLC and lutboksy.
It is also worth noting the significant growth in recent years, the genre of Battle Royale, not too popular for many reasons, indie developers. But this is not so bad, because there are examples of such successful projects as Rust and The Forest, which showed that if you do well, then you can succeed and not in the most classic for indie niches.
In general, the reasons for the decline of indie are clear. Perhaps even natural. But I really want the independent development to continue to live, because it makes the industry more humane and brings to the market the things that the gaming giants lack so much. Moreover, so far we have examples of successful indie projects that show that there is still powder in the old dog in independent igrodelov.
PS I was inspired to write an article by the failure of the application I created, although the soul was invested in it much more than in the successful works of the 2015-2016 year.
But have you ever thought that the best days of indie development are over? I would like this thought to be wrong, but Google Trends for the “indie games” query were merciless:
')
And similar statistics can be seen in almost any query regarding the indie industry. Also not uncommon are articles about the fall in average incomes of indie developers like this .
Under the cut try to understand the reasons for the decaying popularity of indie.
I will try to separate all the problems depending on their source.
The game developers themselves are still suffering from postponing release dates (a recent example of Prey for the Gods) or do not call them at all, which in principle is normal for limited resources and working conscientiously. But the scarcity of good ideas and new mechanics is more and more noticeable. It has become very frequent cases when a studio that has released a good game just continues to make new levels and locations in the next part. And sometimes it works well (The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth - but then there is an amendment to the fact that she came out when the indies were still in fashion), and sometimes not very (Nidhogg 2). Super Meat Boy Forever the world remains to be seen, but so far everything indicates that the game will differ little from the first part. Do developers become so similar to companies that annually stamp a new version of their bestseller, while rarely getting better reviews than the previous part?
A good example of creating a high-quality product is not the Star Star developers, who did not fixate on creating a DLC, but created not very successful, but still quite good Oxygen Not Included, in a relatively new studio genre.
Consumers began to pay less attention to indie, as evidenced by sales. And here it would be possible to refer to the decline in the quality of games, but there are examples that were obviously forgotten not deserved. Pinstripe fascinated the story of development by one person, conducted a successful campaign on Kickstarter and received good reviews and awards at conferences even before its release. Habré also has an article about this game and its development, which received very warm feedback from the community. But as a result, when the game came out in the 2017th year, its sales were very mediocre.
And you can hope that the game was not as intense as, for example, Cuphead, which came out in the same year and already sold more than 3 million copies, but is it really so indie industry so rich in such stories that some of them just ignore?
Sites still did not give birth to love for indie developers (however, why would you suddenly). The transition from Steam Greenlight to Steam Direct is hard to call a good event for indie, because before you could gather an audience of the game even before it was released on Steam. Google Play and the Apple Store are still continuing to ignore the fact that some games are created by large corporations, and some by small studios or developers altogether. In addition, advertising inside the stores makes it more popular than the one who pays more. And this seems to be quite natural, but before all were at least in the same conditions.
Game giants are just getting better. AAA games have become more, among them more and more products made with soul (which is worth Witcher 3), significant discounts and key distribution to old games have become not uncommon. Although there is not without a spoon of tar in the form of pulling money through the DLC and lutboksy.
It is also worth noting the significant growth in recent years, the genre of Battle Royale, not too popular for many reasons, indie developers. But this is not so bad, because there are examples of such successful projects as Rust and The Forest, which showed that if you do well, then you can succeed and not in the most classic for indie niches.
Instead of an afterword
In general, the reasons for the decline of indie are clear. Perhaps even natural. But I really want the independent development to continue to live, because it makes the industry more humane and brings to the market the things that the gaming giants lack so much. Moreover, so far we have examples of successful indie projects that show that there is still powder in the old dog in independent igrodelov.
PS I was inspired to write an article by the failure of the application I created, although the soul was invested in it much more than in the successful works of the 2015-2016 year.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/423421/
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