Rampant Games - The Indie Apocalypse

Jay has turned into a doomsayer and proclaims that the indie apocalypse is nigh. He warned us of this before in his previous blogs, so perhaps he even knows what he is talking about.

Now the talk lately is about the “indiepocalypse.” The mobile markets are far beyond saturation, and now that’s happening to Steam, too. The hardest hit are the ones who enjoyed the most success when Steam was still all about curation by a tiny number of overworked individuals who couldn’t keep up with the releases already.

And now the bubble is bursting. Oh, noes!

I’ve seen this many times before. I’ve talked about it many times before. Half the folks freaking out about it weren’t even in this industry the last time we had a major indie bubble burst (in the casual games arena). Indeed, it seems that about half the commentary on the “indiepocalypse” has been more mocking it, or planning for survival.

One approach is, of course, to turn indie game development into bigger-budget, winner-take-all mentality, or “Triple-I” gaming. To this, I say, “It’s been done, it’s been happening for decades.” I mean, back when I started, that pretty much WAS Triple-A game development with a big team. And afterwards? That was… um… non-Triple-A mainstream game development. There’s nothing new there. The only thing remotely interesting is that they’ve been able to bill themselves as “indie.” I call them “big indies” and they’ve got the same problem as everybody else, from the massive publishing houses down to the lone-wolf developers: they have to make a reasonable return on their investment, or it’s curtains for them. And since many of them are asking for only a fraction of their budget on Kickstarter, it’s not like they have unlimited funds.