"The indie bubble is popping": Jeff Vogel predicted indie game oversaturation in 2014

[Alexandros]

Lots of people think that surviving as an indie developer is now harder than ever before and there's been a lot of talk about what caused this 'indiepocalypse', as I've seen it being referred to, and what can be done about it. Jeff Vogel has been a successful indie developer for many years, making old-school small-budget RPGs and he had some thoughts on the matter back in 2014 in his personal blog, maybe predicting the current situation in indie development. I'll quote the most important parts but you should really read the whole thing, it's very interesting. First, the link:

http://jeff-vogel.blogspot.com/2014/05/the-indie-bubble-is-popping.html

A brief history of the indie boom according to Jeff:

First, a brief history of the Indie bubble. In 2008, big budget developers were doing fine, but they had mostly abandoned a lot of genres many gamers loved (puzzle games, adventure games, 2-D platformers, classic-style RPGs, Roguelikes, etc.)

A few young, hungry developers stepped in and showed that classics can be written on low budgets by young, plucky people with unruly facial hair. (Braid. World of Goo. Castle Crashers. Minecraft. And so on.) They were rewarded with huge accolades and many millions of dollars.

Shortly after, other developers stepped in with their own games. They weren't quite as classic, but they were decent, and these people made fewer millions of dollars. Some old super-niche developers (Hello!) were able to rerelease old games and get caught in the rising tide.

Then even more developers, sincere and hard-working, looked at this frenzy and said, "I'm sick of working for [insert huge corporation name here]. I would prefer to do what I want and also get rich." And they quit their jobs and joined the gold rush. Many of them. Many, many. Too many.

And now we are where we are today.

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His initial thesis:

So what this grumpy old fart is saying is that there are Issues. They should be discussed. There are new obstacles that should be planned for and forces you may blame for your problems that, in fact, you shouldn't. If you are a green developer, face these facts, or I believe destruction awaits.

The easy money is off the street. If you want to make it in this business now, you have to earn it. It's a total bummer.

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The crux of the issue according to Jeff:

It's simple math.

All gamers together have a huge pool of X dollars a year to spend on their hobby. It gets distributed among Y developers. X stays roughly constant (up a little, down a little), but Y is shooting up. A fixed pool of money, distributed among more and more hungry mouths.

Those mouths are your competitors. All your heroes? Notch, The Behemoth, J. Blow, etc? They're your foes now. Are you ready to fight them?

You can talk all you want about how mean Steam was to you, or how much "discoverability" is a problem, or about how important it is for developers to go to GDC or the PAX Indie Warren or to cool game jams or whatever. It's all a distraction.

X dollars, Y developers. That's all that matters.

And if X stays constant, the only way to solve the problem is for Y to go down. I'll give you a second to work out the consequences of that for yourself.

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The marketing and budget issue:

But suppose you're a mid-tier (sometimes called AAA Indie) developer, with $500K-$2 million budgets. You have a problem. You need advertising to get sales, as word-of-mouth won't cover it. But you can't afford a big campaign. The only way you will turn a profit is if you get huge free marketing from Steam/iTunes placement and press articles. (Which is why going to big trade shows and cozying up to the press is so important.)

But when there are so many games competing for free marketing, you have a serious problem. According to their site, the Indie Megabooth at the last PAX had 104 games. 104! At one PAX! Just indies! The games industry doesn't need that many games this year, period. #mildexaggeration

If you are an established developer journalists love, like Supergiant with Transistor, you have a chance to stand out from this horde. If you don't already have a hit, I don't know what to tell you. If I were you, I strongly suggest you write an utterly flawless, ground-breaking title and utterly blow everyone's minds.

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On Steam's decision to open the floodgates:

I have a private theory, that's really only in my own brain. It's this. Valve is full of really cool people, who truly love games. But, at some point, with Steam, these basically nice people suddenly found themselves in the position of deciding who lives and who dies. It's a stressful, miserable place, and they didn't like it. It just made it harder to get out of bed in the morning.

In the last few years, Steam workers were the ones who handed out the golden tickets. They gave one to me. (Everyone on Steam made a lot of money. Even niche-developer dingleberries like me. You could put Pong on the front page at $20 a copy and still make a fortune.) The guy next to me who didn't get the ticket? He was angry. At Steam, at me, at the world. But mostly Steam.

Steam found themselves in a position of being hated for something it could do nothing about. Not to mention the fact that the sort of curation they were doing was impossible in the long term. You shouldn't want the games you can buy to be controlled by some guy at a stand-up desk in Bellevue, WA. They aren't wizards. They can't tell what's going to be a hit any more than anyone else. The free market has to do that job.

So they stood aside and opened the floodgates. Supply shot up and demand stayed even, which means, by a certain law of economics (the first one, in fact), prices have to drop.

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On bundles:

It just can't last. Bundles used to earn a ton, but they don't anymore. If making pennies a copy selling your games in 12 packs is the main source of a developer's income, that developer is going to disappear. Also, all of the bundles and sales encourage users to expect to pay a price too low to keep us in business. It's just the same race to the bottom as in the iTunes store, except this time we were warned, and we did it anyway.

And hey, I'm not blameless in this. My games have been in a million sales and bundles. It's what you have to do now, and I'm just as fault as everyone else.

If someone tells you this is the slightest bit sustainable, they are misleading you. There are lots of different reasons to do this. Maybe they need to fool you. Maybe they need to fool themselves. Just don't believe them. X dollars, Y developers. That's all that matters.

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This post is already super long so I'll stop the quotes here. As I said, I highly recommend that you read the whole thing.

Edit: A couple more articles from Jeff:

Jeff also wrote a follow-up article a year after the one that was posted by the OP that's also worth reading: https://jeff-vogel.blogspot.com/2015/09/the-indie-bubble-revisited-or-are-we.html

(Tangentially related is this article which deals mostly with pricing / sales promotion that he wrote between the two 'pocalyspe articles: https://jeff-vogel.blogspot.com/2014/12/how-youre-going-to-price-your-computer.html)

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[Kyuur]

Going to need some receipts on 'oversaturation'. I'd be willing to bet that there are a growing number of successful indie devs, not fewer.

 

[Wulfric]

Such is the life of an artist. :(

Getting eyeballs on your stuff is nearly as difficult as creating the work.

 

[Deleted member 6730]

What bubble? Like are indie games collapsing? News to me and everyone else.

 

[Sabretooth]

I don't get why the pool X is constant. The market for games is growing, not stagnant. Surely there's more and more money being spent on video games world over?

 

[Nabs]

Really good read. I remember it from before, but it really hits the bullseye today.

 

[GhostTrick]

It's the sad truth a lot of people dont want to see and rather hide behind the "curation" and "store fee" boogeyman. The former supposedly responsible of lower sales of good games, hidden under trash games. The latter being responsible for indies struggle to get revenue.

The reality is that we had a boom in Middleware and Indie industry. More powerful middlewares, that dont requires to know how to code and allows indies to release AA quality titles.

More and more indies jumping in. Indies now use the same tools as AAA developers. Everyone can make games. Everyone is making games.

And the people asking for curation dont even know they'd be the one rejected if curation was to happen.

The thing is production values exploded. Prices didnt moved much. Hollow Knight is a AA title under the disguise of an indie title. With hand drawn visuals, lot of content, high quality music and art. Great gameplay. Sold for 15 bucks and less.

 

[Arion]

Ya makes sense. I'm sure for every Celeste and Obra Dinn there are a bunch of other games that get next to zero spotlight and we don't even know they were unsuccessful.

 

[manhack]

What bubble? Like are indie games collapsing? News to me and everyone else.

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Not collapsing. He is saying the indie scene is oversaturated. I'm not sure that is a thing since it is an indie scene, but it is probably much harder to make money than ever before.

 

[Nozem]

Going to need some receipts on 'oversaturation'. I'd be willing to bet that there are a growing number of successful indie devs, not fewer.

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Maybe in absolute numbers there are more succesful indie devs, sure. In relative numbers though, the chance of failure as an indie dev is higher than ever.

 

[Sean Mirrsen]

I don't get why the pool X is constant. The market for games is growing, not stagnant. Surely there's more and more money being spent on video games world over?

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Mostly because the prices, and the spending per title, are going up. Collector's editions, special editions, DLC, MTX, the whole GaaS thing, nevermind the increasing amount of subscription-based services. The AAA developers and publishers are racing to wring as much money out of every customer as they can, because their 'bubble' is also collapsing, for a different reason - the game development prices are taking a hike. As graphics tech improves, and expectations rise accordingly, 'cutting-edge' games are getting more and more expensive to develop - where indies are facing famine because of 'too many mouths to feed', the AAA devs are simply becoming unsustainably huge.

 

[Croc Man]

I don't think it's just a limited pool of dollars but time. He mentions competing against other Indies but since 2014 the aaa/gaas part of the market has been trying to suck up more time and money.

The Ps+ threads show they're not always in direct competition but there must be some significant overlap.

 

[Deleted member 9317]

Personally believe indie will survive with dynamic payment. Similar to Humble Bundle, but somewhat the opposite. A dev should set a goal of how much money they need to make, not how many copies that need to be sold. Once you set a goal, you trickle down the price and benefiting everyone who buys, never punishing someone who bought day one or day three hundred.

*sigh* I miss my project.

EDIT: Will add that the number of indie developers (or developers in general) have increased since 2014 by a large margin. Also, the public's desire for great games and impatience for broken games have lead them to ignore games that have no reviews or no exposure, and when gaming sites don't talk about those games because they don't have the allotted staff to review them or the devs don't have the allotted budget to send media packages to all, it all adds up to many games being ignored. Cost of indie games have gone up, and the amount of games that take your time have increased.

Add that to the fads of games and ones that all developers chase, and you got yourself a stew of jank.

 

[Falk]

What bubble? Like are indie games collapsing? News to me and everyone else.

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That there are more successful indie devs now and that the success rate is lower aren't mutually exclusive statements.

 

[Nozem]

Very relevant video from GDC, which compares August 2017 numbers with February 2018 numbers.

 

[cucholix]

A quick look at Switch eShop and you can see the bar for indie games is getting pretty high, also there are alot of AA games disguised as indies with middle-high profile publishers behind (like someone already mentioned) it's only natural that quality and user demands increase as new competitors jump in. It's only from Switch side, I know that many devs don't even make to release their games into eShop.

I see the demand for low-mid budget tier games increasing actually, thus bringing more competitors to fill the indie scene spot, including big publishers.

 

[Alexandros]

Going to need some receipts on 'oversaturation'. I'd be willing to bet that there are a growing number of successful indie devs, not fewer.

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Google 'indiepocalypse'. Many indie developers seem to feel that it's very hard to get noticed and make a living.

What bubble? Like are indie games collapsing? News to me and everyone else.

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Certainly not collapsing, but it can be argued that the initial boom at the start of this decade might be over.

 

[Lentic]

You could clearly see this coming in 2014. It's happened in other places as well, such as music.

 

[Alexandros]

I don't think it's just a limited pool of dollars but time. He mentions competing against other Indies but since 2014 the aaa/gaas part of the market has been trying to suck up more time and money.

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A very good point. Today's big games aim to keep the player constantly 'engaged', which means playing and spending.

 

[LewieP]

Google 'indiepocalypse'. Many indie developers seem to feel that it's very hard to get noticed and make a living.

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Harder than prior to Steam?!?

 

[GuEiMiRrIRoW]

I can say this for myself but I don't know if it applies to everyone: my problem is more time than money.
I easily spend 1500 dollars a year with gaming, but my backlog exploded this generation.

Besides, I never bought many indie games but the switch changed that mindset. I don't know why, but somehow I lost my prejudice against indie games.

What I can say is that I actually stopped buying EA and Activision games. Mainly when I can buy 3 indie games instead of 1 EA or Activision game.

I think that big AAA games might explode before indie games go down. It's the change of my buying routine that I think that will replicate with more gamers this generation, leaving big AAA companies in a bad place next gen. Let's see what happens.

 

[Deleted member 9317]

Harder than prior to Steam?!?

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Lol silly question

 

[sirap]

It happened to self publishing too. The big guys saved enough money during the boom to fuel their marketing machines, while newer authors find their books drowning.

There's only so much you can do when hundreds (if not thousands) of books get published every day.

 

[thomasmahler]

I'm not buying it. Yeah, of course there's a ton more indie games out there now than in 2008-2014, but the behavior of customers has never really changed: They buy great games and ignore the rest.

The reason why it looks the way it does now is cause everything gets published. That obviously doesn't mean that everything sells. Back in 2008, indie games had no platform and weren't known, unless they were TRULY special. Now you see a ton more stuff on the stores, but still, the only stuff that sells are games that really stand out and are amazing. If any indie comes out and it's a 9/10ish game, in this day and age, it'd get the exposure it needs.

 

[Matty H]

Indiepocalypse was predicted years ago and it hasn't happened. Sure, many Indies are struggling but there are more sustainable Indies of varying sizes than there were in 2013. It's not just on Steam anymore. There are countless PC storefronts, Xbox, PS and now Switch has been through a gold rush.

It's not a bonanza for every game that releases. There's hits and misses. I hope that most game budgets are low enough for Indie devs to break even and maybe fund a bit of the next project.

The Industry is growing at double digit percentages every year. Its more people spending more time and money on this hobby every year. X is growing. A worldwide economic crash would cause more disaster than too many Indie Devs throwing their hat in the ring.

Giving players choice with more game releases has been the best thing for the industry in the last decade. Discovery has been a challenge and will continue to be but there will always be space for unique and thought provoking games from talented independant developers.

 

[Alexandros]

Harder than prior to Steam?!?

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I would assume not, but developers are more qualified to answer that question.

 

[Gelf]

Supply certainly seems to be outstripping demand right now, if that will ever change though I'm unsure as this looks much like any creative industry where underneath the big success stories there are a lot of talented starving artists desperate for thier big break.

 

[7threst]

Ya makes sense. I'm sure for every Celeste and Obra Dinn there are a bunch of other games that get next to zero spotlight and we don't even know they were unsuccessful.

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This is kinda sad, so many great games that don't even get a little bit of attention. Probably bums out a lot of would be great-developers :(

 

[Deleted member 2595]

I don't get why the pool X is constant. The market for games is growing, not stagnant. Surely there's more and more money being spent on video games world over?

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That's the one thing that doesn't add up, but I reckon Y is still growing faster than X as everyone jumps on the bandwagon

 

[LewieP]

I would assume not, but developers are more qualified to answer that question.

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How so? Plenty of developers misunderstand the market.

It is far easier to sell an indie game today than it was prior to Steam.

 

[sheaaaa]

I'm not buying it. Yeah, of course there's a ton more indie games out there now than in 2008-2014, but the behavior of customers has never really changed: They buy great games and ignore the rest.

The reason why it looks the way it does now is cause everything gets published. That obviously doesn't mean that everything sells. Back in 2008, indie games had no platform and weren't known, unless they were TRULY special. Now you see a ton more stuff on the stores, but still, the only stuff that sells are games that really stand out and are amazing. If any indie comes out and it's a 9/10ish game, in this day and age, it'd get the exposure it needs.

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I think this is a dangerous line of thinking (from a developer no less). Games that aren't commercially successful aren't necessarily not great "9/10" games.

 

[GhostTrick]

This is kinda sad, so many great games that don't even get a little bit of attention. Probably bums out a lot of would be great-developers :(

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I blame the so-called gaming journalism. All dancing around the latest AAA titles, to spout the same glowing reviews and no time dedicated to smaller titles.

 

[Nozem]

How so? Plenty of developers misunderstand the market.

It is far easier to sell an indie game today than it was prior to Steam.

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It's also far, far harder than a few years ago.

 

[Turin Turambar]

I don't get why the pool X is constant. The market for games is growing, not stagnant. Surely there's more and more money being spent on video games world over?

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It isn't constant. But number Y is also not constant.

The amount of indie devs has increased 10x more than the amount of money spent by consumers.

 

[GhostTrick]

I'm not buying it. Yeah, of course there's a ton more indie games out there now than in 2008-2014, but the behavior of customers has never really changed: They buy great games and ignore the rest.

The reason why it looks the way it does now is cause everything gets published. That obviously doesn't mean that everything sells. Back in 2008, indie games had no platform and weren't known, unless they were TRULY special. Now you see a ton more stuff on the stores, but still, the only stuff that sells are games that really stand out and are amazing. If any indie comes out and it's a 9/10ish game, in this day and age, it'd get the exposure it needs.

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The problem is there are far more great games than before. And it's even worse for the good games. Being just "good" isnt enough anymore.

 

[Alexandros]

If any indie comes out and it's a 9/10ish game, in this day and age, it'd get the exposure it needs.

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Is it really that simple? I'm genuinely asking because a lot of your fellow developers seem to disagree.

How so? Plenty of developers misunderstand the market.

It is far easier to sell an indie game today than it was prior to Steam.

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I think so too but since I'm not a developer there's a chance I'm missing something.

 

[signal]

The easy money is off the street. If you want to make it in this business now, you have to earn it. It's a total bummer.

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It's a bummer that money needs to be earned? lol

 

[LewieP]

It's also far, far harder than a few years ago.

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What time period are you talking about? Are you talking about back when Valve rejected most indie games?

 

[Oreiller]

Jeff Vogel is the perfect exemple of a developper that would struggle in the current market since his games aren't great. They're decent but not much more, and that's not enough anymore.

 

[Alexandros]

Jeff Vogel is the perfect exemple of a developer that would struggle in the current market since his games aren't great. They're decent but not much more, and that's not enough anymore.

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He seems to be doing ok now but if he was just starting out today it would certainly be rough for him.

 

[werezompire]

It's a bummer that money needs to be earned? lol

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It was a joke. All of his blog posts are a bit tongue-in-cheek.

Now you see a ton more stuff on the stores, but still, the only stuff that sells are games that really stand out and are amazing. If any indie comes out and it's a 9/10ish game, in this day and age, it'd get the exposure it needs.

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This isn't even true of all AAA games with lots of marketing, much less indie games that can easily fall through the cracks. For that matter, I'm sure we've all seen improved sequels of already great games bomb - maybe the timing was poor or maybe the market just felt like one game was plenty (the sequel no longer having the USP that the original game had since the original game already exists). And I imagine that anyone who has been playing games for a while has a list of amazing games they love that hardly anybody else played.

Whether or not there's an indiepocalypse is up for debate, but I don't think anyone paying attention would disagree that competition for attention and sales is fiercer than it ever has been between the HUGE number of high quality indie games and all the GaaS titles that grab onto someone's time & don't let go. The bar is high and it just keeps getting higher. This is great for gamers but as a developer, you need a strategy - just making good games & hoping for the best is unwise.

 

[Necron]

So... just like every other (entertainment) industry? I don't see a problem here.

 

[Bob Beat]

And I'm happy. The indie scene is flourishing because the mid tier collapsed. It's not popping. More devs I have to compete with it's not popping. The argument is based on x money and y games, just like the death of mid tiers. Indies are here because of that same argument.

 

[skeezx]

i don't see any other way how it could've played out, though measures could be made in regard to curation and such

does suck how many great games fall by the wayside, theoretically if something like hotline miami released in 2018 it'd go virtually unrecognized. but them's the brakes

 

[Auctopus]

Welcome to other media industries, I guess?

Look at all the indie musicians out there, you're in the competition with everyone. Just because you make a piece of art and market it, doesn't mean you automatically deserve success. There are more successful indie developers out there than there were 5 years ago and that's a good thing.

 

[Bede-x]

Welcome to other media industries, I guess?

Look at all the indie musicians out there, you're in the competition with everyone. Just because you make a piece of art and market it, doesn't mean you automatically deserve success. There are more successful indie developers out there than there were 5 years ago and that's a good thing.

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Exactly. There's simply too many good games being released these days, that many of them have to fail. This is no different from competing in the music industry and no amount of curation will fix this problem. You can select some titles to be a success with curation, but only by pushing others aside.

Steam has found the best solution in gaming so far. Practically everything is allowed in to compete, but as an end user I rarely, if ever, see a crap game in my feed and they've given me extensive tools to tailor the store showings to my liking, if I so prefer.

 

[Kouriozan]

...

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Sounds like the same problems the mobile gaming market is facing.

 

[Tuco Benedicto Pacifico]

I'm not buying it. Yeah, of course there's a ton more indie games out there now than in 2008-2014, but the behavior of customers has never really changed: They buy great games and ignore the rest.

The reason why it looks the way it does now is cause everything gets published. That obviously doesn't mean that everything sells. Back in 2008, indie games had no platform and weren't known, unless they were TRULY special. Now you see a ton more stuff on the stores, but still, the only stuff that sells are games that really stand out and are amazing. If any indie comes out and it's a 9/10ish game, in this day and age, it'd get the exposure it needs.

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Well I can see under your avatar that you're from Moon Studios.

You are one of these "indie developers" who actually released quality products that are standing out even in a crowded market.
I don't know to what degree of financial success, but still, Ori is a game that will get noticed by anyone putting his eyes on it even just for few seconds and word of mouth is probably strong.

Many others aren't. And I know indie devs absolutely don't like when someone says it, but the reality is that in the overwhelming majority of cases when they complain openly "I published a game and hardly anyone paid attention to it!", you have to just look at their product and you can see why: they are often completely unremarkable.

Jeff Vogel is the perfect exemple of a developper that would struggle in the current market since his games aren't great. They're decent but not much more, and that's not enough anymore.

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He has a reasonably safe business model and he keeps his budget very low (almost too low for his own good, maybe. If he invested more in production value few years back maybe he now would have a stealth hit).
He was producing and selling indie games to his niche audience way before "indie games" became a popular thing.

 

[eonden]

I'm not buying it. Yeah, of course there's a ton more indie games out there now than in 2008-2014, but the behavior of customers has never really changed: They buy great games and ignore the rest.

The reason why it looks the way it does now is cause everything gets published. That obviously doesn't mean that everything sells. Back in 2008, indie games had no platform and weren't known, unless they were TRULY special. Now you see a ton more stuff on the stores, but still, the only stuff that sells are games that really stand out and are amazing. If any indie comes out and it's a 9/10ish game, in this day and age, it'd get the exposure it needs.

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I dont think so. There are so many 9/10 indie games and they still dont sell that much when compared to the end of last gen (2012 or so) when even 7/10 or 6/10 indies sold great due to lack of competition.

Exposure nowadays is a much more important asset and in the case that your game isnt a gem (9/10) but a great game (8/10 or 7/10), you need even more. I dont think that indie games can be succesful just by making a great game but also need to make sure people know it exists, instead of being one of the 30 great games that launch a month in Steam.

 

[LewieP]

i don't see any other way how it could've played out, though measures could be made in regard to curation and such

does suck how many great games fall by the wayside, theoretically if something like hotline miami released in 2018 it'd go virtually unrecognized. but them's the brakes

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Doubt it. If a cult creator with a sizeable following that they'd built up over years released a more ambitious game than anything they'd done before, they'd likely still generate attention.

Maybe some people think of Hotline Miami as an overnight success, but it wasn't.