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Rampant Games - The Indiepocalyps Continues

by Myrthos, 2016-02-01 12:52:22

The Rampant Coyote takes what happened at Arcen recently as an example of what is currently happening in the Indie development world, where sales on a game with good reviews, are so low that a large chunk of an indie development team have to be laid off.

This sucks.

So Arcen has a critical success that is a commercial flop, for various reasons, and this small indie team is going to have to be gutted as a result.

I was talking to a friend on Facebook today, and I mentioned that when the market gets like this, when supply totally outgrows demand by such a huge factor, suppliers / makers start slitting their own throats to earn their customers, and the market begins to perceive this as normal. And so you get comments like the ones in the PC Gamer article about this.

While many of them are behaving like asses, many of them (even the jerks) have a point. I mean, at this point, I’ve got way more games than I’ve got time to play them, so I really need to be sold on a game to consider forking out even a little money for it. But I still get new ones – especially indie games – that interest me because I understand the dev side of things too, and realize that I can’t demand that a developer spend a million dollars to make me happy enough to give them $15. That’s silly.

But that’s also the market we’re in now. Until the “Indiepocalypse” runs its full course, it’ll be the “new normal.” Maybe one day people will say, “Remember back in the mid 2010s when companies were falling over backwards and running at huge losses to make us more games than we could possibly play, and selling them to us for only $5? Good times, good times…”

The gold rush is playing out like it always has. As a gamer, enjoy it. As a developer… well, decide what you really want to do. If it’s to make games, I guess the answer is to buckle down and ride out the storm. It won’t be over quickly. And it won’t ever be easy.

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