Jeff Vogel and Jay Barnson on the Indie Scene

A couple of interesting blog posts on the indie video games have made the rounds recently, courtesy of Jeff Vogel, of Avernum, Avadon and Geneforge fame, and Jay Barnson, who’s currently busy working on the Frayed Knights sequel. Here’s a snippet from the first:

On October 29, Steam accepted 100 titles for publishing from their Greenlight system. A HUNDRED. IN ONE DAY. JUST ON STEAM.

This is the problem with so many indie devs cozying up to the Escapist and Kotaku and the PA Report. There is a flood of new titles, so many that Humble Bundle sells them in Costco-sized bundles of a dozen for a dollar. A lot of good titles won’t ever get that press. They just can’t. There’s not room.

And that’s just for the flashy titles (the “AAA Indies”). My turn-based, low-budget, word-heavy RPGs are a lot of fun and have a real audience, but nobody at Kotaku gives a crap about them, nor should they. Why would a Let’s Play channel on YouTube want to do one of my games? It’d be like putting up a movie of someone reading a book. Alexander Bruce’s marketing path is useless to me, but my business is still valid. Has been for 20 years.

Also, the gaming community doesn’t care about indies as much as we like to think they do. (Minecraft is an ultra-mega-uber hit, right? Well, Grand Theft Auto V made more than it in like 18 seconds.) The gaming press knows that gamers only want to hear about so many indies. Soon, they’ll start picking who lives and who dies.

The point? Any article about marketing indies that doesn’t mention the word “luck” is lying to you.

And from the second:

I could argue for pages and pages that the whole rise of the casual portals in spite of no longer being the force they once were permanently changed the indie gaming landscape, and their impact / legacy remains. Yet after the boom the more that things changed, the more they stayed the same. Anyone who argued that the fundamentals had changed was proven wrong.

The (Social Gaming) thing was another boom that has lost a lot of its momentum lately (most notably telegraphed by the much-diminished Zynga, which is still quite mighty in spite of peaking out on its growth). It’s still with us, and it has permanently changed the landscape of indie gaming forever, yet now that the boom is stalling out, we discover that. games are games. Our horizons have been broadened, and there’s more opportunity (and competition) out there than ever before. But the fundamentals remain the same.

It’ll be the same thing with Steam. And Kickstarter. And mobile. And indies on the consoles. These are all fascinating changes and, in the long run, good ones. But they do not alter the basics. For a brief period of time, during the (boom,) it may appear that they do. like it might finally be time to chuck the old rulebook. It can be wonderful or frustrating depending upon what side you are on. But when the boom settles down into a mature growth curve, and the dust all settles. the fundamentals remain unchanged.

That’s what I think Vogel is arguing here. As I understand it, guys like Alexander Bruce got things rolling shortly after the IGF started becoming a (big deal) outside of the indie community, and Steam started becoming a major force for non-casual PC gaming. These guys managed to jump onto the beginning of a (spike) in the growth curve and ride it up. That’s awesome, and I’m happy for them, but they may not have the perspective to recognize it as an aberration.

To give some perspective, both posts where inspired by this Gamesindustry interview with Antichamber’s Alexander Bruce, which you might also want to read.