There actually are a ton of gaming companies right now. The indie game space seems to be much healthier and accessible than say, the indie movie business. I hardly buy AAA titles anymore because you can get so many good games for under $20 dollars made by independent studios. Of course, this is based on mostly staying on PC and Steam. I would suspect consoles are not as indie friendly, but it does seem like they have some market access
I wouldn't be too sure to be honest, only companies with a big game platorm can compete with Valve being able to subsidize these and sell them at cost or less, because most game purchases one them will be through steam.
This is the sole reason why I don't play Switch games unless I can get them on sale, or they're exclusive like BotW.
I have a 14" gaming notebook (ASUS G14 2021) that's portable enough and offers decent battery life especially for lighter games with access to my Steam library offline, and plenty of key shops to find games for uber cheap when there's no demo available for me to vet the value of a title first.
Unfortunately, physical copies of games are not depreciating; BotW, despite being five years old, is still selling at full price.
Good for them though, I mean it's a great game, and it means the games don't depreciate much on the secondhand market either. Although I'm confident people don't want to sell physical Switch games, a lot of them have a lot of life in them and become prized possessions.
You assume that the Steam users are willing to pay the same price as Switch users, but that's not necessarily the case. Volume matters as well, maybe the number of Steam users is way more than the number of Switch users so they can make up for the lower price by selling more.
Stadia also has a lot of indie games but thanks to their sales, you end up with a comparable price to Steam sales. Disco Elysium, for example, went on sale for US$18 vs. ~$23 on Switch. Steam's sale price was ~$20.
Also most indie games require more brainpower than what Apple Arcade offers. Apple wouldn't know a complex game if a pile of discs with them fell on their heads.
The "lock-in" and the lack of ownership/copyright extension for media provided by their service is absolutely a problem, but it's not "servitude". There's a couple of other members of FAANG where the relationship with users is much more like servitude.
Forever seems like a stretch. When Switch is succeeded, how long before Nintendo shuts the Switch shop down? You can't legally move downloaded games between consoles.
This was a big issue with WiiWare when Nintendo shut down the Wii Shop. People could keep what they had downloaded, but once the Shop shut down, you couldn't redownload anything.
Download is only one way to buy Switch games, and at least I'll still be able to use one console - compared to zero as soon as I stop paying my feudal obligations to Apple.
And almost every game available on cartridge has some kind of patch only downloadable from the store. Some don't even have all their data on the cartridge and need a download to function at all...
I will maintain servitude to Apple for the rest of my life because of iMessage: if I leave they can subtly “break” my access to messaging with people I care about (and have done so.)
> because of iMessage: if I leave they can subtly “break” my access to messaging with people I care about (and have done so.)
Even if you made sure to unregister your phone number and email addresses from iMessage first? You can do this while still using an iPhone to validate that it's worked before you give it up.
> Even if you made sure to unregister your phone number and email addresses from iMessage first? You can do this while still using an iPhone to validate that it's worked before you give it up.
You are right, of course. And you can also do it afterwards if you forgot. There is no nefarious plan to void your messages when you change phone.
The economics of game passes are like this with nearly all of them. The XBox game pass has several games (on both PC and XBox) where their price is multiples of the monthly price.
You do—so if I like a game enough, I'll pick it up elsewhere, too. But digital games as a whole get harder to play over time. I've moved my DSi games to my 3DS, and I've got a Wii with a whole bunch of titles.
Consider the total hours games like BotW offer and divide that into the price. That might alter your feelings that game prices are too high. I know it did for me.
You say that like games aren't already kind of absurdly cheap for how much work goes into them. People used to pay $60 of 1980s money for, frankly, pretty shit[0] NES games. That's ~$150 worth of money today. $30 games are downright cheap and I'm continually impressed by how entitled gamers can be when they complain about modern game prices. People pay $30 for a decent meal at a restaurant FFS.
Which isn't to say that you should by a switch. If you don't think it's a good value then obviously you shouldn't. I'm just saying that not buying it because 'the games are too expensive' seems like a pretty unjustified complaint to me.
[0] Not all of them were shit of course, but the catalogue is 90% shit and people did buy a lot of shit games.
Well, consider that you could buy any kind of game first hand for $60, then after finishing it, you could be able to sell if and get some money back.
Today you pay $30 (for some games, but a lot are still $60, $80, etc.) Plus the DLC, credits, extensions, registration to an account no ability to sell it or buy second hand.
Game industry got pretty bad, I've enjoyed it in the past, and I have the ability to just move on and ignore anything game related, what I am upset about is that today's kids are squeezed and coerced in order to play anything, and that is why I wish we had governments trying to put a stop to the current gaming companies greed
$60 was also worth quite a bit more in the heyday of GameStop et al.
What you characterize as "greed" is more reflective of general consumer desires (physical media is pretty dead, and I say this having a paper library of around 500 books) and that games are ever-more-expensive to make.
For the preposterous number of person-hours that go into an AAA title, $100 isn't unrealistic. But there's price anchoring dating back to the nineties now, and that as much as anything is why games upsell the way they do. (The "complete edition" prices are probably more representative of what a sustainable price for a player really is.)
Or we can do microtransactions until our souls bleed and go back to single-use codes in the game case. That's a thing too.
> What you characterize as "greed" is more reflective of general consumer desires
While it is hilarious that you imply that vendor lockin, half finished games, arbitrary difficulty curves meant to stimulate mtx and a lack of ownership is a "general consumer desire" I think it is more reasonable to say that the consumer has no choice. They (or we) clearly still desire to buy videogames, so folks end up buying what is essentially trash.
The dichotomy isn't "buy AAA games" or "don't buy games". It's never been a better time to buy indie games, many of which these days are super polished and rewarding experiences. But the thing is? If you want an AAA game with AAA affordances, the cost of production is going to have to come from somewhere. And--well--it certainly seems like a lot of the market wants those games and those affordances, so yeah, if the player is prioritizing AAA games, then yes, they're expensive, and yes, they're going to get more expensive, and you can either pay it at the front door or once you're inside.
You pay your money and you take your choice. I agree that it's silly, and that's why I don't buy those games. I buy and play a lot of games, but it's been at least five years since I bought a game (that didn't show up from Humble Choice or whatever and is languishing in my game keys spreadsheet) from Activision, EA, or Ubisoft.
I have gotten more enjoyment out of Starsector[0], a game that isn't even on Steam yet, than I've ever gotten out of any AAA game I've ever played. It cost me $15. (I have since bought it repeatedly for friends.)
For the amount of person hours having a game sold for $100 is a bit of nonsense, they sell in million worldwide and the people working on it are laid off as soon the production is over, so it's just shared holders and CEO pocketing blood, are we really still thinking that people doing the work are getting anything off the production
A lot more than just inflation changed since the '80s. Off the top of my head: massively larger market, better tooling, better hardware, better distribution networks.
Gaming companies aren't entitled to my money. They're allowed to offer games for the prices they want, and the market is allowed to buy them or not.
That may be true, but the switch exists in a market where games are extremely cheap. High quality free to play games, cheap indie games I play for weeks, steam sales, huge numbers of games given away by Epic Games, "free" games with prime gaming, and the insane value of Game Pass. It feels like every time I spend money on a game its free on the Epic Store or "free" on Game Pass within a few months. There's never been a cheaper time to be a PC gamer... assuming you already have a PC.
I still play $60 for games because it's not a big deal for me but it's weird when I already have so much entertainment available for almost nothing. Playnite says I have 1050 games available to play, about 50 are duplicates and about 350 are from Game pass. I've apparently spent less than $600 on steam and much less than that on all other stores. Seems like the market value of the average game is about $1. (Hands waving furiously)
If games are so expensive to make and sell so cheap, how come are the game companies getting bigger and making record profits year after year? Not that the median game developer seems to be much better off for it, though.
Besides, many of those $10 games that are $30 on the Switch are made by smaller teams or even solo creators. Just because some video game properties have grown into giant franchises with multimedia companies pouring tens and hundreds of millions dollars and armies of people into them, that doesn't mean the majority of video game titles around are like that.
Come to think of it, in the light of the countless recent stories of overwork and abuse in the games industry and the scandalous quality issues plaguing high-profile releases in recent years, I'm not even sure if we should be incentivizing games having a lot of work go into them.
How come is it entitlement to not buy things that cost more than you think they are worth, anyway? Expensive things don't become cheap just because they're cheaper than four decades ago nor because they happen to be created and marketed by large corporations with lots of employees.
> If games are so expensive to make and sell so cheap, how come are the game companies getting bigger and making record profits year after year? Not that the median game developer seems to be much better off for it, though.
That's a fair point. My first guess is lootboxes and microtransactions being used to make up the difference, as well as underpaying employees. For big studios it is common to lay off developers immediately after a big release.
Regardless, I don't think that same logic applies to smaller studios.
> How come is it entitlement to not buy things that cost more than you think they are worth, anyway?
That isn't what I was saying, though I admit I didn't make it very clear. If you don't want to buy something because the cost isn't worth it to you, that's perfectly fair. What I am annoyed by and think is entitled is any kind of objective-sounding judgement that 'games are too expensive'.
there are some major differences that mean inflation isn't the best indication for price
the biggest is market size. in 1980, there were very few people buying games compared to today.
also, for non-aaa games, the difficulty of making a game has in many ways gone down significantly. NES era games were at the absolute limit of hardware capabilities, and required a ton of wizardry to fit within size constraints. now graphics expectations are higher, but modern computers are so much more powerful that you can afford a lot more sloppiness.
> I'm continually impressed by how entitled gamers can be when they complain about modern game prices
> I'm just saying that not buying it because 'the games are too expensive' seems like a pretty unjustified complaint to me.
That's because on this topic you are quick on making judgements on people and don't (want to?) realize their reasons for not buying a switch can be valid and these reasons are not attack or counter arguments to the reasons for why you would buy switch games.
I am not an entitled gamer.
edit: and FWIW I was checking the switch page for Disco Elysium and I see that the price tag is the same as Gog's (39.99) but now I don't care anymore about discussing this topic here and now. Nintendotax gone ? Just checked Life is stange:true colours, same price tags as steam.
I guess the difference I'm trying to make is between "it personally isn't worth that to me", which is of course entirely valid, and a more objective-sounding statement of "games cost too much", which I think any objective analysis would say is ridiculous.
> Game prices on the switch is why I haven't gave in to the temptation yet.
Not:
> Game prices on the switch is why it's not worth gave in to the temptation yet.
> I guess the difference I'm trying to make is between "it personally isn't worth that to me", which is of course entirely valid, and a more objective-sounding statement of "games cost too much", which I think any objective analysis would say is ridiculous.
No, you built a straw man argument.
Do I go around asking for a refund because The Witness has been given for free and I paid for it in full upon release ? That would be entitlement. Not buying a switch because switch games are too expensive for me is not being entitled. I also think not buying a switch because I may think switch games are too expensive is not being entitled.
> [..] , which I think any objective analysis would say is ridiculous.
Yeah, way to go. First you suggest in a reply to me that people who think like you think I do are entitled and then you state your opinion is objective and then throw a blanket statement about something no one said and suggest this position is objectively ridiculous.
The group of truly indie studios is dwindling unfortunately.
Tencent and Microsoft have both spread a lot of money around. Perhaps for varying reasons, namely MS needs to make up for the lack of titles developed for the Xbox Series, and add titles to Game Pass to make it more a more attractive offering.
> The group of truly indie studios is dwindling unfortunately.
This is inaccurate.
I don't have the stats to back it up, but the power of Unity Engine and Unreal Engine have effectively created an indie game developer renaissance.
One of my favorite games at the moment, Hell Let Loose, is published by an indie studio that started in 2017 as a Kickstarter project. They launched their PC version last summer and successfully launched an Xbox port this past fall. It is objectively a better (but harder) game than COD WWII or Battlefield V, both of which are considered AAA titles and have had hundreds of millions put into them for development.
Combine that with the lower barrier to entry with the discoverability of games on Steam and Xbox marketplaces and you have a very hot market. Oh, and consumers play video games now more than ever.
I'm having the opposite experience. I dropped probably $400 on games over the holidays and found three games I wanted to play.
I used to make games, so I hated when people used GameStop because it avoided the developers getting any money. But now I'm thinking that GameStop would be great, because most all but three of the games I bought just suck.
These online-purchase-only systems frankly need a one-hour refund policy. So many games where the controls are just jank (like 100% janky). Like everyone looked at Celeste and thought "This game is good because it's hard" instead of "This game is good because it rewards skill". I'd rather play Celeste and Returnal than these other utter wastes of hard drive. I only made it through Unsighted because you can make yourself invulnerable: fun story, fun ideas, fun levels, jank combat.
Yes, the problem is that the reliance on these few engines is a worrying form of concentration in itself. Especially for the Unreal engine, which is used aggressively to push the Epic games store. How independent are they really when they're so dependent on a single software vendor?
And, to my eyes, Epic uses openly monopolistic practices: they drop the license fee for the engine if you use their game store.
I can think of several recent releases without even searching: Melkhior's Mansion was released this week, Slipways earlier in the year, and Midnight Fight Express coming soon. I don't know if that's representative of indie games or not.
There's so many platforms to build for, and on some (xbox/ps5) a high(er) barrier to entry, vs. low on the PC, or mobile. I'm not surprised that there's much indie action on the xbox/ps5.
As the author of Slipways, it warms my heart to see it mentioned randomly in a HN comment!
As an indie game developer (hard to get more indie than me, I think, since I'm doing this mostly solo), I can attest that it's never been easier to get your game on Steam or a console platform. On Steam it's mostly a matter of a $100 fee and filling a form. Consoles are a bit harder, but still dramatically more open to indie titles than say a decade ago, and all of them are possible to get on even for small developers.
I also wouldn't say that "the group of indie dev studios is dwindling". It's just a matter of the old indie studios "growing up" to become bigger enterprises, but there is tons of other people replacing them on the lowest rung, with teams of several people and true labor of love projects.
Unfortunately, I'm not a gamer, and run a weird version of linux which I don't think you support anyway, but I have played Slipways (a friend purchased it) on the PC, and it's a great game!
> The group of truly indie studios is dwindling unfortunately.
Have you looked at Steam recently? Indie studios are doing just fine, and new indie studios are popping up all the time. I'd argue the indie market is stronger than ever.
What about profitable indie studios? Sure there’s a lot of games made by small companies, but how many are around for a 2nd game that isn’t just a shadow of their first game?
I don’t have any stats but would find that interesting, mainly as I’m not sure how much revenue indie studios have. Is the split like 10% get most of the money while the other 90% starve?
Dwindling as in Tencent showing up with a bag of cash and buying a board seat when a studio hits whatever financial metrics they are tracking.
FWIW, I have heard they are hands-off and offer resources, like great groups for closed alphas.
The only concern I have is that they can become more hands on and excersie control over creative decisions in the future.
Personally, I value good stories from mid sized indy studios. The dominance of 2 engines can make things feel a bit homogenized. Pair a great story with another engine, and my interest is piqued.
I assume by "truly indie" they mean "bootstrapped or invested by neutral/disinterested VCs" — as opposed to
1. invested in by one of the platform owners themselves, in exchange for a [temporary] exclusivity agreement, making them essentially a sharecropper on the platform; or
2. invested in almost exclusively by a single bigcorp publisher, making the studio essentially a secret marque of that publisher for projects they don't want associated with their regular brand image.
Many of the games that later make it to Steam, were originally funded by either one of the platform owners, or by a bigcorp publisher.
Changing the definition still doesn't change how many indie studios are out there. There's been zero evidence here that there isn't a healthy indie market, but plenty that there is.
> Many of the games that later make it to Steam, were originally funded by either one of the platform owners
My account is full of games (including top sellers) with no such arrangements. And I have more access to such games than at any time in history.
These indie companies are no more independent (the meaning of the word "indie") than a person hawking MLM products is independent. They're effective employees of a bigcorp — with all the same danger of being "fired" by their publisher at any time for misbehavior.
> What evidence? My account is full of games (including top sellers) with no such arrangements.
Ignore indie games that have been on Steam for years and years, or that only get published on Steam and no other platforms; these are the exceptions to the rule (despite this set containing some of the largest hits by sales volume.)
While there are studios that sell only on Steam and other low-barrier-to-entry channels, 99% of them don't last more than a year or two, because selling only on Steam is leaving almost all your money on the ground. There's a reason that many of these games don't get support updates any more and won't run on e.g. macOS or Linux after any major OS update, despite originally intending support for those platforms: the studio didn't survive.
And while there are indie studios that eventually take their console-exclusive game over to Steam, it's often still published by the publisher on Steam. Take a careful look at the Steam catalog page for the "publisher" field. If there is one? That's who's making the direct revenue on the game sales. Like the publisher of a book. The "author" — the studio — is only getting a commission.
There are a few indie studios who manage to "earn out" their deals with publishers, and take over their own Steam pages (though not usually their console marketing rights — the platform owners don't like dealing with the long tail of self-publishers, they much prefer well-known bigcorps as marketing partners.)
Here's just a small list of games I found in less than 5 minutes of looking.
- Five Nights at Freddy
- The Binding of Isaac
- Hollow Knight
- Carrion
- Loop Hero
- Factorio
- Phasmophobia
- Frostpunk
- Valheim
- Satisfactory
- Deep Rock Galactic
- Stardew Vallley
- RimWorld
- Terraria
- Dead Cells
- Cuphead
- Among Us
- Project Zomboid
The last three games I fell in love with; Hollow Knight, Ori, Souls Series, have me believing this. You can build amazing games with a smaller team these days which is incredibly inspiring.
You're right that a lot of indie games are metroidvanias or roguelites. However, AAA games exist on an incredibly narrow scope these days too. You have shooters, sports, open-world action games, and that's basically it. Rarely do you see big studios deviate into unknown or experimental mechanics.
Indie studios have produced a lot of games with varied mechanics that are just a huge breath of fresh air for me, personally.
You'd never see a AAA studio making Factorio or Satisfactory, for instance. Probably unlikely to see them make a game like Darkest Dungeon, or Don't Starve, or Stardew Valley or Terraria or Starbound or.. the list goes on. You just might have to look a bit deeper to dig through the roguelikes and platformers.
A little reductive I would say? I would add at least:
* Puzzle (The Witness, Baba is You, Antichamber, Manifold Garden, ...)
* Survival/open-world (Minecraft, Terraria, Don't Starve, Subnautica, The Long Dark, ...)
* Horror (Amnesia, Outlast, Layers of Fear, Five Nights at Freddy's ...)
* Management/simulation (Factorio, Stardew Valley, Kerbal Space Program, ...)
* Metroidvanias (Cave Story, Hollow Knight, Ori and the Blind Forest, ...)
* "Walking simulators" (The Stanley Parable, Gone Home, Firewatch, ...)
Some of these maybe you'd disagree with (Are Metroidvanias just platformers? Can Minecraft still be put on a list of indie games?), but I personally think it's a crime to omit at least puzzle games and survival games. The offerings from the AAA space for those is not very impressive compared to the indie space.
There's tycoon games and strategy too. Stardew Valley and Rimworld are at the top of their genres. And games like Dominions, Telltale games. Horror might be up there.
Do we count mods? DotA and CS would be indie if so, but are now quite commercial.
This isn't true, there are plenty of trivial examples to counter this notion.
e.g. Annapurna Interactive has been publishing AAA-quality titles from indie devs for a long time. And most of those games don't fall into the roguelike or platformer vertical.
Roguelike just means you can beat it in one sitting now, which is a very good niche for indie games if you think about it. Slay The Spire, FTL, Rogue Legacy, and For the King are all "roguelike" but fill completely different niches in terms of actual gameplay and features and all are awesome.
That's not true. Microprose is back and have a lot of indie developed titles coming out this year. They are almost singlehandedly bringing the wargaming genre back from the dead.
I wonder where do Paradox strategy games fall, Crusader Kings / Europa Universalis ones. They definitely don't look AAA, despite offering a very deep gameplay.
I love indie games but I also wish there was a middle ground between the current generation of AAA titles (not typically my cup of tea) and the indie community
There does seem to be a void in between the two. It's so rare I come across one that it's a surprise. Hell Let Loose was one of those surprises for me. It's definitely in the space of "AA but not AAA" games.
>> There actually are a ton of gaming companies right now.
Yeah, but from TFA:
>> Upon close, Microsoft will have 30 internal game development studios, along with additional publishing and esports production capabilities.
I don't see a need for this and agree with the notion that companies should not buy companies. There are cases where it makes sense, but I think another mechanism needs to be created because buying and selling companies is often too much like buying and selling people in addition to being anti-competitive.
Go browse itch.io for some inspiration. There's thousands of indie games there. A lot are no more than student projects and demos, but some are really polished and inventive.
