And even more, the universal effect of broadening access that we see all over the internet, even small-scale sustainable businesses will get hollowed out unless they have a consistent and faithful audience. A mediocre release (sorry Daphny, I’m baked into this thinking and I use it mostly to evaluate: can people live on this?) on Steam used to mean 10k sales, now it means 1k. The curve becomes ever more exponential; the successes get more successful and the tail gets ever-longer.
But we have fewer of these gatekeepers, and fewer opportunities for these exploitative personal relationships. Small businesses, while able to give people meaning in their work, are rife with abusive and unprofessional behavior, from mom & pop hardware stores to indie publishers. At big places you get institutionalized inhumanity but they’re much better (not great) at stomping out this sort of behavior in a crushing grey.
Nicalis was always in a dangerous spot: being the western ambassador to the intensely shy (and sweet) Japanese devs was a huge power imbalance and a publisher would have to work over-hard to not let them screw themselves, because they absolutely would out of modesty.
i live on a few hundred dollars a month so im the wrong person to ask about how to live off game sales haha. i think most people who sell like that DONT live off it, and make games on the side though… or they fucking make 938494383 games a month
our culture of work creates these attitudes throughout everything. games, movies, factories, hospitals, everywhere. MAYBE I WILL SOAPBOX but like, we’re told to be fucking cutthroat and step on other people for our own success since BABIES! my entire country was built on just taking shit and not thinking about the impact our actions have on others lives, thats part of the CULTURE
take take take take take
people are realizing this is fucking bonkers, but without any context for living differently a lot of us are spinning our wheels trying to make it work in this system and it killllllllssss people
if companies that work so hard together to create the same thing cant split wages fairly, why would a smaller publisher go against the grain?
Do you see the culture of cutthroat through the more stable indie studios? In my experience, the ones that survive and thrive develop the relaxed atmospheres of very stable games studios, prioritizing employee health in order to funnel productivity when needed. The passion can be assumed and doesn’t need to be pushed; it grows much more healthily in small companies.
My personal context is that between my wife and I we have something like 250k in student loan debt; a year into my first game design job (in a funded indie studio) I started selling plasma to pay for food (we were much less poor when we were both working retail in post-industrial Michigan). I watched the constant shuffle into the indie scene, where people appear on the scene with passion but developing skills and spent years of their life to barely push out their special project, to retreat back to normal jobs – burnout far past even that of the professional side, and a phenomenal waste of talent and culture. I learned that this has to be either side projects of miniscule scope and strong vision or fully funded up-front – again and again the raw talent was supplied by just-out-of-school bands able to dodge their loans for a year on the hopes of profit share that were broken forever.
So I think people either need to approach it with humbleness or cynicism: games can be either hobbyist and small (like you said, for a local audience only, and that’s the extent of the statement), or operating within the commercial structure – getting the money, working through the backers, and scraping and clawing for individualism and voice.
I’m most invested in seeing the funded indie scene thrive, in places like Annapurna giving the backing to teams with a voice to really hit a scale that makes it capable to reach people.
Annapurna probably (hopefully) represents the beginnings of games being treated like film production, a tax writeoff for the idle rich. To the world as it is currently constituted, that’s a major improvement in the funding available for games!
annapurna seems to be consistently putting out great shit! ive been out of games for like half a decade though so ive only admired them from afar
like okay… small doesnt mean hobbyist!! i wish you said hobbyist OR small but now i have to nitpick!!!
my friend in japan has a restaurant outside of osaka. its his, he had a resturaunt IN osaka for a while that wasnt all his while he built up his reputation
he has like 8 seats in the middle of nowhere and no interest in growing or tv appearances. he just wants to make food for the people that like it to keep his place running and to feed him and his wife
its a career, not a hobby. if you said ‘you were a hobbyist cook’ to this person youd get made fun of
That’d be nice; the closest model I can think of is the museum circuit, where people are commissioned for projects that are expected to take a month or a quarter.
In general, I think the ratio of input to output for games skews it so that you can’t survive on 8 customers at a time. A game takes months of person-hours to provide 10 minutes; years and years to provide 5 hours. It’s just the nature of the work that you need an audience (and then, digital distribution means there’s no marginal cost to each successive audience member, so mass distribution is just sitting there, being ideal…)
I think the most realistic model and practicable small-scale model is the Patreon route: establish deep ties with a small community through a tool like Discord and maintain that across multiple projects. At that scale I think a developer needs about 1-2k fans per developer to sustain, if the audience relationship is stable enough.
yeah i didnt literally mean 8 people at a time, i just want smaller scale stuff to be feasible, not just a hobby
patreon is good. even though you’re always wondering when the company is gonna fuck everything up and take more of your money or just disappear… its a low key stress factor always hanging over you
and it does work best for people who have already built a small following
the bar to NOT be a failure in games is SO HIGH and i just dont want it to be!! wah!!
or wait is it so low? GOD BLESSIT WHAT I MEANT WAS EVEN IF YOUR NUMBERS ARE HUGE YOU’RE STILL A FAILURE IN GAMES
the numbers right now are diablo 3 numbers i want them to be more like paper mario 1 numbers
realistic, readable numbers.
the only industry I feel less confident in making any kind of independent living in outside of music is games
fuck me I did both
both industries have this horrible trend of requiring the artist to also be the promoter/marketer and the distributor and what the fuck ever to literally even exist in “”"“the market”"""
as a friend and fellow chiptune artist told me at square sounds melbourne when I mentioned that I could have continued to DJ instead of getting into chiptune: “ya blew it”
this is only tangentially related to the conversation but
honestly the GBA was the perfect size of game and when I become president the 4th pillar of my campaign will have been that no game is allowed to be bigger than what was able to be put on a GBA cart, it’s the only way to save the game industry
cave story got a whole generation of artists now making indie games interested in pixelart in the first place l so it’s kind of weird to constantly see artists i remember posting sonic recolors now making incredible pixelart for their lockemup game
boktai and pokemon pinball-esque cart expansion will require government permits, issued entirely on the basis of how close to an N64 rumble pak the expansion will be