Gods, the thought of trying to eke out a living making games is utterly depressing.
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The thing that happens in my brain when I tell people that Iām actively involved in making games as a hobby and they tell me āOh, you should try to do that as your jobā is a very complex set of emotions that I try not to share too much with people who are really just being nice.
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My experiences have taught me a lot of things but the most important thing about indie space is play with someone elseās money. Working on hopes of future profits is a way to lose it all; under the threshold of being able to get an advance from a publisher I think itās best handled as a hobbyist proposition.
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(alternately, have a sustained income from previous titles to live on, but that select company includes everyone who could get money and is better off not)
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I wince so hard when I meet someone at a game dev meetup or something who tells me they just quit their job and are living on savings or maybe even took out a loan to finance the next two years of their life with plans to launch a Kickstarter in six months.
You canāt tell someone like that DUDE YOUāRE GONNA BE FILING BANKRUPTCY IN EIGHTEEN MONTHS.
Oh, the dreams.
This was really bad in Utah, where the dumb scrappy capitalist idealism that is forced into young men from the moment they step out of the womb and into a Mormon meetinghouse tells everyone who watches a YouTube tutorial on Unity that they absolutely have to make a million off their open world story-driven puzzle platformer zeldalike where your choices matter.
Since living in Maryland, a lot of the people Iāve met who quit their dayjobs to go indie have recently left jobs in the game industry, but have used their industry contacts to get them contract work to survive on while they use other industry contacts to try to get actual funding. But I still worry about them.
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i personally feel like the indie world really did not benefit from making itself a mirror image of the bigger industry. itās true: once people figured out that the best route to success was via playing with other peopleās/companiesā money, a particular moment of indie game creation ceased to exist. and the possibilities continue to grow narrower.
obviously, not everyone who got into indie games was looking for revolution, economic or otherwise, but i feel like the current state of things is just so out of control, and not in a good or fun way. i just wish someone smarter than me could think of alternative methods of creating sustainable revenue.
i would also never begrudge any creative person for figuring out how game the system and make a living, these are just things iāve been reflecting on lately, as i think about the past.
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Are you thinking of a point where this turned?
Like the golden era of Xbox Indies, or pre-Steam direct distribution, or the flash game scene? Iām still seeing more and better stuff at all budget levels, from student on up, going out through itch and Steam and the like; more and more people are doing this and so doing it without any income.
I mean, Iām older than I was a decade ago, so itās not as novel and Iām harder to impress, but I think more and better and weirder stuff is out there now than before once I adjust for my localized cynicism.
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Aside: the only fun local indie scene Iāve been involved with is in Eugene, Oregon.
Salt Lake City was too full of dipshit twenty-year-olds who all thought their six-months-in-production, ugly-as-shit, barely playable, blatantly derivative projects were a hairās breadth away from notch-like wealth. No one really wants to connect. They just wanna sell. Win Friends and Influence People, but completely lacking in social graces. Every face a customer.
Baltimore is kinda cool because most people are more adult and have more practical experience. Some really awesome, very friendly people, but because itās so pro thereās not really any room for hobbyists. People are either genuinely trying to network to advance their careers or tired of talking game dev all fucking day and donāt wanna connect over that.
Eugene was a rad mix of super supportive people who were always up for seeing whatever anyone was working onāhobbyists, students, small indie studios, people working for big tech companies. God, I miss those peeps.
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thatās certainly possible. i think, for me, my own view is completely tainted by my own experiences, so iād localize the āpeakā for myself as being somewhere in that 2010-2011 range, right before Xbox Indies was really a thing. and somewhat more specifically, the weird and fun collaborations that were going on between game devs and artists in NYC, and the goal of creating stuff that really redefined what mainstream audiences thought of as āvideogames.ā
i guess like, this is just me being old, and seeing how stuff that felt new and exciting and was pushing boundaries has just been turned into another way to sell a product. insert Burroughs quote about the money machine, etc.
there is definitely cool stuff being made, for sure, but i guess what i had hoped was for things to go in completely new directions that were divorced from the industry entirely, as much as possible.
and youāre right, there is cool stuff out there, still, and probably more if i looked harder. but mostly, āindie gameā reads to me as any other label, like āshooterā or āplatformer.ā it mostly describes a product.
i know iām probably being overly cynical, and that isnāt really my aim.
basically, every time i hear about something like the above re: streamers or like, Unity being sold to shitheads, etc. etc., i canāt help but feel like there was an opportunity that was missed to take the field of game design further away from its capitalist roots. there were hints it could have happened, but then we got Braid and Fez.
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what makes the japan indie scene so different? it seems like thereās more diversity of genre there, and almost all games get physical releases, which is something even big companies donāt bother with for pc games in the west.
it also feels more like itās a bunch of people making games because they have ideas for games, rather than as a get-rich-quick scheme (though there are still groups that get console releases and stuff for their games, like platine-dispositif, for example, so thereās still some profit being made in there presumably)
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Whatās strange in this timeline is that Braid was mid 2008, so like it clearly took awhile to have its effect. Fez was four years later, though. Time compression in memory is weird.
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yeah, i could have Googled this before hitting submit, but i like to think of my exaggerations as uhā¦flourishes.
Oh, I didnāt mean it as anything against your timeline, which seems accurate enough for what it is. It is just very strange how the ripples from the Braid release werenāt felt for awhile, but it did definitely cause a stream of āgonna get rich on my indie gameā things to happen.
The dojin culture and even just the material culture surrounding ownership is just a wildly different mindset (good memories right now of buying a game online but having to walk over to Family Mart to pay for it on a kiosk so I could actually download it).
The existence of the dojin comic scene nurtured through spaces like the Comic Market existing as a force of energy that exists in tandem with but not parallel to the professional, corporate industry has given the dojin games scene a healthy, mutually supportive character. People care about the health of that scene in a way that Euro-American scenes just donāt.
But, yes, I think itās absolutely true that thereās less get-rich-quick mentality there. Very few dojin circles are trying to make anything like a living off what they do. My understanding is that most of them take what they make from their works (made in their hobby time, apart from their full-time work) to pour back into buying other dojin creatorsā works (Iāve talked to at least one person who does this and have read about it in multiple articles).
(Not sure I buy the greater diversity of genre line in dojin spheres, thoughāitās different and possibly more diverse from what you see in commercial indie spaces outside of Japan, but I donāt think itās actually more diverse from what you see in the broader English-language indie scene on platforms like itch (and even paid dojin works are usually only liminally commercial))
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in the indie scene as a whole there might be all kinds of games coming out, but it feels like everytime i hear about a new western indie game thereās like a 70% chance of it being a puzzle platformer
thatās just how it feels though, and is probably wildly inaccurate
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thatās not true at all!
More than half of what I make are puzzle platformers and my favorite dojin game is a puzzle platformer so my biases cloud my vision on this.
I am an emblem of the worthless conservative shit in games!
I think doujin is a good vision of what an indie scene unfocused on our metrics of success looks like, and the doujin scene is pretty cool, but it holds far, far fewer people, the average technical skill is much lower, and in my opinion thereās a much larger number of great and interesting things to come out of the western scene than the japanese one.
(My opinion is naturally formed by my social scene which is very close to the gaijin who started BitSummit because they desperately wanted the Japanese indie scene to be as vibrant as the western one, because we all grew up loving Japanese games)
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You are literally the only person I have ever heard say this, please say more
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For all the fucking Nazis in the videogame space there is such a huge unmined reservoir of real, actual European history that could make incredibly rich material for games and they just keep ignoring it in preference to their fake idealized storybook white-identity history, which, I mean of course they do, but man
Any given game of Europa Universalis IV contains a thousand adventure games and RPGs and 3D brawlers and Mount & Blade clones within it
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