You are a hero username.
4 Likes
I gotta admit that I make sure to never scroll down to new releases in case I accidentally see another âHorny: Zero Moanâ game or what the fuck ever (Thatâs a real one, Iâm sorry to say)
3 Likes
Iâm willing to forgive Steam for being a fetid wasteland of cash grabs, copycats and asset flips because itâs also the only major platform that would accept a game titled Bad Bitch Blasters
I donât see Sony, Nintendo or Tim Epic trying to get that dickpenis on their storefronts
7 Likes
according to some research only about about 8-16 games that come out on steam each month make enough money to recoup development costs
Letâs say you spent USD $500k of your own money to make your game: no publisher, but you get all the upside. If you released that game on Steam in January 2026 (above), youâd need to be one of the 16 games of 1,230 (1.3%) that grossed >$1m LTD to have made $550k+ net back (after refunds, chargebacks, Valveâs 30%), and now be profitable, w/ongoing cashflow
Letâs say you spent USD $500k of a publisherâs money to make a game: it depends on your recoup, but weâd think that only ~7 of the games (0.6%) released in Jan would have recouped fully by now at ânormalâ rates. These are not exciting headline numbers.
âŠ
What this says to us is: even at a game funding number ($500k) that some readers will say is radically too low, and some too high, thereâs indications that you need to be hitting home runs to make the ânew PC gamesâ market work for you at all. (Even at $100k budget, only 80 of the 1,230 (6.5%) would be breakeven net, if self-published.)
really donât know how sustainable it is as games go down in quality and the firehose of slop drowns out human made games and for steam to take a 30% cut. I guess Steam wins by default since they run the casino in the first place.
11 Likes
its ok i am sure they will think of something clever to combat this. maybe something like having to campaign for your game and have potential players vote on whether theyâd like to see it on the storefront. ive heard something about how the market already knows what it wants i think. that or raising the submission cost to a more sustainable $125
6 Likes
sorry i know this is not about steam visibility but how ridiculous. although i do know how many indies completely forgo counting their own labor into the costs of things, it feels like a pretty huge reach for the article to assume thats the baseline âaverage indie devâ.
this stuff frustrates me so much; i recently got the chance to ask one of the recent new indie-success->publishers what they thought the minimum pitch someone should be asking them for was, and itâs apparently like $25k+. the further response was âif someone is only asking $3-5k for a project my first question is âare they even feeding themselves?â and iâd worry what their plan wasâ. no, they quite literally arenât sometimes, is that not the point of offering funding? i dont know, i just feel like there are some artists and devs that only need something thats stable and the size of maybe a healthy patreon. and it would probably mean handing over 70% to the publisher to make it sustainable on their end, but i still know people who would take that. people that could make such like, perspective altering art if they could eat and the physical environment around them allowed them to
13 Likes
if anyone providing funding actually cared about any kind of idea of artistry and not just profits and speculation then maybe weâd be in a situation where more funding could happen. but it seems like no one feels accountable to make anything good, let alone anything transcendent, anymore. part of the problem is the people who did this kind of funding in the past either only pretended to care about this stuff, or had bad taste. there are times when people can surprise you (like dunkey putting his weight behind Animal Well) but itâs such a few and far between situation that only perpetuates the âwinning the lotteryâ feeling to so much of this. so our job now is to hope senpai doofus youtuber notices us? what a bleak place to be in tbh.
the whole indie game market has been bumming me out so much. even stuff i have felt optimistic about this year seems to only catch on because people who made it already have sizeable youtube followings (Endacopia, Lucid Blocks) or itâs internet meme fodder (Funi Raccoon Game). thereâs very little sense of being part of a larger space, of aspiring to speak to any kind of greater idea or principle. everything feels very ephemeral, even when theyâre these big youtube channels with huge followings. and itâs all so consumer facing and empty - thereâs no sense that games were ever and can ever be something else. and so many people have basically given up on any sense of larger purpose, and everything feels so toxic and filled with dumb insular internet injokes that are such a dead end. iâm so tired of internet poisoned shit at this point.
why even make garbage AI slop games that have little chance of getting anywhere? and like who even buys most of these games? i guess the small promise of even getting a little bit of internet irony poisoned visibility and doing well is enough for some people. thatâs what makes it all the more worse. it makes looking through the trash pile less pleasurable now that visibility is just tied to random stupid attempts to get virality. it all just feels so cynical and calculated. even like a few years ago i took a lot more pleasure seeing what was out there but increasingly it just makes you feel gross, and icky to be diving in the bin with this stuff knowing that it can prick you.
iâd like to hope there is some alternative vision for what the space could look like in the future where people have some sort of sense of continuity and purpose and it grows into something more coherent. but right now it feels like everyoneâs just running on perpetual resentment and bottom feeding. and internet poisoned shit. and it just feels incredibly toxic to be in the proximity of.
16 Likes
Fuck I canât imagine how many games I woulda finished if I had likeâŠ50k at any point in my life. 10k. Anything. Things sure are different when all your free time and creative energy can go into one or two projects. Iâm going to take my laundry change and buy some scratchoffs.
15 Likes
Just kidding Iâm only joking about gambling cuz Iâm depressed
13 Likes
I give credit to Draknek for organizing their yearly new voices grants in the puzzle game space, but even those are âonlyâ $15k which while certainly very helpful sorta tips the scope of projects they can really aid in any way.
11 Likes
we tend to have a lot of back-and-forths on scene/culture/art stuff here (which i do enjoy) but here i really am just trying to wrap my head around the dev costs and scale of the funding sources.
because there really did use to be a moment for that scale, at least ive heard; flash portals and stuff that would pay maybe 1-3k just to take on the rights to host the game, you could sometimes sell to a few and it wasnât a ton but it gave you another few months of runway to make the next game, at least.
and obviously that model does not really exist any more, but it seems like there is just such a huge gap between âi make these games in my bedroom after my dayjob for 30 patronsâ and âgive me 25-50 thousand dollars to fund the next year of my commercial gameâ. and like you mention the only real way folks are crossing that gap any more is through some viral success story
i think thereâs a stepping stone in the process completely missing here, where someone is still making games in their bedroom or whatever, but is at least self sufficient with it, doing smaller projects every few months.
heck, even if i were making more commercial or consumer focused games, it is still probably to my benefit to try and get a handful of smaller $10-15k projects funded to use as proof-of-work for that eventual bigger pitch, but right now there is just nobody wanting to offer that little money for anything
idk, it just feels like everyone with any power has completely lost sight of the scope of indie or what it even is. im not sure how to fix it. its expensive for these publishers to spend the money i guess. if i have to send my vertical slice, pitch, then have two meetings about terms theyve spent at least $3k to give me the $3k most likely?
im also thinking about the sokpop model right now. they are currently taking in a few thousand from their patreon a month and probably more from the individual game sales. something i read a while ago is that because there is 5-ish of them, even though the games are releasing every 2 weeks that still means each is getting 2-3 months to complete, plus theres always at least 2-3 in the pipeline at any time so they have some redundancy to swap around if one is taking longer. its interesting to me that theres not an indie publisher that has wanted to pick up that same kind of format, some flat-rate stipend with a due date of 3 months that they constantly scout for to make a steady release stream, probably the closest thing to a flash portal you could get now. i assume this has been pitched places before, until someone else says âgamepass but for indie?â and suddenly the whole board room is itching to start an early lunch
edit: remembering that humble bundle sort of used to do this, *cough
and ultimately this is probably just what id want to see more of, but i just dont see it happening with these new indie publishers, and am just trying to reason about how they might ever reach across the halfway point, back towards models of funding that do not put their developers in a make-or-break scenario every single release
more scene/culture stuff response
(sorry, i worry these reply chains kind of derail)
yeah. i find it increasingly difficult to find the right motivations or goals to get past any of this, because i cant find anything outside it to connect with. i want to do these things in a way i can reconcile with but seeking other paths or solutions often just feels like opting out of any kind of indie experience at all.
ive been sending a small test around to friends the past few days, and its likely here is where ill make a log mostly because i want to track my own thought process as different things come into the game. maybe in a few months it will be done. ill have some friends that i will send it directly to, and in trying to participate outside of the market and inside more critical spaces im not sure if itchio is even correct any more, but iâll figure something out, and post it here. call me entitled but i dont want the first itch comment to be a lets play link of it or someone giving feedback about the platforming controls, since even places like itch can give you the attention of dozens of people that just dont have the right context.
im not even sure i can in my local scene any more; like sit next to tables of people asking passerby for wishlists and try to tell people âyeah you have to go to this specific forum to get the itch password if you want to download this at homeâ. i feel like i can barely speak in the space because its just downerisms coming out and im frankly tired of pretending like i actually can rally other people into any sort of action or movement, so i think it just upsets or guilt trips everyone
and i appreciate my friends and i appreciate anything someone here might have to say, but i cant expect anyone else to have more than a few days to set aside for engaging with it when its done. if i paced things out and shared in certain orders i might be able to have a few weeks of engagement around it, but once thatâs spent its just back to that empty feeling of âbetween projectsâ and within a month not feeling like you have anything to show for yourself anymore because either what you just did is âstaleâ - or the fact it didnt make an impact makes it hard to justify to peers in games spaces
and albeit these are a lot of self-imposed rules, but i just dont think something like that is tenable for myself. i simply donât know how many times i could do that, crash after the energy from my friends fades, and go again after. its shallow but i donât think i can put months and months into these things and not have them feel like part of a space or building towards continuity/purpose like you state.
and, i dont really need consoling over it, but it makes me wonder how many other people have resigned themselves to similar practices recently where you would just never be able to find them, because it otherwise seems so ineffectual or hostile to take place in any sort of broader landscape than your circle of discord dms you dont bother any more. i also wonder if even some of the more successful legacy indies are in a similar state or have some belief around weathering the storm
9 Likes
the idea of people starting patreons was for this, but itâs just harder to get visibility now with no real stable social media. xitter sucks, bluesky is insular and filled with politics talk. instagram reels and tiktok just randomly recommend videos and people donât investigate further and then you become a video maker almost more than a game maker. i also think the dominance of Steam has helped push the idea that things have to be a commercial package which makes it harder to have that model for doing subscription-based smaller work. tho stuff like Domino Club does this i suppose.
but yeah, itâs just hard to get any traction right now unless you already have an established audience or itâs a breakthrough bigger thing. maybe some more youtubers or wealthier indie people can be guilted into handing out money though - i heard from someone anonymous that Toby Fox is secretly giving them money to help on their project. iâm sure there are more stories like that, but that feels too much like the âwinning the lotteryâ scenario to me.
i do think if we could resurrect like good crit of indie games in a place that isnât as compromised as youtube and build an audience for that that would help too. but thatâs more of a longer term project. i wish there was a version of a subscriber based site like Aftermath that focused on that kind of stuff specifically.
this kind of thing is presumably still possible yeah, itâs just harder to establish yourself at this point because of the above and i do think thereâs a lot of social pressure to make bigger projects in general. i think if that happens thatâs going to come from the dev side being persistent and not the publisher side though. and again, maybe at least some of the bigger youtubers can be guilted into doing the right thing and engaging with these communities more. i kinda am skeptical but whatever.
re: grants, they certainly happen more in places that are not the US. not so much the US though. maybe if we get more Zohrans they can start more projects like this in the future.
5 Likes
considered specifically excluding patreon from counting as âself sufficientâ in this category, mostly because in its current form it feels so much more like mutual aid or a same-twenty-bucks. i just dont think i could ever consider it stable/secure even if you have social media pull, i think it just relies too much on the affordability of everything else. plus, people come and go from these things and its never necessarily because of what you are currently doing or not, so it can be hard to gauge what that support should be funneling into
also, i was not thinking a publisher would start privately funding some existing domino/vextro group, more like they would begin their own perpetual release cycle by taking out individual contracted games with curated devs
im not a business brain but
say the deal is you have some explicit/publicly known stipend, idk $5-10k, with the explicit expectation its contracting a 3 month dev cylce, for you to staff and plan appropriately. the publisher runs a fixed price for the games individually on steam with the typical rev split (possibly with an until-costs-recouped, idk), but on the side runs subscriptions handing out keys that are not included in royalties.
no, i dont necessarily think this is equitable, but it reads to me as plausibly doable, and again, i know people would take it, just to be able to make the game.
5 Likes
Interrupting this serious discussion to announce
MORAFF IS BACK MUTHALUVAS
9 Likes
https://www.gematsu.com/2026/09/lollipop-chainsaw-2-back2back-announced-for-ps5
Lollipop Chainsaw 2 announced
None of the origonal creators involved
Also the dev is allegedly super keen on genAI
And partnered with Saudi
3 Likes
3 Likes
4 Likes
Was talkinâ with @HOBO about it, but that Lollipop Chainsaw 2 trailer is the most Simple 2000 Series lookinâ dreck. Pretty sure there were some of those games with more âsauceâ than this.
For all the studioâs âheh, we donât do woke gamesâ boasts, I saw some post of that crowd braying they made her boobs smaller, so. Great job.
4 Likes
a few new releases people might be interested in
this is Jeremy Couillardâs new game. like other games it has a lot of wacky visuals. he made a shooter this time, and the idea is that youâre targeting real billionaires and âresdistributingâ their wealth. i playtested a bunch of the levels as he was working on it. i think itâs worth checking out if you want to try and stranger FPS game.
i played this one when i played a bunch of steam demos this summer, and it was quite fun. the presentation is a bit lol meme and havenât played the other Brazilian Drug Dealer games but it does quite a bit with just being a straight Quake mod and just generally i felt like i enjoyed a lot more than a lot of other retro FPS games.
i couldnât fully make sense of this one when i played the demo but that was several years ago at this point. itâs kind of like a dialogue-focused puzzle game very focused on the individual characters and the animation is extremely stylish and distinct. i guess comparable to something like Paradise Killer? though i havenât played that one. maybe someone here will be interested enough to investigate further.
11 Likes
New FLEB dropped with a free follow-up to 20 Small Mazes, naturally titled 20 More, Somehow Even Smaller, Mazes.
Played through it earlier today, they definitely have a gift for these small âletâs take a simple concept and do a bunch of odd things with itâ experiences. Took me a bit under an hour to work my way through, it definitely was 20 mazes and a good time.
I do think after these pair of Maze games and Strange Jigsaws they are hopefully ready to take a bigger swing next time out as it feels like theyâve refined their ideas and identity enough where thatâs hopefully the next step, but given they were working on three different games at the same time I assume they are all gonna be scoped similarly.
13 Likes