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Games

Indie Video Game Devs Are Struggling To Survive (wired.com) 86

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
The video game industry is grappling with a severe financial downturn that's hitting independent developers particularly hard, as exemplified by Necrosoft Games' recent brush with bankruptcy while developing their upcoming title "Demonschool." Brandon Sheffield, the studio's director, managed to secure a temporary contract to keep the company afloat, but he acknowledges the precarious nature of their situation, telling Reuters, "It was the only way to survive, because nobody was funding anything. It's also better than what's happening to a lot of people, where they just have to fold," he told Wired.

This struggle is emblematic of a broader trend in the industry, with experts cited by Wired in a story warning that 2024 could see numerous small studio closures as traditional funding avenues dry up and larger companies tighten their belts. The ripple effects of this contraction extend beyond immediate job losses, with industry veterans like Victoria Tran from Innersloth expressing concern that the challenging climate could deter new talent and stifle the creativity that often emerges from smaller, more experimental game projects.
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Indie Video Game Devs Are Struggling To Survive More

Indie Video Game Devs Are Struggling To Survive

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  • Facts (Score:1, Troll)

    by The Cat ( 19816 )

    Video games and porn have exactly the same business model and exactly the same audience.

    Plan accordingly.

    • Video games and porn have exactly the same business model and exactly the same audience.

      Plan accordingly.

      People beat their meat while playing video games?

    • Re:Facts (Score:4, Insightful)

      by UnknowingFool ( 672806 ) on Thursday July 11, 2024 @12:45PM (#64619059)
      I am pretty sure games like Fortnite and Animal Crossing are played by children and do not have the same audience as the adult film industry. Pretty sure.

      • I am pretty sure games like Fortnite and Animal Crossing are played by children and do not have the same audience as the adult film industry. Pretty sure.

        Well, sure. if you only look at the present time. In 20 years, they will be the degenerates that the OP is talking about. /s?

        • Well, sure. if you only look at the present time. In 20 years, they will be the degenerates that the OP is talking about. /s?

          1) And what time should we talk about if not the present? I am pretty sure for decades now, video games were played by children and many of them were made for children in mind. The likes of Super Mario Bros was not exclusively played by 20 year olds in their basements in the 1980s. 2) In the future, they were will be children who play video games. I am no Nostradamus but I am certain that is a strong possibility.

    • Re:Facts (Score:4, Funny)

      by ChatHuant ( 801522 ) on Thursday July 11, 2024 @01:47PM (#64619281)

      Video games and porn have exactly the same business model and exactly the same audience.

      This is false almost to the point of being slanderous. I hardly play any video games.

    • Video games and porn have exactly the same business model and exactly the same audience.

      Oh, yes. Those playing Barbie DreamHouse Adventures [nintendo.com] on the Nintendo Switch are also ravenous perverts watching dick sucking videos. /s

      Facts? More like delusions.

  • I mostly buy indy titles (Score:2, Interesting)

    by sinij ( 911942 )
    While I am not into 'niche' games, I absolutely do not tolerate intrusive DRM like online-only, Denuvo, etc. Consequently, I buy from smaller studios on Steam or GOG. I also only play on PC. Am I that unusual?
    • What makes you unusual is you're not playing one of the big multiplayer games. They devour over half the industry before anyone gets a crack.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by sinij ( 911942 )
        I have done my share of WoWs, CS/BFs, etc. Been there, done that. They played out for me.
        • Yeah but you were basically out of the game market while you did that. Ignoring the folks who never come back and buy other titles those games extract players for long periods of time even if they get tired of it.
    • No. I have the same preferences and game-consumer patterns. I still buy old console games at the local swap shops, too. I think I just got Okami for the Wii this week. It rocks.

      I know a "real" game dev and his career has mostly been miserable according to him. He says the publishers are always pushing them for quicker and quicker release dates, the employer is always threatening to offshore or shut down, and there is never enough rest-period after "crunch time". He's wicked smart and wants to exit the in
    • You are. It's like people watching indie cinema. Gaming is mainstream now, but the mainstream games are.. well, that, mainstream. Call of Duty, GTA, or Fortnite etc, stuff from big studios with advertising budgets.

      At the same time... the economy is not doing great, and the fact indie companies are struggling shouldn't be a surprise. Thousands of companies get created and die every week, why would video games be different?

      • Re:I mostly buy indy titles (Score:5, Interesting)

        by sinij ( 911942 ) on Thursday July 11, 2024 @12:45PM (#64619063)

        why would video games be different?

        All good points, but the the above - I have truly unlimited budget to spend on good gaming. Most of my fellow gaming geeks are in the same boat - we have good careers in tech and have significant entertainment budgets. The only attempts to capitalize on that so far are underhanded practice of 'whaling' in various smartphone games. Where is my bespoke premium gaming experience?

        • Where is my bespoke premium gaming experience?

          Escape from Tarkov - Unheard Edition [escapefromtarkov.com]

          This company is going right for that demographic.

          Gamers with that much expendable income have shown they want to be the whales, it's obviously what that demographic wants, that's why gaming companies target them so heavily.

          Meanwhile GOTY Baldur's Gate III is $60 for everyone with no microtransactions and not even any DLC.

          Or I suppose EVE Online is still a thing.

        • If you can find me 1000 people to put up 1000 dollars, who'll all agree on what they want, and not turn into raving assholes when it's not exactly what they imagined, hit me up. I can make you a fun little PC/Mobile game. My experience with the gaming community makes this seem pretty unlikely, but you never know....

          • Is that $1000 total, or $1000 per? Because if you make custom (if template-based) games for $1k, I think you could aim for ONE customer and make a small amount of profit.

        • Hoooooooooly shit! You fucking nailed it. I am not being facetious here. Where the FUCK is my bespoke premium gaming experience? Why is it only "how can we gouge more money out of these fools", rather than, "if we make a great game, we will become billionaires!". Probably because making a great game is hard and stealing/dark patterning people is easier.

          This is what happens when you allow the wealth of a nation to accumulate in a few unmonitored areas.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by godrik ( 1287354 )

      The problem is that everyone and their dogs want to be an indie game developper. And the market is much smaller than the number of people who want to be in it. So often it doesn't work.

      • Basically the story for all game development. We all wanted to make a game and then settled on reality when it hit us in the face.
        Do what you love and some cocksucker will pay you peanuts.

        Then indie gaming happened. But like I have only so much time to play pixel art stuff when I haven't even beaten every metal slug on my multicade.

    • You do now steam in

  • I mean, Indie life in any industry is usually the occasional highs surrounded by incredible lows. It always has been.
    I don't know what they expect exactly? And I say this as having done the indie tech company for decades of my life.

    This whole headline could better be: "A universal basic income would be helpful for struggling creatives and everyone else"

  • Forget down turn (Score:3)

    by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Thursday July 11, 2024 @12:35PM (#64619019)
    there's just too many. There's a YouTube channel dedicated to nothing but Indie Metroidvanias and he's got 5 or 6 of them a week. And not low effort asset flips either. Carefully designed and drawn games.

    Steam has 50 releases a day. If 1% of them are worth playing that's 182 games a year.

    And every year Fortnite/COD/MineCraft/Roblox eats another batch of gamers up.Throw in WOW & FF14 and mix in a bit of Apex Legends+Valorant and good luck getting anywhere.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by sinij ( 911942 )
      Then why do I not have anything good to play recently?

      • Because quantity != quality?

      • Play older games from the early 2000s to 2010s. I've been play nwne with all the different community mods and it's been fun. Mount and Blade Warband: Prophesy of Pendor mod is really fun and takes up hours and hours of time. Wurm Unlimited on public server has been pretty awesome as well. Sklotopolis server is great.

        Baldur's Gate 3 was fun though I admit I have yet to finish the entire campaign. The turn base play style is just to much micromanaging for me. It's a beautiful game and interesting storyline. G

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by sinij ( 911942 )

          Play older games from the early 2000s to 2010s

          Problem with that is that I likely already played them when they first came out. With exception of Master of Orion 2, Master of Magic, and Mount & Blade I do not enjoy going back to completed games. I purchased Crusader Kings 3 and played maybe 50 hours total since it came out.

          BG3 was a letdown, the story felt absurd and somehow they managed to get romance to feel wrong despite having porn cut scenes.

        • Maybe one answer is adding a new scenario to older games.

          For example, a friend of mine still uses a Wizardry 1 editor to make scenarios which are played on an Apple //e emulator. Another person still makes NWN1/NWN2 modules, which are definitely playable. Then, there is all the countless Doom levels from "meh" to actually being good enough to press the limits of the game engine.

          This might be how we get stuff going. Counter-Strike was a mod that was good enough to stand on its own.

          Stuff like this may not

      • Because "good” is subjective to your tastes and what types of games you like. If you only like playing AAA FPS games with photorealistic graphics, those generally are not made by indie developers.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by godrik ( 1287354 )

        I guess it depends on what you like and how much time you have to play. But I am clearly not running out of games to play. Though, sometimes I don't play for a few month so releases pile up.

        I can tell you what I played in the last year that I thought was good.

        Catherine: Full Body
        Links' awakening (the switch remaster)
        Ender Lillies
        Dead Cell
        Ori (there are two games)
        Fire Emblem Engage. (Though I understand why some people had problems with that game)
        Shadow of Adam was surprisingly good
        Lost Sphear
        I am Setsuna

        Now

      • Go through a list of "100 best games" and pick something you've never played.
        Especially good for lists from past decades, the crap has had time to be forgotten and maybe theres even a remake by the time you get it.

        Really enjoying some metroids right now.

      • What? You don't want to play Demonschool? /s

      • Probably because you don't like playing video games. From indie to AAA there is a ton of good games, no way you played all of them.
      • Most likely a combination of decision paralysis, and a discoverabilty problem ie. being able to find the gems amongst a sea of trash.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by godrik ( 1287354 )

      Exactly! There are SO MANY PEOPLE who want to be indie game developers. But there aren't that many good ones. So the market is swamped, and even a good game can go under the radar.

      You talk about metroidvanias. I can't believe I missed Ender Lillies. The game released in 2021, I noticed it and played it in 2023. It's fantastic, one the best metroidvania of the decade. I think Hollow Knight is better. But I think it's better than both Ori. And better than Metroid Dread. I think it's better than Dead Cell. And

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      The barrier to entry is low. There are plenty of tools for making games on PC, and modern machines are so power you don't need to optimize.

      Retro machines, on the other hand... The tools now are better than they used to be, a lot better, but you still need quite a bit of skill to make them. There are some game-maker tools out there, but for really good results you still need to learn to code, and code efficiently. Limited memory, limited CPU cycles, hardware you have to understand... Well, there are some dri

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mjwx ( 966435 )

      there's just too many. There's a YouTube channel dedicated to nothing but Indie Metroidvanias and he's got 5 or 6 of them a week. And not low effort asset flips either. Carefully designed and drawn games.

      Steam has 50 releases a day. If 1% of them are worth playing that's 182 games a year.

      And every year Fortnite/COD/MineCraft/Roblox eats another batch of gamers up.Throw in WOW & FF14 and mix in a bit of Apex Legends+Valorant and good luck getting anywhere.

      The problem is the complete lack of middle ground.

      The AAA "industry" has become a mass produced, cookie-cutter bore fest producing the same thing year-in, year-out. Come and get the latest Call of Snorefare: Modern Repitition and pay 70 bucks for half the game, the other half will be sold to you in 10 x 14 buck chunks.

      On the other end you've got hobbyists who produce a decent idea in a pre-alpha state, release it on Early Access and often don't finish it (no time, no money or sometimes just don't wan

  • Re: (Score:3)

    by kurkosdr ( 2378710 ) on Thursday July 11, 2024 @12:40PM (#64619045)
    Maybe those people should organize among themselves to create fewer but more polished games. Electronic Arts started like this (before it got a bad CEO that turned the company into an amorphous blob that destroys its own studios, so don't go public like EA did).

    • I think that's part of the problem. Opening up stores like Steam to indie publishers have meant that there is a LARGE amount of absolute garbage games in the indie category.

      Plus even for the really good ones they tend to heavily lean towards very specific game genres (eg, side scrolling 2d platformers) so that even if its good, people get a bit of fatigue from them.

      For better or for worse I basically don't even bother looking at indie games on Steam because its too much work to find something actually good

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by sinij ( 911942 )
        Rogue Trader was really good, SpelForce Conquest of Eo worthwhile, take a look at Svarog's Dream, WarTales gets a nod from me.

      • There's definitely a lot of crap on there. If there was a professionally reviewed section that might help - sure, the dev might want to charge more to cover the review fee, but customers could be more confident about what they were buying.

        I scroll through the lists sometimes, and by the time you're on the 4th page of crap or so you get an urge to leave your computer for a bit and go do something useful instead.

    • Eiyuden Chronicles is a modern take on late 90s AAA JRPGs (specifically Suikoden I&II). Pretty huge game, 50-60 hours of play.

      But the trouble is always budget. You need money coming in. EA got it's start in the bedroom coder days. You were selling games for $80-$100 bucks a pop (inflation adjusted) after 3-6 months of work. A year for a big game. Bard's Tale I/II/III are a fraction of the complexity modern games expect. You can speed run the game w/o exploits in a few hours if you know how. And thos
      • Indie devs have much better tools at their disposal today than what they had back then. Doing something like Bard's Tale today is much easier than doing it back in those days. The issue with indie games today is that most of them are not 6 months of daily work from a small tight-knit group of developers. Part of this is because the modern generation has been indoctrinated by half-commie influencers that private companies are "bad" and the idea of getting together to form a private company to work towards a

  • They are struggling like everyone else! Who would have guessed???

    p.s. who cares, get work in IT and attend furry conventions to network

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by sinij ( 911942 )

      attend furry conventions to network

      I knew I was in the wrong line of work...

      • My friend wants to know how he found a furry convention for IT workers. I can imagine it now: "Why did you plug your CAT6 in there!?" /s
  • always have always will

  • They have basically recreated the environment that lead to Atari crashing and burning in the 1980s only worse because now you don't even have to find retailers willing to buy inventory to stock your game.

    The music industry has had a similar, but even more extreme problem that looks even worse when you adjust its sales numbers from the last ~30 years for inflation.

    The friction of the physical era from the rise of Nintendo in the 80s to the end of the 7th generation of consoles was invaluable for cutting down

    • The issue with the music industry was a triple-whammy. We all can blame piracy, but what really made the music industry unprofitable was selling songs individually. A band could do okay if people bought an album for ~$20 or so. Get 10-20 people buying that at a show, and it could result in a profit for the night. However, when that went away, bands had to depend on touring dollars... and with venues so hard to find, that was an avenue effectively shut off. Now, we have streaming, which effectively give

      • Video games, it is similar... however, the issue is that a lot of people will be chomping at the bit to pay $99/month for a subscription, coupled with $99 for the game title, and hundreds for DLC, gachas, and loot boxes, to play AAA titles.

        Actually, people are not. Sure there are some whales out there, who desperately need an intervention for their gambling, but the vast majority aren't willing to sink thousands into a game. There's been plenty of attempts by the industry to make it that way though, and every time there's a group that calls them out for it.

        Of course the real problem with the industry is it's greed driven desire for cheap to produce rehashes and free money in the form of subscription services. Like everything else in this w

        • The Steam Deck is probably is the only thing that comes close. However, with even mainstream computing getting tainted by the likes of Denuvo and always-on telemetry, it might be best to see about a different type of console, addressed not for giving the gamer a middle finger, but as a step back from the current gaming environment.

          IMHO, I don't think any big name would make a console that would support the old school type of games. Too much money for DRM and subscriptions, as the parent mentioned. Perhap

  • by Big Gaming anyways...

    Sorry, but these devs need to start doing new things not just the same old gameplay with a different wrapper

    where is the indie metaverse user/client software that links us to more than one game / publisher at a time?

    can't even use my fortnite skins in other unreal games

  • ... get some ads on Steam worth watching, eh?
  • Isn't it the business model of all the big game houses to let the indies develop, market and prove a game is worth while before they swoop in, buy the company and fire half the dev's, while the former owners walk off into the sunset with fat wallets/
    • That might be what microsoft do. But the original indie was usually one man studios making games. Todays indie is a bunch of industry connected people leaving their job and getting venture capital and using past jobs working on actual AAA games to diddle investors. Most of the shovel ware on stream is funded by speculators hoping to go viral. When there games turn out to be neiche with no hope of exploding - the investors pulls the plug, they the developers complain about how hard the market is. Just
      • thank you for these insights. Yeah, there has been a certain amount of BS where people complain the market isn't interested, when their crap isn't even released yet.

  • We've seen all the pixel art and retro-inspired aesthetics we care to see. Time to step up your game and charge accordingly.

  • Calling BS (Score:3)

    by fjo3 ( 1399739 ) on Thursday July 11, 2024 @06:35PM (#64619885)
    Are some indie devs struggling? Of course. The bad ones. There are loads of great indie games released on Steam that have done extremely well. I know a lot of people on here are anti-Steam, but they provide an excellent platform for indie devs. I play indie games almost exclusively, with the one big exception being Civilization. Just one more turn...
  • Are doing something no one asked them to do. There is SO MUCH SHIT from indies, its not even funny. A lot of them are ideologically brainwashed and create same ideologically brain washing content. And later on they blame it on gamers, that they are not progressive enough. Not all of them of course. There are some indi studios/games that are fantastic. But would be interesting to see what kind of indies go down. Half of them don't even know how to code and use default Unity assets that everyone and their

  • According to the U.S. Small Business Administration, the survival rate for small businesses in the US is:

    First year: 80% survive
    Two years: 70% survive
    Five years: 50% survive
    Ten years: 30% survive
    Fifteen years: 25% survive

    Show me actual data that suggests the churn rate of small business failures in software development is any different that that of most small busin

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