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[larsiusprime]

Ah, gotcha, just misunderstood you then. Sorry I read more into what you wrote than what you meant.

So, you're talking about a perceived "in-group" of people who control Indie Gaming? Ie, if you're not friends with the in-crowd then you can't succeed?

It's hard to successed without those people. You can successed with other means, but that's one in a million.
And even with those "Junta" people, only a few Indies get passed the gate keeper filters.
But, it's not so bad right now. But I fear it might get even worse. You will have like, Indie Corps or something..

Now I understand what you're saying.

Okay, so let's look at this objectively:

IGF/Gamasutra/IndieGames.com/IndieRoyale - all under the CMP Media Group, Simon Carless/Brandon Sheffield and friends.  1 entity so far.

Desura/ModDB/IndieDB - not sure, but it's not the previous crowd. 2 entities.

JayisGames/Casualgameplay.com - 3 entities.

Kongregate.com - Greg McClanahan, Jim Greer, owned by gamestop, Impulse is part of same group, 4 entities.

Newgrounds.com - Tom Fulp and friends, 5 entities.

Joystiq.com - WebBlogs inc, network, 6 entities.

Kotaku.com - Gawker network, 7 entities.

RockPaperShotgun.com - Independent company, 8 entities.

DIYGamer - same company as 8-bit funding, 9 entities.

Humble Indie Bundle - wolfire games, 10 entities.

TIGSource - 11 entities.

XBLA/XBLIG - 12 entities

"The Super Indies:"

Jonathan Blow - 13 entities
Edmund McMillen - 14 entities
World of Goo Guys - 15 entities
Thatgamecompany - 16 entities
QCF design - 17 entities
Carpe Fulgur - 18 entities
Zeboyd Games - 19 entities

And I could go on and on.

The core of your argument seems to be that all these people are a small group. However, from where I'm standing it looks like this number of entities is only increasing, not decreasing. With each new "super indie" or games blog, it's more people who can help you, its more competition for the core gatekeepers, and its more options, which reduces the power of centralized gate-keepers. If you have another choice, you can negotiate more favorable terms or find somebody else.

So, with apologies for misinterpreting you earlier, let me see if I understand you now:

"Success without gatekeepers" is defined as succeeding without using games journalists or portals. It consists of simply making a game, putting up a website, and promoting it yourself without having any special friends or making any special contacts?

First off, I think that's an especially narrow view of things. It's not hard to make friends and contacts, and I disagree that a tiny number of people control the whole market.

Even so, it seems to me that that is MORE possible now than it has ever been to succeed even with this narrow definition, and even though some "indie corps" might indeed arise to capitalize on indie games, this will be merely one more entity among the many and it seems that the general direction is more options, not less, and the group of "gatekeepers", though they may indeed be gatekeepers, is growing and the choices, and therefore power and options, to us individual developers is increasing as well.

[ANtY]

I think it IS hard to make any friends/contacts in the "Gate keepers" group. Especially if ur not from USA/UK and there is no jams or other indie events in ur area, then ur fucked...

excludes using any of the following:

-google / twitter / facebook
-games journalists / blogs
-portals / bundles / online stores (steam,desura,etc)

You can use google,twitter, facebook, make a website and blog there but if ppl won't know about it and they won't if u won't get featured on some popular websites no one will read ur posts/twits and u will earn nothing from updating all these profiles and sites.

[larsiusprime]

I have never been to any jams or indie events, never been to GDC, etc, have never met any of the people in the "gatekeepers" group in person, and have made plenty of friends and acquaintances despite these so-called "limitations."  It's harder I'll admit if you're not from US/UK and there's a cultural barrier, but English isn't my first language, either.

In short - yes there are obstacles, but you CAN make friends and the so-called "gatekeepers" absolutely do NOT have a stranglehold on success.

I will buy the argument that it is hard to succeed without attracting the attention of the media. To that I say - learn how to write a press release! Learn how to contact the media! There are TONS of websites that will cover Indie games and if you have something interesting and can think of a unique angle and invest some effort you can probably get someone to write an article or two about you.

[ANtY]

I have the pleasure of being an owner of Polish most popular indie games website so at least in Poland I'll be covered for sure 

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

i mostly agree with the original article; i feel that the criticisms leveled towards it are a bit strawmanish since it's not claiming the things people are saying it claims (at least not to the same degree)

what the article is basically saying is that steam sales and things like the humble indie game bundle benefit a small portion of indies at the expense of the larger portion of indies; that's pretty self-evidently true, because only a few indie game developers can get in those bundles or get on steam, and because it creates the expectation among people that indie games are inexpensive things that you can get an unlimited supply of for a dollar, so those who are less famous have to compete at the lower prices for fewer sales

it was easier to make a living selling 500 copies of games a year at $30 each back in the shareware days, now to make the same amount of money at the reduced average prices you need to sell about ten times as many copies to make the same amount at $5 each (when you factor in the % that goes to portals and the processing fees)

[PompiPompi]

Well Paul, I will play the devil's advocate by saying that, first: There are more portals, journalist sites and "gate keepers" available today than in the past. Which is supposingly better.
Secondly: More people are aware of Indie games and might be searching for and consuming more indie games than ever.

Also, you can claim that you could never succed without a journalist or some established indie website talking about your game. So back then it was the same as today, only today there are more places for your game to get exposure.

So basically, lower price, but more exposure and supposingly more clients.

Now for my opinion, I am not sure when it was easier to make a living. But I think nowadays you are definitely more dependant of established and key position individuals in the Indie scene than ever before.

[tametick]

larsiusprime and the others - I don't think your arguments are wrong (yes, the marketplace for indie games is a ton bigger today & that's a huge plus, as I said at the end of the article), they are just not arguing against what I actually wrote.

what the article is basically saying is that steam sales and things like the humble indie game bundle benefit a small portion of indies at the expense of the larger portion of indies; that's pretty self-evidently true, because only a few indie game developers can get in those bundles or get on steam, and because it creates the expectation among people that indie games are inexpensive things that you can get an unlimited supply of for a dollar, so those who are less famous have to compete at the lower prices for fewer sales

This is basically the crux of the matter.

I like the humble bundle & valve guys like most of you, and I am not saying that if they go away suddenly everything will be well in the world (nor would I want them to disappear).

I am not presenting the universal solution to all problems indie nor do I think there is one. I am also not looking with nostalgia at long gone golden ages.

What I was trying to say was that constantly selling games for next to nothing (HIBs are now coming out one after the other, royal is every 2 weeks, don't know how often steam sales occur but there is one going on any time I log in) change people's expectations of what an indie game is worth.

You can see that all over the internet, players decrying "expensive" $10 desktop games or $2 ios/android games.

I constantly get complaints from people saying they want to play cardinal quest but can't due to the hefty ($4.45) price. 100 rogues is $5 on the mac store and gets the same treatment.

And really, why pay $10 for an unknown indie game when you got Braid for as much (or as little) as you wanted and World of Goo sells for 2.25 on steam? Let's just wait until the game I wanted is on a steam sale or a humble bundle (because of course every indie gets on one of those)!

I don't blame players, nor do I blame Steam & co for making out like bandits on the sales.

All I'm saying is that this isn't the endless cornucopia of happiness & savior of indie devs as it's often toted to be.

It's awesome for the lucky few that get on it (and I am happy for them), but not for the vast majority of us.

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

Well Paul, I will play the devil's advocate by saying that, first: There are more portals, journalist sites and "gate keepers" available today than in the past. Which is supposingly better.

that's just untrue. there were more portals 5 years ago than there are today.

[PompiPompi]

Well Paul, I will play the devil's advocate by saying that, first: There are more portals, journalist sites and "gate keepers" available today than in the past. Which is supposingly better.

that's just untrue. there were more portals 5 years ago than there are today.

Oh? I don't remember, could be. Then it's even worse.

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

yeah a lot of the small portals are being shut down or bought by larger portals; 5 years ago you had a dozen or so portals of about equal size, now you just have one or two big ones that own everything (basically steam and big fish games; the others are so small in comparison now that they aren't even blips on the radar)

several of the portals that i put immortal defense on back in 2007 are now defunct -- reflexive (bought by amazon), manifesto games (shut down), and a few others i forget. others used to be much bigger than they are now, and are now not even worth the time filling out the paperwork because they'll only sell a few dozen copies on it

[larsiusprime]

I was mostly responding to Pompi's assertions that making use of media somehow means you're just leveraging "gatekeepers."  I'm sympathetic to many of the other statements but I feel that one was kind of ridiculous.

Paul:

If I'm wrong on a factual matter (number of portals, etc), then I'm more than willing to revise my statements.

My main question is, is the downward pressure on prices something that HiB and Steam are solely (or mostly) responsible for, or is it the result of a market force on digital goods which have ~0 marginal cost of production?

With the Apple Store, I can definitely accept the case that it's intentional pressure, as Apple completely controls entry to that entire market, and intentionally breaks discovery so you have to lower price just to get on the charts, which is a prerequisite for success.

As for the PC, my view is the prices have gone down mostly because it was just a matter of time before someone realized that it didn't cost them anything to sell for less, since the product doesn't have a marginal manufacturing cost. If it wasn't Steam/Hib, it would have been someone else. My point isn't really about whether Steam/Hib are at fault or not, so much as it is to explore what the nature of the price pressure is and how it differs from Apple's. Regardless of that, the bridge is now crossed and we have to figure out what to do about it.

So, I'll agree that it's more difficult to succeed today using yesterday's pricing strategies as the landscape has changed, but there's been successful people who HAVEN'T gotten on Steam/Hib, etc. Jason Rohrer seems to do alright (combined with a super-specially designed lifestyle), Proun was pretty successful, too. These are just anecdotes, sure, but it's a starting point to explore the issue with some real case studies.

Proun was an interesting case, to me. They didn't make out like bandits, but they did moderately well, and with a few key marketing tweaks (have a free demo and full version rather than a full version and bonus track, minimum price $1.00), could have done even better. It looks like a repeatable business strategy that others could leverage that takes into account the modern pricing pressures.

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

i'm not sure it matters what caused it; whether or not steam or apple or whoever is responsible for games being sold for a few cents, it's not sustainable long term. remember that the north american videogame crash of the 80s was also precipitated by lots of bad games being sold for extremely low prices. the same thing is happening today, except that if it crashes it'll be worldwide since the markets are more globalized now

also, why would it be true only of *indie* games? why are AAA games still selling at $50 for PC and $60 for console? it's only indie games that are going down to ridiculously low prices, AAA games (aside from sales) are sold at normal price at release. i think it's important to recognize that it's more of a problem with indie games than with AAA games; the average indie game price, *on launch*, had gone down from about $20 to about $5 (with a typical range of $15 to $1), whereas the average price of AAA games on launch has remained constant for decades. why is it expected that the new gears of war or halo game cost you $60, but if a new indie game costs 1/2 of that, $30, it's seen as outrageously expensive? just try releasing an indie game at $40 and see all the hate it'll get, even if it's more fun and has more content than a $50 AAA pc game

[PompiPompi]

Price pressue comes from the consumers, not from the developers. When developers volunetarly drop the price to compete with other developers, it's a race to the bottom.
It takes one developer to drop the price to have all others need to accomedate. It's kind of like the prisoners dilema.

[larsiusprime]

I'd agree that whenever your product becomes a commodity, it's a suicide-pact and then a race to the bottom.  The key is to avoid being seen as a commodity.

The 80's crash is similar, but different in a few key respects. Most notably, there was a marginal manufacturing cost for each copy of the game. Then, as well as now, there's still a FIXED cost (you gotta make the game and not starve to death while doing that), but the lack of a marginal cost now means you still make money each time you sell a copy. If you had to lower your prices in the 80's you were actually LOSING money with each copy you sold below your manufacturing cost.

My earlier critiques were based on pretty strong skepticism that the era between 1995-2005 was some golden age of shareware. If someone has data to refute that, I'll gladly retract those statements.

The 1000 true fans strategy is a good solution for small operations who are willing and able to spend the time building and connecting with an audience, and a way to get around market prices driving your value to zero.

Long-tail doesn't work for people who can't drive in people by the boatload (like Steam can), sure, but there's pretty strong evidence that selling at a high fixed price leaves a lot of money on the table and excludes large swathes of your audience.

On a related note, gratuitous space battle did really well with their 50% discount for the same content. Yeah, they're on steam, too, but this was done just through their own site.

I know you guys aren't suggesting that we engage in communal price-fixing, but what solutions do you have in mind?

Paul, you yourself sell Immortal Defense on a perpetual pay-what-you-want model. Was this a response to this downward pricing pressure, is it something you did for philosophical reasons, is it something you wouldn't do if you didn't have to, etc?

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

there's still the cost of bandwidth, maintaining a website and mailing list, supporting the game, and so on. it's still perfectly possible to lose money on game sales. let's say your game is 2gb and you sell it for 1 dollar. at bandwidth costs of 30 cents per gb of transfer, you lose 60 cents of that just through delivering your game to your customer. and you lose another 32 cents from paypal transfer fees. so you get 8 cents per copy instead of 100 cents, which might be eaten up by various things like domain name cost, newsletter subscription cost, and all the various other costs associated with running an indie game business

"but there's pretty strong evidence that selling at a high fixed price leaves a lot of money on the table and excludes large swathes of your audience." -- what strong evidence do you mean? if you mean things like gabe newell's rants about how steam sales increase sales drastically, remember that a lot of people who buy a game at $5 instead of at $50 buy it on impulse and never even play it, or play it for only a few minutes, so i think it's a mistake to think of such people as "your audience". your audience are the people who seek out and specifically buy your game and play through it and enjoy it and are or become fans of your work, not people who buy it on impulse without even trying the demo cause it's on sale or in a bundle

i also wasn't suggesting there is a solution; i don't think there is one. but i also think it's foolishness to suggest that bundles and steam sales for 1% of indies are somehow a good thing for the sales of the other 99%

and the reason that one of my own games is pay what you want is because it's an old game. it was $23 on launch in may of 2007. lowering the prices of old games is standard and expected, low prices on launch is what the problem is. i should also note that there is a "suggested" price of $17 which appears in the text field where someone names their price; a lot of people just pay the suggested $17 price

[tametick]

I know you guys aren't suggesting that we engage in communal price-fixing, but what solutions do you have in mind?

I don't think there is one, other than try to scrape by long enough & hope to become one of the super-indies.

I personally live on ~$20k/year, so I can actually make a meager existence using desktop sales + flash sponsorships + crowd sourcing + mobile revenue.

I've been a full time indie for about 9 months now & have run out of savings after about 5 months. I've been living on Cardinal Quest revenue since then and still have enough from that for a few more months (it's also still selling so it's likely to actually last a bit more).

Hopefully by the time that dries out Auro will be making enough money to fund the next game.

[hanako]

I'm still selling my latest game at $25 a pop. While it will take serious time to catch up with Cute Knight's overall direct sales, it easily beats the direct sales figures on anything else I've released, even though it's the most recent.

(Although there has been a special limited sale going on this past week, it's juuuust about to expire, but if you have any interest in grabbing Magical Diary for half price...)

Of course, I have certain advantages. I work in a genre that isn't all that crowded and that is not currently available on Steam. Sure, you could buy some random game for $3, but if VN is what you're into, "Expert Soccer" is not going to scratch the itch at all.

Still, part of the problem seems to be nothing but perception. People seem to be so afraid of trying to sell anything for a higher price that they vanish into a sea of disposable offerings.

[larsiusprime]

So, interesting comments. I'm willing to concede any points that anyone can provide convincing evidence and/or arguments for. I'm not so much interested in being right here so much as I just want to learn and explore solutions to this potentially scary problem.

I'll take this as an opportunity to step back and re-evaluate everything I've said so far.

Here's various theses that have been posited by different people:

1) Hib / Steam benefit 1% of indies, AND also harm the remaining 99% (ie, us).
2) To succeed, you MUST be "hand-picked" by a gate-keeper
3) Gate-keepers include Steam/Hib/Super-Indies
4) Gate-keepers include the media and blogs
5) Current downward pricing pressure is comparable to the 80's video game crash
6) There is no solution. We're screwed

My current stances:

1) Partially agree - see below
2) Disagree
3) Agree
4) Disagree - simply because it is waaaaaay easier to get a blog or even major news site to write about your game then to get on Steam or HIB.

5) Disagree - the market is much larger, more diversified, and is not nearly as concentrated into one platform. Secondly, we're dealing with digital goods rather than physical, and the principal cause of the crash was the dumping of large numbers of discount cartridges that were purchased en-masse from failed studios and then dumped on the market below cost, a pretty much guaranteed nuclear economic bomb. There's some useful comparisons for sure, but it's not apples-to-apples by any stretch of the imagination.

6) Completely disagree

#1 was the original thesis that started this whole thread, so lets start there:

Hib / Steam benefit 1% of indies, AND also harm the remaining 99% (ie, us)

First, I think it's undeniable the first half is true. A small number of indies are doing super well and making out like gangbusters. Decent evidence has been presented that the second half is true - there's clearly downward pricing pressure, and some people using a fixed-priced pricing strategy right now are suffering. Paul is right that hosting costs, etc, are still part of your fixed costs and it's still possible to lose money on low-priced sales to fixed overhead and transaction fees.

That being said, there are a few questions I have in regards to #1:

1.A) Is the downward pricing pressure inevitable, or is it a distortion because of Steam/Hib's effect on consumer expectations?

1.B) Does the increased attention to the Indie space benefit the rest of us?

1.C) Are we forced to charge rock-bottom prices because of Hib/Steam?

Paul says 1.A is irrelevant, which is fair enough if all we're concerned with is how to deal with things and continue to make a living. My estimation is that it's an inevitable effect for digital goods. The fact that AAA games are still priced at $60 is due to price fixing on the part of the major publishers and console manufacturers. In fact, there's now a "AA" space on XBLA and PSN where studios are releasing games for $10-$40, so I think this counters Paul's point that downward pricing pressure is only affecting indies. It's affecting all games, though the big dogs are fighting it with price-fixing. Paul is right, however, that WHY this is happening isn't as important as whether we're screwed and what we can do about it.

As far as 1.B is concerned, I'll say right now I'm no fan of so-called "trickle-down" economics so I'm not making that argument. I will say there's the potential for people to be introduced to Indie Games through Hib/Steam, but also the potential for Steam and Hib to capture that consumer loyalty for themselves without transferring it to us, as Dan Cook explores in his game of platform power article. I don't have any numbers on either of those effects so I have no answer to 1.B.

As for 1.C, I think this depends. If we aren't connecting directly and personally with fans in significant numbers, not getting attention from the press, etc, then we risk being relegated to  commodity status, and then we are in the price War and "Prisoner's Dilemma" that Pompi referred to. Our games are just another anonymous title among hundreds, we have little to compete on other than price, the audience doesn't particularly care about us or our success, and the effect of downward pricing pressure, regardless of why it is happening, is going to be negative. This circumstance well and truly sucks, but I don't think we're all doomed to it.

The strong evidence is not Gabe's rant, so much as the numbers provided by Proun, Spiderweb Software, and Gratuitous Space Battles. Yes, Spiderweb and GSB are both on steam, but they also sell on their own storefronts and brought in decent money apart from Steam in part by offering discounted prices.

Links:
Jeff Vogel
Gratuitous Space Battles
Proun Sales Data

Here's the key - I am NOT saying we should all be selling our games for the fixed price of $1.00! In that I am in COMPLETE agreement with everybody here (Jeff Vogel says the same in the above link, a great read). That's insane. If that's the only avenue open to us then yes, we are screwed. But I don't think that's the situation.

My point is that we should lower the floor, and raise the ceiling on price. Let people simultaneously pay less AND more. There are various ways to do this - promotions and sales, pay-what-you-want, sell ancilliary things, free2play w/ microtransactions, pick-a-price, etc.

Gratuitous Space Battles found that by offering two prices for their DLC, it did NOT result in a larger number of people just buying it for the cheaper price - the majority paid the high price, but they got extra sales at the lower price. I imagine this is largely in part because they are a niche title with a devoted fanbase, and so the decision to pay more or less is not simply a cynical "maximize value for money" that we humans do when we don't care about the vendor we're purchasing from.  Things like emotions, good feelings, loyalty, service-with-a-smile, etc, are all things people have shown a willingness to pay a premium for, and it's a potential thing we can use to fight downward pricing pressure.

So, at the very least it seems that the following strategy seems to work, at least for some people, and is not destroyed by the recent downward pricing pressure:

1) Work in a niche market
2) Raise the ceiling / lower the floor (promotions, sales, pay-what-you-want, etc).
3) Forge a strong connection with a small but devoted audience rather than a distant connection with a dispersed large audience

There might be other strategies, too. I'm not saying this is the only way to do things, or that it works for everyone. But it is A solution.

Recent comments by Hanako seem to be following the above strategy. Anybody else? Are we doomed, or is there a way out?

Again, we're mostly just throwing anecdotes back and forth at eachother so I don't pretend the above evidence I've provided is super rigorous or anything. If you've got better numbers, and better evidence, and better arguments, and can prove me wrong on any of these points, I'm completely prepared to changed my stance.

What say you guys?

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

1) Hib / Steam benefit 1% of indies, AND also harm the remaining 99% (ie, us).
2) To succeed, you MUST be "hand-picked" by a gate-keeper
3) Gate-keepers include Steam/Hib/Super-Indies
4) Gate-keepers include the media and blogs
5) Current downward pricing pressure is comparable to the 80's video game crash
6) There is no solution. We're screwed

from what i remember, most of these were not in the article. e.g. it didn't say that you MUST go through a "gate-keeper", just that it's more important now than it was in the past

so that's what i meant by 'straw man' things; you're claiming people are claiming things that they never claimed. nobody ever claimed that you absolutely have to go through steam or other portals to succeed, that'd be a ridiculous claim considering minecraft's success

[larsiusprime]

I'm not responding to just the article, I'm responding to things people have said since, since this is a group-discussion, being a forum and all.

I said, these are theses people have brought up in this discussion, not things the author brought up in the article (he mainly just said thesis #1).

If I stated things a little too strongly, then I apologize. You did say that you generally feel we are doomed and downward pricing pressure is killing us, and that's generally what I'd like to discuss - whether we can succeed without having to be the next minecraft (ie, is there repeatable success that doesn't depend on 'winning the lottery').