The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community.
The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.

Behind every super logical sounding argument or theory, there is always some kind of emotional charge. This is especially true in media studies and criticism, I think. That’s not to say, however, that the argument or theories are wrong, or coming from a dishonest place. We’re all people and we all have stories that are real and that happened and that do actually say something about the world, and those real things are informing our point of view now, in the form of that emotional charge.

For as long as the internet has had access to me and my writing, and also for many years before that, I have been a strong videogame cynic. I pretty much hate all videogames, even the ones I play, and even the ones I endorse.

Someone asked me what the best Nintendo DS game was. I said, confidently, that I thought it was Mystery Dungeon: Shiren the Wanderer. They looked into it some, and were able to find out many egregiously horrible design flaws in the game. I conceded them all, saying, “I didn’t say Shiren was good, I said it was the best DS game.”

I’ve met people recently who call themselves videogame cynics, who say stuff like “I feel like I hate all videogames”, and I just know that they like videogames way more than I do. Over the last few years I’ve been telling people I’m a “videogame refugee”, particularly coming out of the GamerGate situation and how so much of videogame industry and fans (at least the loud, vocal ones) seem to be toxic, angry, aggressive, lacking compassion, etc. It feels very insular sometimes, going to these game conventions with booth babes, guns, and huge muscle cars everywhere. And as a straight white dude myself, I generally have wanted to kind of back off somewhat out of that insular little circle.

Oh, and also videogames cost a lot of money. And it’s this big conspicuous consumption thing where people just kind of want to buy stuff, like on some level the most fun games ever are are while you’re purchasing them. And also, what adult has the time to play these things, anyway?

The point is: if you want to withdraw from videogames, there are ample reasons to do so.

For years I’ve told myself that my hate for games is actually because I love them so much. I see a promise in them that other people either can’t see, or don’t care about – a promise of vastly better interactivity, etc. And all of that stuff, all of my criticisms, I think they’re not false. But there’s also an emotional charge element to it all that maybe explains it better than whether any of these points are true or false.

The picture above was taken sometime around 1992 or so, I believe, and it’s of me in my home-made Sonic the Hedgehog costume (thanks, Mom!). Growing up, I really liked videogames. But like, no – you don’t understand. I really, really liked them. I had a massive collection of NES, Super Nintendo, Atari 2600, Gameboy, Game Gear, and Genesis games at that time, and they weren’t the only things I was interested in, but they were always a main centerpiece of any social interaction or free evening.

And back then, I had an optimism and a positive identity as a “gamer”. I took pride in it. I would dress up as characters, draw the characters, talk to people about the games, go excitedly to Gamestop (or back then, more Babbage’s) and get excited about things.

In 1992, I was like how so many people are now about videogames. Excited, and able to take pride in my hobby. By 2000, I was distinctly and clearly not so.

You were so cute—what happened?!

The 3DO

There were a few formative events that pushed me in this direction, but if I had to point to one “inciting incident” for this change, it would probably have to be the Panasonic R.E.A.L. 3DO. Actually, I just looked it up on Wikipedia, and apparently the real, full name was the “Panasonic FZ-1 R.E.A.L. 3DO Interactive Multiplayer“. I had no idea, I never heard “FZ-1” and I don’t remember “Interactive Multiplayer” either.

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It came out in October of 1993. A hung out with a couple of friends who were older than I was, and had jobs, and were equally as obsessed with games, and they got a 3DO pretty early on. Here’s the big thing about the 3DO you need to know:

IT COST SEVEN HUNDRED DOLLARS. That’s $699.99, specifically. And that was not normal back then, or anything – the Sega Genesis cost $189.99 when it came out.

But I played the 3DO at my friend’s house and I was totally sucked in. I had to have it. The only way I could get that kind of money together quickly as a 12 year old was to have a tag sale, and so I had a huge one, wherein I sold almost all of my videogames*. The gameboy, the game gear, the NES, the Atari, a ton of accessories and games, were now all gone (I believe I kept my Super Nintendo, because I was also obsessed with Mortal Kombat 1 and 2 at the time).

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I really did that, and I got together most of the money to get a 3DO. I remember going to Babbage’s and buying it, and being so excited. I took it home, and honestly, I enjoyed some of the games a lot. The original Need for Speed was a decent racing game with the first “good car physics” I had ever seen in a game, and that was a lot of fun to play with. Crystal Dynamics’ Total Eclipse and Crash n’ Burn were both, totally fine videogames overall, if nothing particularly special. John Madden Football was… I mean, it was John Madden Football – it was quite like ’92 and ’93 which I liked a lot. Some other games were pretty obviously not-good, like Way of the Warrior, their attempt at a Mortal Kombat clone. There were a few other neat features – to this day I wonder why more systems don’t use the “chaining controllers” model that the 3DO used, where a second player would plug his controller into your controller, and a third player would plug their controller into yours, and so on. (Well, I dunno, maybe that’s not that cool actually, but it was novel.)

Overall, my actual interactive experience with the few games I had was actually alright. But it wasn’t mind-blowing. And overall, the Super Nintendo was way better. I don’t think I was conscious of that fact, but the undeniability of it kind of started sinking in.

But I remember the real moment everything sank in. I remember the moment so much stuff happened in my brain. About 4-5 months after I bought the 3DO, I went into Babbage’s, as I had many times, and I saw the shelf where the 3DO was, with a few boxes that looked like this:

All scuffed up – the mark of people abusing the hell out of Babbage’s ridiculous return policy (which I myself abused many times by buying PC games, installing them, and then returning them). But the worst part of all was that there was a little sticker slapped onto the box. It was a price sticker, but it wasn’t the normal small, white orange stickers you typically see on an item like this. It was an orange sticker, more like one you’d see in a supermarket on a 2-liter of store-brand cola when it was on sale. But the worst thing of all was what the sticker said:

$49.99

That’s right. The 3DO, between the time I bought it for $700, and the handful of months that had gone by, had now gone down in price to just fifty bucks. I had of course been following the news about various 3DO games getting reviewed badly, and how the system wasn’t doing so well, but when I saw that sticker, that was the moment when I knew that the 3DO had died.

But it wasn’t just the 3DO that died at that moment. My belief in the greatness of videogames, the dream of videogames, was really kind of shattered. It was all just… some crap. Seeing that box all tattered and bruised like that, that early in a console’s life, really just let me see behind the curtain in a way, and really realize—really know, and feel it, in my heart—that it’s just marketing, all the way down. From that point on, and even today, I see new games in this state: massively marked down, in a beaten-up cardboard box. I always ask, “how much value will this have, then? Without the hype storm, without the ads, without the memes?”

There wasn’t any overnight change, but I think that that was the last time I bought a console as soon as it was available. Both the original Playstation and the N64 I got, but 3-4 years after they came out. And that number got bigger and bigger for each successive generation. By 2000 I remember staunchly advocating against people buying consoles anywhere near their release date. Release day is the worst possible day to buy a console, I would tell people. The system has the smallest library, and it costs the most. Wait about 10 years, so you get the largest library and the cheapest cost, I would tell them.

Today

And those things aren’t false. It really is kind of irresponsible and sort of dumb in a way to buy a console really early in its lifespan. But maybe that’s what it is to like things. Being a little bit dumb – believing in something, even when maybe you know you shouldn’t. Because maybe you’re wrong. Have a little humility in your own ability to know how it’s going to go, and have a little bit of hope and optimism in the other human beings who are making these things. Now, I’m a game developer, I know indies and AAA people and everyone in between, and I’ve never met anyone who was very cynical about it at all. People are trying to make good things.

Beyond that, though, if you wait 10 years to buy a console, or if you don’t buy one at all, that means you won’t be connecting with anyone about these things. Most of the big games of the last decade or so, I’ve done this with—always played them at least a year after everyone else did, sometimes a lot more. And okay, yeah, they’re cheaper. But have fun playing them all by yourself with no one to connect with them on. There’s value in being part of a current conversation.

And there’s even value in some of the “hype”. If it takes hype to get me and a friend to sit down in front of a game and play it for a couple hours, then maybe there’s something to that. I can’t forget that a lot of these games are made by massive, massive corporations that are dealing in totally obscene amounts of wealth, and I can’t forget that we as a society are totally brainwashed into being these conspicuous consumers for whom it gives them a weird rush of pleasure to buy things.

But I can choose to try to have a positive attitude about things. Yeah, the 3DO is a good glimpse for me into the reality of what videogames, especially consoles, are. They’re marketing. They’re some plastic and some silicon and some metal with a good ad campaign. But they are also platforms for art, real art, made by real people, with real stories. And even for the huge AAA games, not all of those stories get their edges shaved off. We are connecting with a real person, with real people, when we play Breath of the Wild.

Going Forward

It’s true that on the extremely narrow axis of interactivity that I’m generally interested in – strategy games – I do think videogames are a little bit stuck in the mud (which is what a lot of my theory work is intended to help out with). But what about other things? What about puzzles like Portal, what about toys like Minecraft, what about contests like Rock Band, and what about interactive narrative experiences like Gone Home? I don’t deny that these things are all… quite fantastic. And yet I’ve still kind of just say that “videogames suck”, overall.

Ultimately, I just kind of have – or, have had, as I’m trying to change this – a negative attitude about games. This year, I bought a Nintendo Switch, and the new Mario, and the new Zelda. I also got Civilization VI and I’m excited about the upcoming expansion, which I’m going to play when it’s new, for once.

In my recent podcast episode, some got that I had “flip flopped” from my previous super-formal “hate everything” positions. It’s not the case. I still have all the same problems that I had before, I just am taking a wider view, and a more pro-social view. We can know about these problems and have a negotiated interaction with them, which is what I want to do. And I also want to recapture some of that feeling that I had dressing up Sonic as a kid.

~

Thanks for reading! You can support my work here.

* The good news is, in my early 20’s I worked at a Funcoland and got back all of my videogame collection, and then some. The bad(?) news is that I’ve since sold almost all of it again.

The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community.
The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.

“Our game is called Mystik Spiral. It is an indie interactive aggression about the evils of conformist corporate culture. Coming on Steam for Windows and Mac and as an XBox One console exclusive.”

Over the last couple years, I’ve gotten a fair amount of attention for my articles about the Indie Bubble and the Indie Glut.  (And even a GDC talk.)

Quick version of indie gaming history: In 2010 or so, due to a combination of factors (AAA creative stagnation, better development tools, better online stores to sell on), indie games caught on in a big way and made a ton of money. For a short time, getting the Golden Ticket and landing a game on Steam was guaranteed big cash. This was the “Indie Bubble” phase.

People who wanted to write a video game (i.e. everyone) saw this and went, “Hey, I wanna get rich following my dreams too!” There was a big pile-on. MANY indie games became available, more than anyone actually wanted. This was the “Indie Glut” phase.

At last, I can complete the trilogy of articles. Now we can look around and see where we’ve ended up, a phase which I suspect will be permanent. (At least until the Earth gets hit by a large solar flare and we get to start over.)

You can’t deal with this business without grasping its fundamental reality. So it’s worth wallowing in this topic one more time. A proper understanding of reality will help us process a lot of otherwise perplexing issues (like Apple or Steam charging devs to have games on their store, or the ever-present “discoverability problem).

To see where we are, let’s talk about a long-standing rite of passage for young creative types: Starting a band.
 

I think this would be really funny if I knew anything at all about music. Can someone translate it into a Guitar Hero chart for me? I think it means I have to learn how to play the orange notes.

The Story of Being a Musician

For decades, many young, enthusiastic, creative people have worked through their dreams, energy, and youthful ambition by forming bands.

Why not? It’s takes a fair amount of technical and artistic aptitude to learn an instrument, write songs, get gigs, press a CD, etc., so it’s a good sponge to soak up excess ambition and energy. But it’s not a prohibitive amount of energy, so just about anyone can start a band.

Usually, this band is a reaction against corporate pop culture. “Screw your plastic, AAA, mass-produced, soulless Katy Perry crap! We’re going to create real art.” This is an entirely worthwhile goal, even if it fails 99.999% of the time.

Of course, most bands die. After all, most bands are terrible. Even if they aren’t, people grow older. They lose their energy. Their dreams die. Life intervenes. They get jobs as insurance adjusters or whatever. Their demo CDs get stuck in the attic, forgotten, and then they have kids. Who start their own bands.

Not everyone gives up, though. A tiny handful of bands, through a combination of skill, connections, and luck, become actual successes and make careers out of it. Other musicians make a living as freelancers or working in a business environment (studio musicians, corporate gigs, etc). Others, the damned souls, trapped between a lack of talent and an inability to quit, live long (looooong) lives as failed musicians.

Most quit (or do art as a hobby). This is ok. The world needs plumbers far more than it needs musicians.

But the hard inexorable math of the thing is this: There are far more people who want to make a living as a musician (actor, writer, dancer) then there are paying jobs they can occupy.

There comes a time when you have to face this. Disney movies and La La Land lied to you. There is a point where refusing to give up makes you stop being an admirable young spitfire and start being a cautionary tale.

Anyway, this is the basic cycle of the thing. For the last few decades, younger people with a certain amount of talent, energy, and time could soak all that into starting a band. A few prospered. The rest went on to other things.
 

The current location on Steam of the New Releases chart. (Artist’s conception.)

You Probably Figured Out Where This Is Going

Getting together with some friends and writing a game is the new Starting a Band. I’m not saying this is going to happen. It already has.

Plenty has been written about the flood of games appearing on Steam. As I write this, 125 in the last week alone. More games than anyone wants, that’s for sure. That’s why Steam has made it very difficult to see all new releases. Let’s be honest. Almost nobody cares to drink from this firehose.

Don’t believe me? Check it out yourself!

It is very instructive to look at these new releases, which is why the site What’s On Steam, which just shows all new releases, is useful. Take a look. New titles appear FAST. Most of them will bomb, and their creators will vanish from the public view forever.

Here’s a fun trick. Write down the most recent 10 Steam games released. Wait a month. Check their sales on SteamSpy. (Bear in mind you need a few sales to appear on SteamSpy at all.) You will see very few games that get any traction. Each of their creators is just another kid who started a band (and there’s nothing wrong with that).

There’s no need anymore to predict the endgame for the video game glut. It’s happened. We’re living it. Bands haven’t gone away. There’s still a billion of them. People making lots of video games won’t go away. There’ll always be a billion of them, offering their hot take of the procedurally generated Roguelike 2-D platformer (now in VR!!!!!).

This is why “Indiepocalypse” is such a useless term. Other fields have exactly the same situation, but nobody talks about the Musicianpocalypse or the Actorpocalypse or the Writerpocalypse. It’s just part of life.

This is the new normal. So, if you are one of the doomed souls who is determined to make a living in this business, you must figure out how to deal with it.
 

Fun business tip! When you start seeing articles like this, you’ve already missed the boat.

Curation Won’t Make a Difference

Here’s what gets me about the situation. Often, when people talk about the flood of games on Steam, they act like it’s mostly trash and Steam should just curate most of it away.

I wrote a whole article’s worth of stuff in this section, but this post is already stupid long, so I chopped it out to post on its own. I’ll bullet point it for you:

1. Steam doesn’t want to curate. They hate it.
2. Even if they did curate, at least half of the stuff would remain, because it’s good enough. It’d still be a flood.
3. A fee to get on Steam won’t change anything any more than the fee to get on iTunes did. In other words, not at all.
4. Steam and iTunes don’t have a discoverability problem. They and their customers are doing great. Developers are the ones who have the problem. Nyeah.

College Degrees In Game Development

Colleges are, for all practical purposes, businesses. They charge a fee and provide a product (your degree). Like good, practical businessmen, when they saw video games get hot, they jumped forward and generously offered to give you, in return for over $100K USD of post-tax money, a piece of paper that claims you know how to make them.

I’ve written about college video game degrees before. I don’t have much more to add to that, except to say you shouldn’t get one without being realistic about your chances.

You might have a lifelong career in video games. Hey, anything’s possible. But video games are an artistic field. Writing a successful video game is HARD (like becoming a full-time musician), and a huge portion of the field burns out of it before they hit middle age.

Want a degree in video games? Fine. But you may want to approach it like getting a college degree in, say, playing the trombone. You might be one of the ones who makes it, but you’d damned well better have a solid Plan B.
 

Steam tried to get me to pay full price for an indie game. My face when.

Global Competition!

The competition in the vidya gaems biz is going to get even more gruesome. Development is starting to become far more of a global activity. This will mean not only more titles to fight, but more downward price pressure.

The Law of Supply and Demand already tells us that when there is a glut of supply (games) and roughly constant demand, prices will be pushed inexorably downward. (Which explains deep discount Steam sales and Humble Bundle.) I’ve sadly watched indie devs plaintively asking their fellows to join them in trying to keep prices high, only to see those efforts get ground to dust by the inexorable gears of Economics 101.

(Though I would note that if your business model requires Price Fixing to survive, it may be a bit flawed.)

But prices will get even lower, because you will increasingly compete against developers in the third world. Having a hard time competing now? Wait until you’re fighting someone in a country with 1/10 the cost of living of yours. Someone who can charge $1 USD a copy and still make out great.

Yeah. However pessimistic you were feeling about your game’s chances before, it’s even worse than that.

So What Does It Take To Succeed?

A really good game that feels fresh and new and is solid and also manages to, through going viral or really good PR work, get attention. Sometimes bands still get rich. So can you.

You just need to watch for those rare opportunities to make a game that says, “It’s Like [Popular Thing], but [Some Small Change].” in a new way. “It’s like Harvest Moon, but 16-bit.” “It’s like Minecraft, but 2-D.” “It’s like a JRPG, but with bullet hell shooter combat.” “It’s like Huniepop, but more Huniepop.”

There will always be ways to get rich. All you have to do is be brilliant, spot the right opportunity at the right time, have at least a little luck, and then make an amazing product.
 

This is all getting depressing, so, to cheer you up, I added a picture of an adorable doggo.

My Grim Future

When the Indie Bubble happened, I made a bunch of money. More than I deserved. And then I saved it. I’d been around long enough to see both booms and busts, and I knew you had to save during the former to prepare for the latter.

But the games business for small developers (and if you are an indie developer who didn’t write Minecraft, you are a small developer) is in a bust phase that won’t end. So now I’m asking myself, “How am I, between new games and remastering old ones, going to stretch Spiderweb Software for 20 years and reach retirement.”

It’s scary. I don’t know if I can do it. Our newest game, Avadon 3, didn’t do that well. I think it’s a really good game, and the people who bought it seem to like it. But there are new RPGs coming out on Steam every single workday, some of them are good, and you can only hold off so much competition before being overwhelmed.

Next year, I am going to write an all new game engine and series. I think it’s going to be really neat and different from what I’ve done before, and I’m excited about it. But I’ll tell you this: Its development is going to be LEAN AND MEAN.

I’m using as little custom art and music as I can. (Working title is “Unity Asset Store: The Game.”) Any way I can cut costs and still maintain a constant art style and game quality, I will take it, and I won’t apologize. This market doesn’t allow for blowing money unnecessarily anymore, at least not for me.

If you criticize me for that, feel free. It’s your right. I’ll just think of the developers who, during the Indie Bubble, flush with easy Steam money, made fun of my development style TO MY FACE. Developers who are sadly no longer in business. While I keep plugging along in my humble little bottom feeder way.

My goal is to prove you can live an entire fulfilling career writing indie games. From college to old age, all the way through. I’m over halfway there. But man, the next two decades are looking like a long road.

I’m Done Writing About This

This blog has been focused on the indie business for the last few years, and I’m mostly done with that topic. I believe we are in a stable phase now, so there isn’t much else to say. I think that most gamers don’t actually care. They don’t care about business stuff. They just want to talk about games and how awesome they are.

I write this blog to get attention for myself, because it’s really hard for a small developer to get attention. From here on, I want to write outrageous funny things about games in the hope that I get a little attention and something goes viral and I pick up a handful of customers along the way.

Good luck to everyone in this business. Unless you’re directly competing with me, in which case I wish you luck in some other business.

And if you want to make a living in games and need some advice, here it is: Write a VR game. It’s TOTALLY going to be the NEXT BIG THING and not a faddish washout AT ALL.

—

All of our delightful retro RPGS are out on Steam. I occasionally mutter on Twitter. My many blog posts are here.

Welcome to Next Week on Xbox where we bring you the latest details on upcoming games coming soon to Xbox One! This coming week we have the final chapter of the acclaimed adventure game Life is Strange: Before the Storm, the arcade puzzle game Raining Blobs and a few more titles as we head into the holidays. Read on below for more details on these games and more and we’ll see you back here in the new year!

Games

December 19, 2017

Take on the role of a broken robot who, upon falling out of his space fairing cargo ship, has landed on an Earth than has left mankind behind. Now inhabited by robots, it’s up to you to get back to your ship before it’s too late in this free-flowing, fast-moving indie game.

Games

December 20, 2017

The final chapter in Life is Strange: Before the Storm will conclude Chloe and Rachel’s stories. Set three years before the critically acclaimed adventure game Life is Strange, you’ll experience the girls confrontation with each other’s personal demons… and overcome them.

Games

December 20, 2017

Do you have what it takes to survive an endless supply of blob rain? If that sounds intriguing to you, you must check out this fast-paced arcade puzzle game inspired by the likes of Tetris and Bejeweled with adorable anime-inspired pixel art!

Games

December 22, 2017

Featuring 50 scenic levels full of cube-like critters, prepare for boom time once again with Boom Ball 3. This unique take on ping-pong supports a two-player mode for you and an opponent to square off in this family fun Kinect game.

Team Meat has announced that Super Meat Boy will be releasing on Nintendo Switch on 11th January, adding a brand new ‘Race Mode’ into the mix.

For anyone not in the know, Super Meat Boy is a tough-as-nails platformer that has been around for several years across various platforms. After receiving a large amount of requests from Switch fans to bring the game to the console, the developer confirmed that a port was in the works in August. Now, thanks to the tweets below, we have confirmation of a release date and even a small glimpse at this new mode coming to the Switch version of the game.

With the amount of body tensing that happens as a result of Super Meat Boy’s challenging levels, perhaps it will be the perfect game to burn off a couple of pounds after the holidays (because that’s much better than doing real exercise, right?). Will you be picking up the game when it releases next month? Let us know with a comment below.