I mean, personally it just feels like there’s too many games. And consequently too many game studios.
On top of that, the cleft between the production value of a triple-A game and anything not that is gotten so big that the moment you aren’t some Call of Duty or Dragon Age or something, you might as well be a 1-person hobby project that as a result has no need to keep making money as it can trivially just go at whatever pace it wants. Add that it’s not uncommon to make the vast majority of your money via an unfinished game that you can then leave unfinished so you can reduce costs while making most of the money, and you got a recipe for disaster for any A or AA development studios wanting to scrape by.
You basically got to have your own little reliable niche, while also being lean enough so you can make games with extremely little cost per game. Hence everyone turning to mobile, where exactly that MO has become established.
It helps to make games people actually want. I know that seems obvious, but so many game studios just make games that are fine, but are not exactly inspired.
Even if they did, those inspired games can get lost and fail to find their audience in the sea of games that are fine.
I don’t have numbers on this, but I’ll bet the percentages on mobile studios struggling financially are even worse.
Plus, there may be too many games, but I’ll put an asterisk on there that there are too many long games. When so much of it is designed to keep you coming back to this one particular game over and over again, there’s less room in your life for other games that you otherwise would have been willing to buy. I’ve got a list of 14 games that came out this year or have release dates this year that I’m interested in getting around to still, on top of the 8 games that I’ve already started or finished, plus another 8 that are expected to come out this year but don’t have release dates yet…and I’m still going to spend a few hundred hours across three different fighting games that I’ve been playing for years.
You basically got to have your own little reliable niche
I think one big problem is originally. So many indie games are essentially clones of the games that the developers happened to like. Zelda-likes, rogue-likes, greyscale puzzle platformers about depression. There are literally hundreds of examples of the first two of these, and not as many but still weirdly a lot of the third. But without something to make it stand out, casual players will come across the game and think “This looks neat, but basically the same as about 4 other games in my wishlist that are already very well reviewed. Maybe if it starts getting rave reviews, I’ll add it to the queue”.
Not to paint all indie games with one broad stroke, the most novel game ideas out there are also usually from indie studios. I don’t have numbers and I don’t know about longevity, but I bet that games with novel ideas get more initial downloads
This seems like a natural evolution of the market: a period of expansion followed by saturation and contraction. And there can be no doubt that we have hit a saturation point. There has been an absolute explosion in the number of games available, largely because platforms like Steam have simplified the logistics of distribution tremendously.
On the positive side for small developers, if you look at which games are rated “overwhelmingly positive” on Steam, the vast majority are not high-end graphic-intensive AAA games. There is a huge market for lighter, innovative games that can run on a cheap laptop. For every massive Cyberpunk type games in my collection, I have three Stardew Valley, Caves of Qud, and Undertale type games.
I want to take all the fun out of making games.
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