Just read this. Coming from a gamer of 26 years, I thought it was an interesting read by an indie developer of... how ever many years Jeff has been making games. Link:

http://jeff-vogel.blogspot.com/2014/05/the-indie-bubble-is-popping.html

Read and post thoughts and comments if the fancy strikes :)

Gotta figure Vogel knows what he's on about. I think I bought my first Exile game, oh, 19,20 years ago, so he's been doing this a while, yeah.

It probably is a subset of the overall bundling problem, but I can't help but think that another part of the problem is that so many bundles have made significant numbers of PC gamers cheap as hell. I see comments from people who look at a bundle of six, seven games and go, "Five bucks? Too expensive." It's like when people complain* about the $5.99 titles here on GOG. Just blows my mind. How cheap are these people, you know? They're certainly not helping indie studios afford to make games.

Or, as my brother said when I was chatting with him yesterday: "...then I see I have some crap like Unstoppable Gorg, and never play it. I assume it's named after the noise you make when you play it, and you just can't help yourself." Some of the blame has to go back on these indie devs for producing such terrible, awful games.

*I get that you don't have a lot of money, but if you own a computer you're in the part of the global population that can afford luxury items. You're probably not starving in a dilapidated box in the rain. If you are, you have weird priorities.

I admire Jeff Vogel and he writes in a very entertaining style but you don't need to be a guru to predict that:

"And if X stays constant, the only way to solve the problem is for Y to go down. I'll give you a second to work out the consequences of that for yourself."

I believe this has been predicted by many GOG community members at various occasions already. It's not really a new insight.

I think Jeff Vogel is a pompous ass and I detest him. He's wrong, as he tends to be.

1. There is no bubble. A bubble is a speculation/overinflation thing. The indie market just grows. It may shrink later when the next crisis hits, it might not, but there's no overinvestment in indie games that will make a whole lot of investors lose money all of a sudden. Games are not the abstract means to making abstract $$ that might or might not fall out of fashion with Wall Street, they are the end product, they will always be in demand. Indie games in particular are less susceptible to the next financial crisis (we're due another one real soon) because they are cheap and don't require high-end computers.

2. The money-making opportunities for you personally as an indie game maker have been improving. There are more tools to make games, more additional resources, more communities, etc. And sure, as exponentially more people make games, the percentage of runaway success stories among game-makers is decreasing. SO FUCKING WHAT. Jeff Vogel is doing the equivalent of whining about the decreasing percentage of world-famous writers as literacy spreads. I'll bump this thread in three years and make you Vogel fans eat your posts with Russian mustard.

It's not as if bubbles do not exist. There are good years and there are bad years. Sometimes people put more hope into a business field than what is justified really and then the dreams burst at some point.

But there doesn't have to be large oscillations. Maybe it will just be a smooth, slow decline to a more sustainable level.

If I remember I will come back in three years and count the frequency of (good?) Indie releases. I will be positively surprised if it increases.

It all depends on how much you make. If you make $3-400/month, then you work 2-3 hours for those 5 bucks.

Ha! Didn't realize someone posted it already - thanks :)

Nope, you're the wrong one. I got one word for you. ONE word to show you why:

ATARI

This is exactly what happened to the Atari 2600. Huge flood of shit games at low prices to flood the market until devs could no longer survive and the public went "fuck me, these games are shit" and stops buying them. The whole bundle ecosystem was ALWAYS going to end up badly for indie devs and I said so for years - there's too many bundles, WAY too many - and they pit the best games out there against each other for mere dollars so even if you got a great game, you'll still won't get what you deserve to make off them because people now just hold out for bundles and sales. It's a system that is unhealthy.

The good thing we might see from this, is that the "opportunity" devs leave and find some other platform to mooch off but with them, good devs might go belly up as well. That's what happens in an over-saturated market. Without bundles and a huge amount of sales, this wouldn't be such a problem since good games sell, but these days, they sell ... but for a lot less ...