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HoloDust on 27 November 2017
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JEMC said:
Chazore said:
$500 seems like the middle ground, while 1k is just a bit insane of a price entry fee to go for. We already know that price fees of getting a game on consoles can be high, but charging the same, if not more on PC would just drive indie devs away.

We already see some known indie devs complaining that their game isn't getting a full spotlight of attention, which has led to them praising Switch/XB storefronts. Charging up to 1k would just solidify their choice of where to release their game, and it wouldn't likely be Steam.

The thing that bothers me about some of those indie devs, is that they have made it clear that they dislike competition, they dislike having to market their own game, and they dislike having to work hard for their game to get noticed. They praise Switch/XB storefronts because there is far less competition, and in some cases, they have their marketing done for them, so they kill two birds with one stone.

meanwhile we have other indie devs out there who just do what they can to sell their game. I don't see why the other devs cannot do the same, it just comes off as being entitled and lazy to me. You work to sell your game, not having others do it all for you. You compete or you get out.

Yes asset flippers need to go, but even if they were to vanish, the marketplace would still grow each year, as more and more devs hop on board, and then we'll go back to square one, where some devs bitch about not getting enough spotlight.

Valve definitely needs to suck it up and hire actual people to do the job of seeking out asset flippers and promptly banning them from the store. Yes the chances are high that the scummy flippers will just create another account and repeat the process, but that's why we need more people to catch them out each time, until those flippers quit for good.

The entry fee is a really easy to fix problem by making it scalable: for your first game make it $100, for the second one make it $500 (after all, if you come back with another one it's because you've made money, right?) and for the rest, $1,500. That will make it affordable for those that are new, while preventing those that only launch garbage to abuse the system.

About indie devs, I think the problem here is that there is an abuse of the term. I mean, it can't be that, and I'm going to use two successful games to make it fair, Stardew Valley and Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice are both considered indie titles. It's not fair because only the first one is a "real" indie game, being the first game made by a small studio (1 guy) and without any help, while the second one has been made by a nearly 15 years old studio with who knows how many staff. And yet, because no publisher backed Hellblade and they did it by themselves, they're now an "indie" studio. Yeah, sure...

And that difference is the reason why some can get media attention and afford to make some marketing, while others simply can't, having to rely on others (like some youtuber that likes their idea and talks about the game, for example) for help. And these are the ones that have a harder time with the Steam bloated system that we have now.

That's because indie is meaningless term when it comes to size of developer, it only refers to them being independent of publisher.

I much prefer bedroom/garage developer moniker, like back in days, with small one/two men teams who were (primarily) coding for C64, ZX and similar computers.