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Conina on 26 March 2023
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scrapking said:

I did not say that no indies were coming out exclusively on PS.  I said that the PS platform has gone from being an indie darling at one point with the PS4, to being criticized by many indie developers today (poorer sales performance than before, worse discoverability than before, etc.).

To test how much of a difference that was making to developer intent, I've been tracking recent announcement.  And we have in fact seen a significant up-tick in indie games that are coming to Xbox but not coming to PS.

There also appears to be an implicit suggestion that this is some kind of pro-Xbox thread.  That's incorrect given it's a two-part thread, and that the other part is tracking examples of games that are coming to PS4 but not coming to Xbox One.

Instead of tracking a few anecdotal examples of some games, I looked up the available games with a 2021 - 2023 release date in the different online stores.

Deku Deals has great filters for release year, price range and content type (to exclude DLCs, bundles, demos):  https://www.dekudeals.com/

The PlayStation platform hasn't been an "indie darling" for years now, it is on the third place behind Switch and Steam. But PlayStation still got a lot more games since 2021 than Xbox (each year). And since the vast majority of games releases on EACH platform are "indie games", of course PlayStation still got a lot more "indies" since 2021 than Xbox (each year).

To exclude new AAA games, you can also look up the number of games in the price ranges up to $10, $20 and $30. (Almost?) no AAA game with a release since 2021 will be priced under $10 (even in a sale) and only very few AAA games with a release since 2021 will be priced under $20 (even in a sale). And very few indies will be priced higher than $20 or $30, even if they are 2023 releases.

So the number of currently available games released since 2021 are:

  • Xbox Marketplace: 774 up to $10, 1541 up to $20, 1866 up to $30, 2072 in total
  • PlayStation Store: 1636 up to $10, 2493 up to $20, 2894 up to $30, 3195 in total
  • Switch eShop: 2712 up to $10, 4031 up to $20, 4435 up to $30, 4745 in total
  • Steam (50+ score): 11170 up to $10, 15194 up to $20, 16066 up to $30, 16650 in total
  • Steam (all releases): 16545 up to $10, 21089 up to $20, 22052 up to $30, 22775 in total

DLCs and free games are excluded in these numbers for all stores. And since there is a lot of crap in the Steam store, I set a quality filter at 50% SteamDB rating and a minimum price of $1 in the first Steam line for better comparisons.

For the numbers per release years, you can check these search results: