There's a new 'thing' to discuss. Its called the "
Indipocalypse" (
#Indipocalypse "in-dee-poc-ahh-lips"). In a nutshell the Indie game market is on the verge of a (potential) collapse event because too many games are being released with too few making a return. The problem appears to be so bad there's increasing back-chatter in certain quarters from developers resigning themselves to pulling work from stores or in other ways essentially abandoning their creations rather than finding a solution.
Freemium, in-game adverts, micro-transactions and all the little tricks and hock used to part players from their cash don't helping either, and may in fact appear to be turning people off games in droves, driving them towards
Social Media, YouTube and other forms of entertainment - gamers of all stripes are now watching others play games as a legitimate form of entertainment.
For Indie devs the answer to this market saturation to some is the emergence, or more correctly, the continued dominance of, "
Triple-I" ("I" for "Independent") game studios and publishers, outfits that are able to leverage disproportionately large amounts of cash to 'buy' platform dominance. For others, smaller Indies in particular, a crowded market can be navigated by forming
Indie-cliques (#indiclique) or
indie-collectives (#indicollective); groups of independent developers, creators and artists mining a localised pool of followers and fans for financial support. For
individuals, certainly those wanting to go-it-alone as much as possible, the situation is slightly more complicated but there's a lesson to be learnt from the aforementioned; social media - the dominance of Facebook, Twitter, and other social platforms that may come and go, and the way people use them highlight the importance of building a community of follows and fans. This cannot go understated, and indeed seems to be key to
surviving the Indipocalypse.
Having said that,
be careful not to put all ones eggs in the same basket because of inherent concerns associated with handing distribution control over products to third-party services that can pull products or penalise sellers for seemingly arbitrary reasons.
