Prior to the summer of 2017, the Nintendo Switch’s eShop saw an influx of five or six games a week at most now, that number has multiplied by a factor of four or even five, according to Eurogamer, as studios hungry for sales seize the opportunity of a fresh platform. So far in 2018, there have been over 6,000 games released on Steam the majority of them have sold fewer than 500 copies. The weekly trickle of games flowing into Steam has surged into a roaring river, with the number of games on the platform nearly doubling every year from 2014 to now - 1,772 that year, 2,964 in 2015, 4,207 in 2016, and 7,672 in 2017, according to Sergey Galyonkin of SteamSpy, a site that uses a quickly vanishing trove of public data to estimate the sales of games on the platform. But the exponential growth of indie games on Steam has tightened the vise against them even further, making it harder to stand out in an ever-crowding market.
For independent developers struggling for eyeballs against blockbuster mega-franchises like Assassin’s Creed and Call of Duty, it’s easy to feel like the deck is stacked against them from the start. Meanwhile, console storefronts like the Nintendo eShop aren’t far behind.
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Front and center, Steam has surmounted its humble origins and transformed into a behemoth of capital and the port of call for all of PC gaming. Over the past decade and change, the number of video games on the market has increased exponentially. When they release a game, they sell 500 copies on Steam, if they’re lucky.” “All of the developers I know in Spain, it’s something they fear. “It’s basically a lot of people complaining about not being able to make it, and being envious of other developers and letting their frustrations go,” de Paco says. He describes a private developer group chat on the messaging platform Telegram that illustrates the trevails of chasing the misty specter of building your dream game. “I think that if we released Gods Will Be Watching today, it would’ve failed,” he says, “because it used to be 20 games a week on Steam, and now it’s 20 games a day.”īy de Paco’s count, there are now hundreds of indie studios sprouting up all around his native Spain, and only 10 of them are actively turning a profit off their games. Like a lot of game developers, de Paco sees the daily avalanche of games crashing onto online marketplaces such as Steam as a severe threat to his livelihood. For its latest game, a 2018 cyberpunk adventure called The Red Strings Club - which received floods of enthusiastic tweets and positive reviews - sales have only started to slip into profit now, many months after its release.Īnd it’s the exception - the game that’s been able to make it work. Now, it has to be innovative and have incredible quality.”ĭe Paco says that his studio Deconstructeam managed to make a profit just off the pre-orders for its first game, Gods Will Be Watching, back in 2014. It used to be that you could do something that nobody had ever seen before, or you could do something familiar really well. “Everyone can make games, but be realistic. But while his career has had ups and downs, he sees 2018 as the most challenging year yet for small teams. “I don’t recommend quitting your day job to anyone these days,” says Jordi de Paco with a heavy sigh.ĭe Paco is no newcomer to the erratic world of independent game development, having worked on dozens of prototypes and multiple commercial releases over the years.
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