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Comment by Mathnerd314 | Hacker News Reader

At least for the genre I've been following (indie horror) it seems like the recently-released games are all low budget one-man-studio cash grabs or else quick Game Jam games that have been polished up a bit. There don't seem to be a lot of medium-sized indie studios doing games anymore.

It would be interesting to see some statistics on firm sizes or game budgets.

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why does is being low-budget and "one-man-studio" mean it's a cash grab? I would say it's actually more likely these are a fruit of the developer's passion than something made by a larger studio.

Jim Sterling coined the term "asset flip" to describe cheap, rushed, barely-playable games cobbled together with Unity and pre-bought art assets. These games are a shameless attempt to cash in on the latest fad with an absolute minimum of effort. A substantial proportion of indie releases on Steam (and a majority on Android) fall into this category.

https://youtu.be/5svAoQ7D38k?t=48 (strong profanity)

Maybe. There’s also prolly a ton of teenagers who are very excited about being able to make a game with tools and stores available to them.

The funny thing about calling it "asset flip" is that at the same time they were adamant that what matters is gameplay rather than the graphics.

If you've seen some of the videos of people playing these "asset flips" you would have seen that they have very little in terms of gameplay. They are also full of bugs and appear mostly unfinished.

Yeah, it's an insult that's pretty indiscriminately thrown around.

I think the medium-sized studios just tends to either get bought by a big publisher (InXile and Obsidian, for a pair of recent example) or just crash after a game that just didn't work well enough

Indeed, medium size is the death size. Too big to survive on ramen, big enough to sell for an acquihire or small bounty for IP.

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