Why Bundles and Steam Sales Aren't Good for Most Indies | Hacker News Reader

Why Bundles and Steam Sales Aren't Good for Most Indies

dinofarmgames.com

39 pointsido41 comments

One thing you can do is run an aggregator, since they benefit quite a bit by commoditizing content. Another thing you could do is program for an audience which is not crushingly oversupplied by geeks willing to work for nothing. If you enjoy hobby game programming, you can subsidize it by making something people want... to pay for.

Microecon 101: it teaches superpowers.

I don't think there are many people making good indie games (or music apps, my domain) that are willing to work for nothing. We're all just slowly coming to the realization that venues like the App Store and Steam have eaten the middle out of the market. If you're not one of the anointed ones you might as well not bother. Things weren't nearly so lean before this.

The problem is that an "app" has now become a generic commodity, with an expected value that has zero correlation with the amount of work that went into it or the size of the potential audience.

There are billions of possible projects out there whose expected value has zero correlation with the amount of work that goes into them. This is why I'm not spending a million man-hours building a ziggurat in my back yard.

Paying for an app based on effort going into making it is nonsense. An app should be paid for based on the value it provides. If it could have provided that same value with less effort, it probably should have.

Now, if you want to complain that it's hard to charge based on the value the app will provide, I'd believe you! It's still very, very hard to provide users with information which will let them evaluate your product and determine that it is, in fact, a quality product worth paying lots of money for.

App Stores (not just Apple's) have also served to erode the perception of value any one app (or game) provides as well, IMO.

Fun fact -- I have never bought a single app on Amazon's Android App Store even though I fire it up every day to see what I can get for free. Why buy an app for $1-10 dollars (even if I may get that amount of enjoyment/practical use out of it) when it MIGHT BE FREE tomorrow?

The same thing holds to a lesser extent on those giant Steam sales. I never buy any games on Steam full price even if I want to play them badly because I know if I wait a few months I'll be able to get them for pennies on the dollar in some crazy sale or other.

As a consumer this is great for me. As a developer, not so much.

> Paying for an app based on effort going into making it is nonsense. An app should be paid for based on the value it provides.

The price of an app (or anything, really) is based on both. It's not dictated by the supply curve or the demand curve; it's dictated by the intersection of the curves. This argument was settled centuries ago.

I'm the author of the above post.

I am in fact making a living off of making indie games, and I admit the market is now in fact better than it was ever before (in sheer size).

However, we keep seeing people gushing all over the various bundles and steam sales & with little to no discussion of the possible long term negatives.

EDIT: although you are right that there is a lot of competition making games, there isn't that much competent competition.

You're still complaining that other people are pursuing a product marketing / sales strategy at your expense. Your objection to this perfectly normal state of affairs might lead one to infer that you're suggesting indie game developers had an informal agreement to set a minimum price for their products* or some nonsense like that... as if such a thing would even be achievable in the current indie game sales environment.

(* http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/15/1.html )

I'm not saying we should set up a minimum price or any such thing, nor that all bundles must be stopped.

The only thing I'm talking about is that amidst all the praise we should think about the possibly negative long-term effects of the race to the bottom[1].

I'm not presenting any grand scheme to solve it, only pointing out that there is a dynamic at hand that I think is not all good.

[1] see the situation at the app store for what a possible future might look like.

In any competitive environment, like game development, a tiny minority will win. I don't understand why that then gets drawn to "bundle sales aren't good for most...". I was never exposed to indie games until the Humble Bundle, for example.

Competition leaves a majority that does not win. This is true in capitalism, nature, sports, you name it. Whether that is a good or bad thing is separate, but I don't think it needs to be extrapolated to "bundles and Steam aren't good for most". Competition itself is not good for "most".

Boo-hoo, prices have droped. Guess what? So have the costs of developing and publishing your game!

I understand the price drop is not proportional to the cost decrease, but that's not even important.

The people behind Steam or Humble Bundle are showing great creativity and forward thinking, creating viable businesses (if we can call Humble Bundle a business) by selling 1-2$ games.

What this rant is saying is basically that competition is better and cheaper, it's so unfair.

Saying that indie games used to sell for 10-15$ does not make it better. It was viable 5 years ago, it's not anymore. Period. Prices of blank DVDs have dropped drastically in the past years. You don't hear DVD manufacturers complain about the price-drop or make claims about the 'industry'.

I understand that the author is raising an otherwise rarely discussed issue. I apologize for the harsh tone of my comment, but globally, the message is the same: Stop nagging and do things differently. Your competitors understood that and are moving on!

    What this rant is saying is basically that 
    competition is better and cheaper, it's so unfair.

Nope. What I'm saying is that the race to the bottom hurts all of us except the king-makers (and their few appointed kings) in the long run.

It's the same deal as wallmart moving into town and driving all the mom&pop shops downtown out of business.

The result is the concentration of power - it is already almost impossible (baring a handful of outliers) to make a successful indie game without going through steam (and giving valve their 30-40% cut).

Bah, WalMart. Your premise that "it harms all of us except the king-makers" is fundamentally garbage. WalMart benefits hundreds of millions of ordinary everyday people to the tune of billions of dollars, and every dollar that someone saves by having their groceries shipped with a more efficient supply chain is a dollar they can spend on things which are meaningful to their lives. WalMart's positive impact on the US economy is bigger than the last recession.

Would you approve of a 10% tax on groceries for the poor? Because that's essentially what you're calling for when you call out WalMart.

I suppose it's easy to bitch about the "king-makers" when your own little barony is disrupted.

Not saying it's all bad.

Just saying it's not all good either, and that unlike walmart I rarely see any possible negative effect discussed.

First, the customers are the actual king-makers. In the end, if something isn't what lots of people want, lots of people won't buy it. In any given moment, what people want is something that is out of anyone's control (and this is true whether you're talking about a single developer or a giant group of them banded together in a corporation).^ This is broader than just stuff that you buy. Introspect for a moment, right now: could someone get you to want to listen to music you detest, without forcing you by planting electrodes in your brain? Or to any music at all, if you aren't in the mood? What about our romantic and sexual lives? You can't control who or what someone else wants, nor should you.

Remember that games compete with a whole world of stuff out there that's not on your phone or computer or game console. When people aren't playing video games, it's because they're doing something else that they chose to do, such as going to work, out to a restaurant, on a hike, for a drive, kayaking, listening to a recorded lecture, making dinner at home, etc. For all of recorded history, up until the last 35 years or so, people didn't play video games. You're not up against a company that's trying to keep you down: you're up against the actual desires of every single person that would never buy your product, even if they were somehow made fully aware of its existence.

It might be hard for you to imagine that the game you work on will never be important to a huge number of people, but you have to get over it. No one owes anyone else a living, no matter who they are, or how much they need it. Anything less means enslaving at least one person, to some degree, to the will of another.

^In the long term, what someone wants ultimately stems from ideas a person chooses to hold, which they apply in the course of dealing with the environment around them.

And I'm still convinced that there is a market for 10-15$ games. It's just that today's customer won't pay that much for the cute 2d physics game, or the classic reproduction of Super Mario in Flash.

I believe there's a range in between the 0.99$ Pacman on Android and the 70$+ new Assasin's Creed. I believe that a dedicated team of indie developers could pull-off a a modern game worth of that price range.

    It might be hard for you to imagine that the 
    game you work on will never be important to 
    a huge number of people, but you have to get 
    over it. No one owes anyone else a living, 
    no matter who they are, or how much they need 
    it.

It's not about me personally.

My last game is still paying my bills and was played by more than half a million people.

The sad fact of the matter is that "being successful" goes beyond making a good product. A team/person can create a phenomenal indie game but if they don't have the proper skills/hookups to market the product where people can find them they're dead in the water. Others that build a worse product but are able to get it out there will win. Apple has shown how marketing can be greater than engineering in many regards.

It sounds like people want to blame bundle providers for picking some over the others but how is that their fault? If the humble bundle crew finds a set of excellent games (I've yet to be disappointed by their packs) who are we to ridicule if their selections neglected other good games? I'm sorry but that's life in competition.

A big part of this too is that there's boatloads of indie games out there. But there's only a small dingy of good ones. Everything believes that their game is worthy of the throne but very few are as developers often view their work through rose tinted monitors.

Life is what life is: some win and some lose. There is no entitlement here where hard work guarantees a reward; there is no 1:1 relationship like in the games people are making.

Personally though? I feel that if bundles weren't to exist then even fewer indie games would receive recognition than we have now. Out of the 5 indie packs I've purchased I had only previously owned 3 of the games (So that's about a 3/20 ratio give or take). I'll take our current system over the alternative.

I'm not blaming the bundle guys for their selection nor do i wish for an alternative system where steam and bundles didn't exist.

I am merely saying there is also a long term downside to the industry in reducing the expected value of games in general (one we can see even more extremely in the app store).

As a consumer, I can confirm this phenomenon. I just don't pay more than 5 bucks on steam for anything anymore. I wait until the game I want is on sales for 2 or 3 bucks.

Well I guess the question is if there were not any sales would you buy the game at all?

I find myself buying many titles because of a good sale that I otherwise would have skipped.

Steam sales are what convinced me to stop pirating games. I'm perfectly happy picking up 1+ year old games on sale for under $15 (and usually much less). Doing this I usually buy about 6 - 10 games a year, and that's about all I have time to play. Heck, I've actually gone overboard the last couple of sales and I currently have 9 games waiting to be played (4 of which are indie titles).

I see where you're coming from though. It sucks when you put your heart and soul into something, and then you gently release it out into the world like a smiling parent only to then watch it be mauled by a cruel and unforgiving world.

The fact of the matter is there are so many great indie games out there, and only so many gaming hours in a day and so little money in my wallet.

Much likewise, I have two categories on steam:

* Stuff I buy on sale because it looks ok and at that price it's nice. That makes up 90% of my library

* Stuff I buy right at release because I want it now because it looks/feels/seems that awesome. Recent examples in that category are Binding of Isaac and Bastion, which I bought at release.

Binding of Isaac and Bastion had a fair bit of hype surrounding them at launch; is it fair to say that this is the case for all indie games you bought at launch?

Yes and no, I obviously have to know about the game to buy it at launch. And I have to be confident it's not a halfway chance of shooting myself in the foot. This has improved since I started regularly reading RPS, but before that Steam Sales were actually a great way to discover small Indie games: they're often featured pretty prominently, and /r/gaming and neogaf tend to have massive reco threads around sales, that's how I discovered gems like Atom Zombie Smasher.

But I tend to buy indie games at launch more often than "big name" $60 stuff.

I've toyed with the idea of creating a service that aggregates the game reviews of several years ago. Then I would only read those and get the "brand new" games for five bucks.

Interesting. Make the site where you only review games once they get below a certain price threshold. Pull prices from amazon and reviews from the normal places. Let the user use slider(s) and order highest rated in a price range.

Review the game right away, THEN put in the threshold control. Let the user decide with the price threshold what reviews to see. Once the price/quality falls within his criteria, he'll see the review.

You can do that by going into e.g. Metacritic's advanced search [1] and setting the date range.

[1]: http://www.metacritic.com/advanced-search

Good idea, thanks!

The humble bundles and steam sales got me back into gaming, and moreover, into buying instead of stealing. And into sending games as presents.

But, apparently, my attention and money is no good to indie game developers because I'm not willing to shovel $50 bills at them.

It's not. Did you read the article? Only a small slice of the very small amount of money goes back to the game developers, and then those developers are the top 1%. The rest get very little.

I think his point has merit, that its limiting the amount of good games that come out. It's just too risky of a proposition to develop an indie game.

It's all very interesting, but personally I don't care. It's games... these efforts aren't terribly useful to society. They should live and be well, but we don't need to be all that concerned about "saving the poor indie game developers". These people could easily make tons of money developing other things, but they choose to pursue their dream of game development. They don't need to be coddled.

    personally I don't care. It's games... 
    these efforts aren't terribly useful to society.

I disagree- unless you think movies, music, books and art also aren't terribly useful to society?

Selling your content for peanuts at predictable intervals isn't a viable long run business model? Who would have guessed.

Apparently not many, as I got quite a lot of resistance to the idea that it might be harmful in the long term (in places other than HN).

I suspect that's mostly from players who like getting games for cheap.

We're working on a pricing model at my startup (BitGym) which should route around this problem and both pay or partner developers more than 1.99/game and not make us kingmakers. It's different, but very fair and will earn developers above the median of their releases on steam/app stores. This race to the bottom in other spaces should only serve to help us find more developer partners.

I realize that sounds like a plug.. I guess what I'm trying to say is read the landscape and adapt!

I was expecting an article about how the Humble Bundles discourage repeat customers from paying more than the average, or how Indie Royale essentially sets a hard limit to the amount of money they can possibly bring in.

Not the case!

I would however love to read your thoughts on those matters if you'll blog about them :)

I won't join into the chorus about marketing being the key (it really is), but I did see this: "We're the creators of the critically-acclaimed iOS game, '100 Rogues'". I bought that game on sale for iOS -- after it had been updated a few times -- and I'm not sure what "critically-acclaimed" means. It had bugs out the wazoo, barely any variety in items/monsters/levels, and its non-standard UI had frustrating quirks.

If you have neither a polished product nor any real marketing, is it truly any wonder you're not selling well?

I've bought every humble bundle, but never played a single game. They wouldn't have got that money from me otherwise, because I normally wouldn't purchase the game.

Steam isn't producing a "race to the bottom". What it's done is increase supply. Unless there's been a massive surge in demand (there hasn't; player time is finite), prices have to drop accordingly to compete.

Years ago, I'd be willing to pay $20 for an indie game after playing the Shareware trial and deciding that I liked it enough that I wanted to play the whole thing. That situation likely existed because I wasn't spending my gaming time playing some other title. These days, I have more games on my backlog than I have time for, so your indie title could be priced at $0.50 and I wouldn't care - if I don't have time to play it, it's worthless to me.

If I have to choose between spending my playtime on Assassin's Creed (which I know is going to be an AAA title, but for which I pay $40-$60) and Indie Button Masher (which may or may not be of dubious quality and/or play-length, for which I pay $10-$20), which do you think I'm going to plunk down for?

There are more AAA titles than ever on the market - this fall alone has been one of the biggest quarters for AAA titles in video game history - and it's not that I'm Mr. Stingy Customer who doesn't want to pay for your games. It's that I'm Mr. Spending My Gaming Time On AAA Titles, and if you want me to spend that time on your game instead, it had better be ready to deliver equivalent value-per-dollar.

Let's look at some of the indie games in my Steam list which I got on Steam sales or in bundles.

  Super Laser Racer - 11 minutes played
  Steel Storm: Burning Retribution - 42 minutes played
  Sanctum - 4 hours played
  Machinarium - 32 minutes played
  HOARD - 77 minutes played
  Hammerfight - 21 minutes played
  Gish - 20 minutes played
  Crayon Physics Deluxe - 47 minutes played
  Bullet Candy - 36 minutes played

Now let's look at where I'm spending my time:

  Mass Effect 2 - 96 hours played
  Team Fortress 2 - 104 hours played
  Portal 2 - 27 hours played
  Deus Ex: Human Revolution - 29 hours played

And to be fair, there are some games like Minecraft (140h), Magicka (45h), and Terraria (48h) that I have spent a LOT of time on. I also bought them for full price on the recommendations of friends.

I don't have a vacuum of time that I'm trying to fill with more games. The reason that Indie Button Masher isn't worth $15 to me anymore is because I have so many other high-quality games to spend my time on. There are occasional shining examples (like Magicka) are were well-worth the full $20 + whatever else I spent on DLC for them, but I bought them because my friends recommended them and assured me that they were worth my time and money, not because it was on a Steam sale.

If there's a game I kinda want, I'll wait on a Steam sale for it, but not because I'm being cheap, but because I have plenty of other games to play in the meantime. If there's a title that I really want, I'll buy it outright for full price. DXHR, Arkham City, Skyward Sword, and Magicka all fall under that heading, for example.

I spend more money than ever on games, thanks to Steam. Just because I'm not spending it on your games doesn't mean Steam is slowly killing the market.

I think it just makes it more "difficult" - that is, developers have to make a greater effort to stand out. I'll admit, I mostly buy games off Steam when they're cheap, and I've bought every bundle because it's cheap. But, I will buy a good indie game when I see it.

Most recently, I preordered Dungeon Defenders full price and ended up satisfied. I won't go out and spend money because it's an indie game though. Dungeon Defenders caught my eye and persuaded me to take the plunge.

In fact, it's probably because of the sales/bundles that I'm more open to purchase indie games now. I also helped fund Lifeless Planet and the NASA MMO, because the sales/bundles showed me the value of indie games. The "problem" is that indie developers have to work harder to get my attention now, either with an interesting premise (the Kickstarter games I mentioned) or interesting gameplay (Dungeon Defender).

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