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Comment by ndiddy | Hacker News Reader

It's brought up, but the main point of the video is that RollerCoaster Tycoon was one of the last major retail games made by a handful of people (Chris Sawyer for design and programming, Simon Foster for graphics, Allister Brimble for sounds/music), and managed to become the best selling computer game of 1999 despite going up against games made by teams of at least a hundred people. That's what he means by the game being "the last of its kind".

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Minecraft?

Later in the video he discusses how times have changed once more, and solo developments turning it commercial hits is still possible. I do feel Minecraft was close enough to RTC to say that it never really stopped being possible.

But in general I think the video is just remarking how the industry evolved and it became significantly harder to compete against bigger studios in the 2000s and beyond. I think it is undoubtedly true that the benchmark for many types of games has risen beyond the capabilities of the average solo developer in terms of graphics, content and gameplay scope. But many types of games do not have the burden of high end graphics and a particularly motivated individual can still make breakthroughs.

It gets easier every year now, whereas for a while it was getting harder every year.

Retail can years after the original indie release

This still happens. Stardew Valley for example.

The author specifically hails that the sands shifted once systems like Steam opened up to enable the publisher-less world.

That one is popular, but certainly nowhere bear nr 1 in the charts.

It's still top 10 played on steam, which is incredible really, and while it might never be number 1 best seller in the short term, it's probably out-sold many of the games that did get "number 1" in the year it was released.

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