> I'm sitting here on a Friday night, working myself to to bone after my day job, trying my best to scrape a living from my indie games, trying to keep up with Apple, Google, Unity, Xcode, MacOS changes that happen so fast my head spins while performing worse on older devices.
I can’t help but shake my head when Indie game devs unload these sob stories trying to garner support. If it’s so hard for you then just stop making games.
I often get this whiff of entitlement from indies that we should be supporting them because they are small, often one man operations. Or that because they invested so much time and money building a game, they should deserve to get that back through sales.
But the world doesn’t need more indie game devs, the world needs better games. I doubt a game that hasn’t been updated in 2 years is any good or doesn’t have a million competitor clones by now.
> I doubt a game that hasn’t been updated in 2 years is any good or doesn’t have a million competitor clones by now.
That statement doesn't make any sense whatsoever. Games can be "finished products". Do you also think that movies and songs that haven't been updated aren't good?
There are plenty of games from the 80s, 90s, 2000s that are still selling today, in unmodified form, running via emulators.
And clones are 99.9% pure garbage that don't replace the real thing.
But at that point, a bunch of us moved our game purchases to indie games, specifically because they still act like products and not services.
Honestly, I'd rather play the original binary instead of some slapped together port to current unity + xcode. At best, the physics or something are slightly off. At worst, the game has major regressions that were introduced by the latest build.
I'm probably weird, but I like buying consoles toward the end of their lifecycles. That lets me limit myself to the top fraction of a percent of the games released over the last five-ish years, and still have a dozen titles to play.
“Finished product” games make most their money at the beginning of their life then peter out into a long tail of revenue that drips in slowly day by day, until it stops altogether or becomes negligible. This game dev has likely made as much as he will make from his game and it’s time to put it out to pasture and build a new game.
I can’t help but shake my head when Indie game devs unload these sob stories trying to garner support. If it’s so hard for you then just stop making games.
I often get this whiff of entitlement from indies that we should be supporting them because they are small, often one man operations. Or that because they invested so much time and money building a game, they should deserve to get that back through sales.
But the world doesn’t need more indie game devs, the world needs better games. I doubt a game that hasn’t been updated in 2 years is any good or doesn’t have a million competitor clones by now.