Ha, sorry for the heated rhetoric. The whole reason
Infinitron dragged me into this thread is that he knows that I get riled upon on the subject.
Still, I guess I still am more or less here:
(1) The short period where Steam opened up its market to some, but not all, small indie developers strikes me as one of those short periods where if you were in the right place at the right time, you got
absurdly lucky. The idea that a so-so indie developer (because that's what we were/are at Wormwood Studios) could release a retro adventure and sell >200k copies is bonkers. Even WEG didn't have much name recognition then. When WEG signed us and Resonance, Dave hadn't
grossed $100k on any of his games. Primordia has grossed around $650k. As someone who has missed lots of other boats in life, I'm glad I got on that one. But the overall experience I've had in life is that
this era is not an "indiepocalypse" --
that era was an "indiebonanza." This is what has
always been normal. In almost every field of endeavor, even very talented people tend to make
negative money at their passion projects. For instance, the median passionate violinist probably only ever plays the violin to his or her very small group of friends who play classical music together. The median passionate poet probably has his poems read by no one other than the editor of his local poetry zine. Over the course of decades, my very skilled grandfather turned hundreds of bowls and plates on a lathe, made hundreds of pieces of glazed pottery, whittled dozens of love spoons, and probably sold 10 or 20 of his things, likely at a local Elks fundraiser.
(2) The more of an engagement your creation demands, the fewer people will engage with it. It is much easier to look at a picture on DeviantArt or to read a tweet than it is to buy, download, install, and play a game on Steam. It doesn't matter how cheap, how small, how short. It still is a big investment. Every single game on Steam is tl;dr. Without knowing more about what game "felip" was posting about, I can't really say whether I'm surprised that it got no plays at all. Again, I direct you to legal citations. The average law review article is written by a tenured professor at an elite law school with the assistance of many research assistants of fine pedigrees. It is combed over by editors at the law journal, put on Westlaw where every lawyer can access it, and printed and bound in volumes in dozens of law libraries around the country. The median number of citations for a law review article
is zero. I'm not sure why we would expect someone to play Omnochronom. At a glance, it looks bad. Why would anyone go farther than that glance?
(3) "So UIHY has 5% the reviews (and presumably sales) as Primordia. Why did the devs decide to make a game 20x as shitty as Primordia?" I know, it's like this park has really gone to hell since it stopped being a country club! (Though, of course, different devs working in a different genre might have made a difference, too.)
(4) "What this really is about for me is that I've wanted to go into games my whole life." It's too bad you weren't able to release your game in the country club days, but almost no one got a chance to. The reality is that "indiepocalypse" = "almost any idiot who wants to make a game can do so, has a means to distribute it, and likely will get at least some players." Setting aside the very brief indie bonanza, you are in the best moment in all of history for someone with that aspiration. Almost everyone born before you had it worse: hardware was more expensive, game development tools were much more expensive and much more difficult, distribution was nearly impossible, publicity was non-existent. When I made games, even very fun games, back in computer lab in the early 1990s, it was to the delight of all my classmates, but that was it. When I wanted to make a jRPG from ~1992 to ~1998, this required learning a programming language, trying (and failing) to make graphics or to hire artists, etc., etc. I never got anywhere at it. But I knew a guy who did, a Japanese programmer named Takamoto Miura. He actually managed to do the coding, art, writing, everything for a Romancing Saga style RPG. AFAIK, it sold zero copies. Today, anyone can buy RPG Maker in a sale on Steam for $20, can actually
distribute the game through Steam, and can get dozens, hundreds, thousands of players.
Imagine two worlds. In world one, there are 100 M&Ms and they were all shared by five people. 20 M&Ms each! What a snack! What a world! In world two, there are 500 M&Ms but they are shared by 100 people. Only 5 M&Ms! What a tragedy! But this is only a tragedy if you thought that you would be one of the five people in world one. Otherwise, you have gone from never even tasting an M&M in world one to at least getting a nibble in world two. I'm fairly sure if the Omnochronom developer had been working in TurboPascal and distributing through binaries on rec.games.* or on MadMonkey.com or something, he wouldn't have gotten
more players than today. (He probably never would've finished the game in the first place.)
Take just AGS (Adventure Game Studio). A good number of people made AGS games before Steam. Very, very few people played
even the most popular. Do you think it was better to make games then than now? Just go look at the AGS awards from 2006 (
http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/wiki/AGS_Awards_2006) vs 2016 (
http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/wiki/AGS_Awards_2016), the last year that they even permitted successful commercial games to compete -- that's how much better it's gotten. Three of the top five games got commercial releases with some success, and Kathy Rain has been a runaway hit. Which era do you think was better for someone who wanted to make a point and click adventure his whole life?