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Did you know? Reading the article explains the headline, I recommend doing so... well, to be honest, I recommend reading the report the article is based on.
He says "Indie golden age" since the number of games with 1000 reviews or more made a big jump from 337 in 2022. This is also an increase percentage-wise despite the huge increase in games overall:
This is all games, the article focuses on the indie portion (as decided by the writer, not steam tag) later on.
The problem is a lot of the games will be shovelware that no one in there right mind is interested in playing. It would be nice if we could filter out to only serious attempts. Because that's the metric that's more relevant. Of all of the games released by developers that were really trying to release a game, and not just an asset flip, how many of those games succeeded.
Like filtering out games with 1000 reviews by the end of the year? Like he says in the article?
No that's just filtering out successful games from the unsuccessful ones.
I want to filter out the shovelware from the data set so we actually know what the ratio of successful to unsuccessful ones are. Since it's not useful for me to know that shovelware isn't successful.
The market being completely oversaturated doesn't seem like a golden age to me
Seems more like age of slop no one sees or plays.
If you read the article, the percentage that reached that threshold rose.
Yeah, I've heard of a similar ‘golden age’ of 1983.
Apples and Onions. Not even close to the same situation, since we don't rely on physical copies anymore, and the physical copies that are produces are such a limited run that they are basically collectors items or data archivist / ownership enthusiast items.
Also that crash only really affected the US. The gaming market as a whole just kind of absorbed the losses, and got stronger for the video game comeback in 1986 in the US.
90% of them are hentai AI slop garbage.
I saw one game that was a 5 minute black screen with someone talking teenage-level philosophy. There was a handful of clicks to make in the whole playthrough.
Steam has a lot of low-quality games. The volume of stuff shipped with Synty Studios assets from Humble Bundles is crazy.
Indie games are doing great. Shovelware is doing meh as it always should be.
The sad thing is that on some level indie games do get pushed out by shovelware on a certain level.
Number of games released was never really a good metric. Review count is probably a bit better, but people buy games released before the current year too.
Right? This just reminds me of how platforms were flooded with clones of clones of clones when mobile games started becoming a thing back in the 2010s.
RTFA.
Shovelware.
Your avatar reminds me i need to play neverwinter nights again when i get ny steam deck.
It's 64bit now & we can do so much more with it now due to the other internal updates.
Good to hear, I may have to reinstall it!
Deekin agrees!
Meanwhile I don't really play games anymore.
I'd rather spend my free time... learning Turkish. It's like puzzle, but a bit harder to make sense out of it :)
Could be that or it could be AI slop games.
With all the layoffs of tech workers, theyve been pouring into more creative outlets like game dev.
I bought a bunch of games in the last year that are pretty niche and fantastic, but also under 1000+ reviews.
What's a good Lemmy community to share them to people who will appreciate it?
Maybe something like patient gamers but for indie games?
Ugh, I made a Cheap Games community on the now defunct lemm.ee . It was nice as a record of what I liked (until it died...), but man it was like pulling teeth to get myself to write a couple paragraphs mini-review of new games.
Honestly something like that I'd personally like a monthly roundup in the regular gaming communities. No need for a separate one imo.
I don't think the author knows what a golden age is
Have you read the article or the report it is based on? I think he makes his point quite clear.
Fair enough. Let me change that up. I don't think the editor who wrote the clickbait headline knows what a golden age is.
People stress out about having too big of a backlog, who cares? Support artists, buy indie games!
Hate to ask, but as an Indie dev, I'd love some support:
We made a cartoon network inspired RPG (am ex Cartoon Network dev). It's called:
Ink Inside
It gets lost in Steam discovery constantly as it's combat is too unique to classify as more than "action RPG."
Several 9/10 review scores. Brian David Gilbert as a lead VA, with 11 others
42 reviews on Steam.
Honestly, announce it on a gaming community here that allows promotion. And put it on GoG too. Some of use are trying to reduce our use of US tech or reduce use of monopolies.
Working on that actually! Specifically GoG and more outreach on Lemmy. And thanks for the advice! 🙂
We're probably going to be deleting our Tiktok soon to likewise reduce use of US tech. Which really sucks because it's the only place we have any traction atm.
Looks kinda cool, wishlisted for later.
Btw, a new Fediverse instance was recently setup for Indie Games https://indie-ver.se/ Why not try creating a community there, or if it's a bit too small see if the creators of the instance can make a "this is my indie game" type of community for self promotions.
Wait, co-op RPG? Split-Screen Co-op?
I'll buy it!
I mean, I'll need to find a friend but I'll think about that later.
Yep! Co-op OR single player. Player 2 has an AI that scales as you level, so it's still very fun as a solo experience 🙂
And it's a shared screen, kinda like a 2 player beat em up.
And co-op works over Steam remote play. Only 1 copy of the game needed!
We don't hear that in any other industry.
"My word. There's too much cake in this cake factory! And there's too much music out there! Oh no, MORE comic books?!"
I've said this about books, specifically since self-publishing and print-on-demand have saturated the market with garbage.
I say garbage and not slop because this was before AI even became a thing. I can't imagine how bad it is now, but fortunately I've broken my habit of hoarding books so it's not really something I notice anymore.
You will hear the same in pretty much any industry. Farmers get problems if their harvest is too abundant because that means that they have to sell at a loss when this happens, possibly banlrupting them. Digital products have less of an issue with this, because they don't have running costs (as long as there are no multiplayer servers needed) but it still becomes a problem for the individual devs who now have to compete with way more competitors than before.
It's how I feel about anime.
Can't even watch everything.
😭
I miss greenlight. We should go back to that. I'm already tired of the endless amounts of crap being put on Steam.
It's a good thing for a marketplace to have many options. As long as steam keeps discovery working well then its totally fine. Lots of people throw up their first game (from a game tutorial) onto steam as a learning experience, they aren't expecting to make any money. Posting your highschool programming project on steam feels cool.
Yeah... It's not indie golden age.
I guarantee you less than 1,000 of those were made by actual indie developers.
I'd more than willingly bet the rest are vibe-coded slop or unity asset-flips designed to look just enough like an actual game that you buy it and hopefully never bother to refund it.
Steam has had this problem for years, and AI slop has only exacerbated it.
On one hand, Silksong, BallxPit, Peak, Expedition 33, Dispatch, Blue Prince, Morsels, Rift of the Necrodancer....
On the other hand, ~20,000 games that don't have anyone playing them.