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Comment by screye | Hacker News Reader

Economies of scale ruined it.

Good indie games like Super meat boy & Hollow Knight take more human resources than AAA-gamechanger Doom did, back in the day. Your 'kind of useful but fun/dirty' hacker project either becomes ad-infested to survive or is too-useful and gets copied by a big-company. If your problem is cool enough and you can solve it, investors will throw millions at you in hopes of making a global success. Hard to say no to that.

There is no moderate success anymore. Economies of scale end up being all-or-nothing style situation. Just as local mom-n-pops places have gotten replaced by much cheaper national chains and building your own house is now a thing of the past because the costs for getting past regulation only make sense at scale.

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> Good indie games like Super meat boy & Hollow Knight take more human resources than AAA-gamechanger Doom did

I just read "Masters of Doom", and this struck me as wrong. People tend to only remember Carmack and Romero, but Doom had a team about as big as Super Mario World, another AAA-gamechanger. So I looked it up.

15 people worked on the OG DOS version of Doom. Many more of course when you start including developers and producers on its ports and localizations.

The crediting of Super Meat Boy is more complex. If you exclude the guest artists who did one-off pieces, then the original Windows version comes in at 7 people. This balloons to 48 when you include the guest art, XBox port staff, and localization staff.

All numbers from MobyGames.

> 15 people worked on the OG DOS version of Doom. Many more of course when you start including developers and producers on its ports and localizations.

While Super Meat Boy was mainly made by (AFAIK) two people, the original DOOM was made by an id software that had just 10 employees - this is mentioned in the Doom 3 manual. But this also includes everyone on id, in an article about Quake some months ago Romero mentioned that "We got Doom done mostly with only five people, and then we got a sixth person during the last few months. With Quake, there were only nine of us, but by that time everyone on the team was awesome".

However it isn't just the number of people but also how long it took to make the game. Doom was made in less than a year (or about a year if you include the engine research that went into Shadowcaster) but Super Meat Boy was made in a bit less than two years (and that was with already having Meat Boy as a template).

Heck the original Meat Boy flash game was basically just two or three people. And that alone was enough to get everyone interested.

There's a distinction between something like gaming or a mom-'n-pop restaurant vs. business software or building your own house. The first category still exists much more than the second; I think the difference is whether taste is the dominant feature of the product.

Indie games aren't being regulated out of existence, and they don't need much scale to survive, compared to something like a five-and-dime shop; they're almost purely about taste.

Building your own house is partly about taste, but there are a ton of physical constraints and different specialized skills involved in making it work (plus the regulatory concerns), so generally taste takes a back-seat, and the beautiful houses are old ones that were grandfathered-in.

An independent restaurant is somewhere in between; you have to meet health department standards, and you have to make money in order to keep it open, but past a minimum bar of safety and comfort, your customers care mainly about the food and atmosphere and are willing to pay for it. If it were all about scale, McDonald's would be the only thing left.

We still get indy games year over year that take the industry by storm.

factorio, stardew valley, undertale, don’t starve, super hot, goat simulator, cup head, rocket league, kerbal space program and so many others.

heck steam, Sony and Microsoft are competing to distribute this IP and open it up across platforms and it’s never been better.

Your point kind of proves the point of the GP: there is almost no middle ground. The differences between rates of success are orders of magnitude. Order N doesn't break even, N+1 almost makes you a millionaire and could effectively set you for life.

Some of the examples you give also had quite a history of a backing in some form, which is a totally different animal compared to a "I wanna make a game!" indie developer today with zero network and zero funding.

There are a ton more games out there, i just know what i know and what i've played. I'm an old fart that remembers shareware and buying floppy disks with trials and getting on BBS's to download more... the entire experience of gaming has never been better. I have GamePass today and can play many of those titles on PC/Xbox and the developers seem to be doing well.

All of those games you've mentioned are at least 5 years old now, many coming up to a decade old if you count their early access.

There was a golden age of indie gaming 5-10 years ago, but it does feel like that has passed somewhat.

Golden age was more around the time of Thomas Was Alone, Super Meat Boy, Spelunky, Binding of Isaac etc. There was a low barrier to entry, but also a low saturation. One good piece of polish or gimmick was enough to hook people. This was also around the time many of the titles mentioned by GP got initial backing and before people got extremely skeptical of crowdfunding games.

Since then the market has gotten way more saturated. Games have gotten way higher demands on all three fronts of polish (gameplay, audio, visual). If not a roguelike / player-generated content game / simple loop, lack of content is even more killer (which is why so many indies are either arcade, sims or roguelikes, compared to AAA games). Even several of the titles mentioned in the comments would rather come out with sequels building upon their success or games highly similar to what they made before, than experiment. Most indies I checked who deviated too far from their big hit (devs from Castle Crashers, Deathroad to Canada, Binding of Isaac) had nowhere near the same level of success. Not too bad considering they can coast by just off of their main hit's success, but it does illustrate the lack of moderate success.

Or you can try make a big hit with a meme game (anime optional) and be forgotten in the next 2-5 years.

Games nowadays are often updated for a long time (e.g. Factorio), so the initial launch date is less relevant. I would argue that indie games are doing really well right now, and the AAA gaming companies' reputations are in the gutter.

EA, DICE, Take Two, Ubisoft, Bioware, Konami, even the once vaunted CDProjekt Red's reputations are in tatters (of course, they still sell tons of games). Gamers are tired of copy and paste money grabs, full of bugs on launch and overhyped to the moon.

The accessibility of game development tools to almost anyone globally, the pandemic, and the relative ease of digital distribution is a boon to indie game makers (Steam, Epic, Itch, GOG, Indiegala....).

Valheim, Among Us, Project Zomboid (launched 2013, becoming much more popular recently), Escape from Tarkov are all examples of indie games doing well. Check out /r/patientgamers and related subs and you'll see more examples.

>Gamers are tired of copy and paste money grabs, full of bugs on launch and overhyped to the moon.

If this was actually true, the companies you mentioned wouldn't be selling a ton of games and gambling gimmicks didn't need to get banned for companies to stop putting them in their games. In reality, successful companies are better off iterating on their existing games and systems a few times until the sales die down, then maybe release a few later for nostalgia and move on. It's much less effort, less risky, and it plays better into the expectations most people have.

This has been going on for well over a decade. It's not like people haven't had the chance to see the trends yet.

That's just all i could think of.. there are many more out right now

Great list. I would add Hades and Slay the Spire.

I would be reluctant to refer to a team of 20 developers working on 1 game for 3-ish years full-time as 'indie'.

That being said, supergiant is a rare gem. Shows how effective lean organizations with narrow concerns can be without needing to be abusive.

> mom-n-pops places have gotten replaced

This is demonstrably false in my metropolitan area, we even have a few which are supermarket sized. They're often ethnic. Read an essay somewhere a month or two ago about how the supply chain economics are different, can't find it now. Think Zillow vs a guy with a lawnmower in the back of his pickup truck.

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