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.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.
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.
Could be that or it could be AI slop games.
Shovelware.
Your avatar reminds me i need to play neverwinter nights again when i get ny steam deck.
Deekin agrees!
The market being completely oversaturated doesn’t seem like a golden age to me
Yeah, I’ve heard of a similar ‘golden age’ of 1983.
Seems more like age of slop no one sees or plays.
90% of them are hentai AI slop garbage.
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.
A ratio between hours played and sale counts would be a better metric.
Boring grind and hours of fun are tracked just the same
It doesn’t really matter for the purposes of filtering out slop, although you’d need to account for people like me with huge libraries with tons of good games we’ve never played.
No single metric is going to give a good picture of what’s good or not. You’d need several layers of filters.
Number of people still playing over a year after launch probably isn’t a bad one to look at.
I saw one game that was by 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.
More likely "Simulator"s and AI-gen retro/2D games. Most are usually just copy and paste of something that was successful but with different skin/title/theme.
The proof is in the tags and search filters using Steam.
Although Hentai may appear at the top of New Releases it’s because those trend with higher sales.
Visual Novels are probably in a close 2nd and most of those are now AI-gen now so the pump is flowing fast.
I keep seeing that AI simulator shit, too. It’s really irritating. Especially since streamers play the games and the content keeps spreading.
What is an AI simulator? Is it a simulation game made using gen-AI, or a simulation game where you interact with gen-AI?
Lol, I wasn’t super clear on that.
It’s a game like Water Park Simulator where you run a water park. At least some of the images are clearly generated with AI, and I’m certain they vibe coded the game as well; used an LLM to generate some or all of the code.
Yuck, no thanks! But thanks for the clarification🌊
The hentai ai slop seems to make the front page, so it seems to be doing fine.
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?
Honestly something like that I’d personally like a monthly roundup in the regular gaming communities. No need for a separate one imo.
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.
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.
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.
I have a question for devs. I don’t want to support US companies, but I’d like to support US individuals artists/creators. I dunno if you’re from the US, but is it possible for someone to wire money to a dev and the dev give me a free copy on Steam thereby avoiding the 30% cut? I’m assuming that’s against the EULA…
It’s against the EULA, but nobody is going to get caught. The main issue is that it’s a pain in the ass and doesn’t scale. You can do this for one person, but most people aren’t going to be cool sending a payment to an address and just waiting around, hoping that they get a key. This is why Steam exists. There are other services that do the same thing that are not US based. GOG is based in Poland, for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GOG.com
Ah, thanks. I thought so. I use GOG for this exact reason but not all the games I’m interested in are available there. I’ll just have to play my backlog for now haha.
Unfortunately GOG are very selective in the games they allow, you kind of already have to be a successful indie on Steam before they’ll consider you.
How do you mean? You have to apply to get your game there and they reject it if it isn’t popular already?
I dig it. Wishlisted.
I have a rare disease where I can only buy Steam games that are on sale, but the next time that happens I’m all over it.
Haha, thanks man! Completely understand. Keep us in mind around March 5th for related reasons 😉
Looks cool. I wishlisted it and will try the demo when I get a chance. How’s it run on the steamdeck?
Thank you! 🙂 Works great on Steam deck actually! 🙂 Just need to adjust the auto aim a bit in the options to get the best results.
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?!”
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.
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.
It’s how I feel about anime.
Can’t even watch everything.
😭
I mean, I only have so much money free to spend on hobbies. I will gladly support indie devs when I want a new game, but I’m not in a position to just be buying them for the sake of buying them
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.
