Jeff Vogel: Indie Bubble Is About To Burst

Spiderweb Software founder Jeff Vogel believes that the rise of indie games is just a bubble that is about to burst.

In a lengthy poste on his blog, Vogel, who has been in the industry for 20 years, argued that the lucrative success of games such as Braid, World of Goo and Castle Crashers has prompted an avalanche of new developers to flood the market with similar titles and drive the value of indie games to the ground.

Recent surveys have revealed that as much as 40% of Steam purchases are never launched at all. Vogel believes that the reason behind that is simple: user never wanted those games in the first place.

“Indies now do a huge chunk (if not most) of their business through sales and bundles, elbowing each other out of the way for the chance to sell their game for a dollar or less,” a-t-il expliqué. “Indie gaming started out as games written with passion for people who embraced and loved them. Now too much of it is about churning out giant mounds of decent but undifferentiated product to be bought for pennies by people who don’t give a crap either way.”

“It’s not sustainable. It just can’t last,” asserted Vogel. “Bundles used to earn a ton, but they don’t anymore. If making pennies a copy selling your games in 12 packs is the main source of a developer’s income, that developer is going to disappear. Also, all of the bundles and sales encourage users to expect to pay a price too low to keep us in business. It’s just the same race to the bottom as in the iTunes store, except this time we were warned, and we did it anyway.”

“And hey, I’m not blameless in this. My games have been in a million sales and bundles. It’s what you have to do now, and I’m just as at fault as everyone else.”