Sunlight

The number of indie games being released on Steam and consoles has sky-rocketed this last year. At the same time, the amount of money being spent on indie games doesn't really seem to increase. In other words: the average indie game is making much less money! SteamSpy recently released some graphs that show that while total sales for all games together are pretty stable, median sales per game have dropped enormously. You only need to open Steam's list of new releases to see why: so many new games launching every day! Five years ago only a couple of games launched on Steam per week. Now there are dozens launching daily , and they're all competing for the same players. The average income of a new indie game has dropped so far that some even call this current trend the 'indiepocalypse'. There are several reasons we're seeing this now. The most obvious reason is that marketplaces like Steam have made worldwide distribution easy. They have become more and more open...

Most multiplayer games die within a week. Not because the multiplayer doesn't work, but because there aren't enough people playing online. If you look for opponents and don't find any, then the multiplayer mode might just as well not have been made. This is even more of a waste because online multiplayer is so much work to develop, as I recently explained . The vast majority of online multiplayer games ever made isn't playable any more because of this. Partially this is because not all games can be a success, but there is a much more important reason: often the matchmaking is poorly designed for a smaller playerbase. With clever choices multiplayer can flourish even with a tiny community. For an average indie game that is doing okay but isn't a big hit it is pretty decent to have 40 simultaneous players a few weeks after launch. Our own game Awesomenauts did really well so our daily peak is usually above 1000 players, but expecting such numbers is unrealistic for m...