There Are Not “Too Many Games”: What The Indiepocalypse Panic Ignores
It’s the Indiepocalypse!! At least according to an ever-persistent hysteria that’s been buzzing around the sphere of independent videogames for the past handful of years. The market for independent games has rapidly exploded, especially on Valve’s PC digital distribution platform Steam. Steam’s quick change from a curatorial model to an open platform with little oversight has created digital storefronts that are incredibly crowded, where it’s hard for games without substantial budgets to get any visibility or traction. Games that could have probably garnered a substantial amount of money and attention prior to Steam’s change have now been washed away with a wave of a lot of other stuff. One recent iteration of this incredibly tedious conversation is an editorial from Polygon titled: “There are too many video games. What now?”
…and the problems start immediately with the title.
Author Steven Wright frames the issue, like many voices in games do, as if it’s a moral crisis to solve with the greatest urgency. The implied perception here for many videogame fans when they hear “too many games” is that storefronts are filled with low-quality cash-grabs, akin to the infamous Videogame crash of 1983. The videogame industry was still young in 1983, and the flood of cheap console clones and samey cash-ins meant to capitalize on the videogame craze at the time had started to alienate the public. This led to a temporary collapse of large portions of the industry — the home console industry, in particular. There is still a fear remaining from that time that today’s flood of PC games will result in a similar catastrophic collapse of the market.
But a massive wave of new creativity has also come along with this flood of games.
The current panic about “too many games” carries with it a notion that those who don’t have big enough budgets to make or promote their games don’t deserve a place in the market. But the wave of cheaply made corporate cash-ins that led to the crash of 1983 are not really analogous with small developers all trying to find a place to put their own visions of today. The sheer variety of types and styles of games that exist in the marketplace now would not even be remotely conceivable in 1983. Now, especially with the relative ease and access of software like Unity or Twine or Gamemaker, many new voices are throwing their hats in the ring. From any other perspective other than a failure of most of these to achieve large-scale commercial success or visibility, there are not too many games.
That is not to say that there aren't many problems with visibility, or problems of market overcrowding, problems of monopolistic content platforms, or problems with lack of effective curation. That’s not to say that there aren't plenty of exploitative business practices out there as well. Or poorly planned, poorly made projects, falsely advertised, or any number of other things that irk many gamers. The flood of these games runs the full gamut of quality, from total drivel to forgotten masterpieces. But it’s easy to forget how videogame marketing has been hyper-directed towards a very specific, heavily male “hardcore gamer” audience because of years of market research leading to the conclusion that this resulted in higher profits. This has created a culture that is very hostile to things that exist outside of its bounds; where there are a lack of established alternative niches that might be able to meaningfully track or appreciate all the different types of games coming out that now alienate that hardcore demographic.
Videogame culture, even on the independent side where artistic expression is supposedly more valued, is very much trapped inside a bubble where the hardcore gamer is king, and where business talk of metrics and data rules the day over conversations of artistic value. So those forgotten masterpieces tend to get thrown in the same pile as the soulless drivel without much notice.
Another question to ask about the “Indiepocalypse”, then, is: how did so many people get the idea that the purpose of making videogames was in finding a reliable business model for sustainability, rather than… you know, making good works of art?
I remember a very particular moment I had while attending the Game Developer’s Conference in 2016. I was sitting on a rock on the periphery of Yerba Buena Gardens, the park near the Moscone Center where GDC is held yearly in San Francisco. It was the last night of the conference and I was supposed to go to a party that evening. But right after dinner, I exploded with anxiety and decided I couldn't go. On that rock I had a total breakdown and was overcome with emotion. It was hard to explain or process any of this emotion at the time. Two years prior, at GDC 2014 I was approaching homelessness — I was only able to attend via a free pass and already living in the Bay Area. I had plenty of good reasons to be crying then, but I never really did. But this moment in 2016 was different.
By 2016, Indiepocalypse panic was in full swing. It felt that conversations at the conference broadly shifted from talk about new ideas or projects to questions like “how are you holding up?” between developers. Maybe subconsciously I asked that question too because the other substantial conversation happening was a growing obsession with trying to “solve” the increasingly confusing market with better business models and marketing strategies. This talk was always around in various forms pre-“Indiepocalypse”, but the amount of people who thought they had some sort of mystical key to turn in the lock of the market and magically reveal all of its secrets only became more insufferable.
It always felt like a good deal of the more visible indie devs were attempting to explore new artistic spaces more out of the dream that they could be a king of that space and strike it big financially, than to transform the overall artistic landscape. The indie game boom started around the same time as a huge global economic recession hit in 2008, and it felt like one of the few paths a creative person could take where there was potential to be genuinely successful. No doubt the massive success of Minecraft, or the still extremely respectable successes of games like Braid and Super Meat Boy helped that perception immensely. There was a small part of me, inspired by talks by people like Jonathan Blow, that thought my weird ideas could somehow catch on a little bit too. At the very least, indie games seemed like more of a sure bet for me to pursue as a career path than other creative fields I was interested in.
If you achieved any degree of minor success at that time, it was easy to think of yourself as one of The People: an ambassador into new space, a true explorer into a new Wild West of independent games. I often referred to this type of person as the “boy genius” because they were usually a particular type of young, ambitious, often feverishly egomaniacal man that dominated games and tech. Walking around a space like GDC, you could get a strong whiff of the vibe that whatever you’re talking about could be your big ticket to fame and fortune. This was true not only for the boy genius, but for basically everyone involved in every conversation I had, no matter how pleasant.
That little breakdown on the rock in 2016 is when it finally became clear to me that many of us had been existing in two parallel realities. Two identical-seeming conversations were happening: one was a conversation about ideas and ways to expand the medium artistically with the implicit understanding that you would be selling that idea to a large mass of people. Another was the same conversation without the desire to become massively popular or commercially successful.
In retrospect, that division between these two camps was always there. But very few were able to articulate it, because of the assumption that we all had the same goals. I was always broadly critical of indie game culture, yet I was still naive enough to think that a lot of people who were more interested in mass cultural exposure and fame would still be interested in going along with my weirder ideas. And many of them probably thought I was interested in going a far more mainstream direction than I had any interest in going. In their view — why would I be a part of this crowd if I wasn’t? We were strange bedfellows.
Eventually those two perspectives collided, and communities collapsed. This fault-line even existed among the queer and trans game developers I knew, many of whom who were more interested in getting mainstream exposure to their work than I was. Text-based games, “queer games”, “walking simulators” and other niches might have made some careers for a handful of people and made a lot of other reactionary gamers really mad, but at the end of the day they became just another market category. Depending on who you were, you either were happy about that or you weren’t.
The explosion of games out there meant a whole host of new things outside of the bubble began to define the culture of indie games. Being at GDC or knowing the right people didn’t give you the leverage that it once did. Now it was random forces of the market that determined a success, or maybe that the “right people” to know were totally different people now. Maybe they were streamers instead of game devs. Being at an award show around the “in-crowd” was no longer a ticket to success anymore.
I honestly thought this development was great. It was only by some immense luck and good timing that I managed to sneak my way inside the gates of an event like GDC with incredibly meager means. I was far more excited to see outsiders who weren’t imbued with the idea that being there entitled them into being “one of the special people” getting exposure. But many who were living inside of the gates did not seem to share those same feelings of excitement. If it wasn’t happening inside their own spaces with their own friends and acquaintances, many didn’t seem to want to know about it. And, to be fair, there was a lot of rightful anxiety that this shift away from conversations among a community of theoretically like-minded devs and into the world of streamers and internet personalities would create other negative consequences (which it has).
There is a fanatical desire among many who work in videogames to find new facets of a person’s life to create and exploit markets inside. This is an extension of the tech startup venture capitalist mindset, which has created and pushed apps for virtually every human purpose imaginable. It also partly has to do with the hyper-specificity of the hyper-male hardcore gaming demographic alienating a lot of potential consumers who don’t fit into that category. More broadly, it shows a need for the videogame industry to get the broad validation and cultural legitimacy film or literature have that it so desperately desires.
Many of those indie game types who were interested in helping create new niches to be king (or queen) of have variously jumped onto whatever bandwagons happen to be big now. Or they became subsumed into a growing games academia, where the advocacy for the expansion of these markets continues today (along with some of the more positive debates that used to happen in indie spaces). Leftist game designer and academic Paolo Pedercini satirizes this desire to find and exploit new markets handily in his talk about the “Indiepocalypse” — why aren’t there more games for people while they’re having sex? what about the elderly? and so on. I honestly didn’t even read it a satire at first, because I have been around so many people who espouse these ideas with zero irony.
What many who have invested their careers and identities into indie games fail to face is that legitimacy is never something that the dominant culture just gives to you. It’s something that’s earned over years and years of fights to change culture and values. Videogames may still be mostly associated with mindless and soul-sucking escapism for many, but in the meantime they’ve become an increasingly ever-present part of our culture. Youtubers and livestreamers who primarily play videogames easily have more viewers than any of the major networks or streaming services. Many on the outside will decry this as the end of culture, but they ignore that this just how culture works.
The biggest problem is not whether or not videogames will become subsumed into and validated by mainstream culture. That’s already happening, regardless of who has (and hasn’t) been able to cash out from it. The biggest problem is how games are used as tools of exploitation. Players are endlessly milked by exploitative business practices that profit off of their own addiction and depression. Online games that depend on a central server to exist are killed off routinely by an industry that doesn’t care at all about the preservation of its own history. Game workers tend to have minimal job security and benefits, work long hours, and face high turnover. The problem is with how games mobilize far-right wing movements. It’s in how games are often used as a propaganda tool to isolate people from each other socially and provide ultimately empty feelings of false empowerment. The search for new markets doesn’t change this — it only seeks to bring more people into the worst elements of all of it.
When you look at the whole of art history, it’s not hard to see how much of what we value now was not valued in its time. Often it’s just one or two people who end up changing public opinion about a work, or an idea. Herman Melville of Moby Dick fame died in obscurity, with all of his books out of print. But Raymond Weaver’s biography of Melville, written thirty years after Melville’s death, played a crucial role in the revival of his work. Now-renowned photographer Vivian Maier lived her entire life in complete obscurity, only taking photographs as a hobby, and was discovered only because of one person who bought a mystery box of prints and photographs of hers that were abandoned in a storage facility, which he started sharing immediately after her death in 2009.
The book publishing and art industries were (and quite frankly, are) no less brutal to artists, and contain no less amount of largely forgettable works that videogames today do. But there’s at least more of a perception that challenging work deserves to have a place and exist within them. Not so for videogames. But public sentiment and audience tastes change over time in response to different struggles and movements. We can be a part of that.
Very few will remember or care about how financially successful a work of art was after enough time passes. That’s why preserving culture is not about business models; it’s about a much broader social and political revolution.
This is from Paolo’s talk:
“We all know that not all culture is meant to be profitable. Culture has been produced industrially only in the last century. And even in the modern era, many works we consider masterpieces were not commercially successful. More importantly, an excess of culture is never a waste, like an excess of cars. So perhaps the best solution doesn’t lie in the relationship between demand and offer. But in liberating games and all culture from the tyranny of the market.”
I might miss those often stimulating conversations about ideas at events like GDC or Indiecade. I might miss feeling like the industry was so small, and I could connect with and talk to so many people who I never thought I’d be able to. I definitely miss feeling like there was an actual continuity between conversations that were happening and what games were coming out. But I don’t miss feeling like I was inside of a gated community that other people didn’t have access to. And the friendly vibe inside the conversations I had there were so often cynical to their very core. It was a tunnel-vision it was easy to find yourself in, wanting to carve out a new small space in the market in your area of interest, instead of looking toward the big picture. Now, we can ask: how can we look beyond the market and contribute to changing the cultural landscape for the better? What can we bring that is genuinely new and different? Then, those questions were usually ignored or pushed to the side. And that’s why we should be glad that era is dead.
As someone who has been able to see a lot of it — I honestly, wholeheartedly, think that so many of the games that have come out since the “Indiepocalypse” began are several times better than most of the indie games that garnered a lot of attention and money prior to it. Uurnog Uurnlimited. Rain World. Black Room. Oikospiel Book I. Detention. 50 Short Games. Everything is Going To Be OK — they may not be big names, but they’re all classics in my book. That many of these didn’t make a lot of money or get much visibility doesn’t make this fact any less true.
The most important thing, then, is to draw connections between different realities that exist both inside and outside of videogames. How can we build structures of support for these new ideas and works that are coming out which will otherwise go unsupported? Those who are interested primarily in the market will stay forever following the whims of the market. Those who aren’t, however, will be the ones plotting a new path and creating new networks and ways of looking at the world. Given current political realities across the globe, it’s a very rough path. But that’s exactly why those that take it are so worth celebrating. Besides, it doesn’t really take that many people to change a conversation. Trust me — I’ve seen it happen. I know.
Liz Ryerson is a musician, writer, and artist currently based in Los Angeles.
Deorbital is a videogame-aligned journal for insightful articles on games, culture, and society. This Autumn Quarterly has been funded by readers like you. To support Deorbital in creating more space for under-represented voices in games writing, we are currently raising funds for a full year of publication. Please consider supporting us and our work, by donating HERE.
