14 DAY TRIAL // Puppy Games co-founder Caspian Prince says that independent development studios will soon face a mass extinction event.
Last week, the indie dev published a pretty antagonistic blog post on his company's website, making a case that customers were "worthless" to indies.
"It has been said that it was a desperate bid for attention disguised as truth. But in fact, it was actually the truth disguised as a desperate bid for attention," Prince tells GamesIndustry.
Whatever the case, his blog post sparked a few heated discussions regarding the costs of making an indie game versus the turnover that most indies get, especially when factoring in the recent trend of bundles and ubiquitous sales that shave more and more off their earnings.
In his post, he mentions that games have been devalued over the course of time, due to colossi like Steam and the Humble Bundle, and because players started paying less and less for the games, their value as customers met a similar drop, basically incentivizing the industry to ignore things like customer support simply because each individual customer wasn't worth the effort anymore.
"The post was deliberately written in the most incendiary way possible knowing full well that Angry Internet Man would pick up on the article, read it entirely wrongly, and then try to pick a fight over it, which then means swarms of people who had actually read and understood it would argue back," Prince says.
He says that he believes his objective to have been reached, quickly becoming viral and spawning numerous responses from the community. Prince says that the post was just "the tip of the iceberg" and that there are many other topics he would like to address in the future.
"Our customers may seem like ants to us, but we are the ants to Valve. For every indie developer that turns up, pours their heart and soul into something that's taken them all their lives to achieve and then throws it out onto the merciless shores of Steam's ocean, there's another one going to come along five minutes later that's done exactly the same."
"They have an effectively infinite supply of suppliers," Prince says, adding that Valve are "king-makers," and estimating that any game featured on the storefront's top slots would bring in a hefty sum overnight.
"People turn up and buy stuff whether we promote them or not. It doesn't seem like we've got much effect on it. We don't really have a lot of control over who's buying our games anymore... It doesn't matter how much money we spend on trying to advertise or market [our games]. It's nothing compared to what Valve can do on a whim," Prince explains, comparing the company to Oprah.
"I think the next thing that will happen is there will be a mass extinction event, basically. There's got to be a consolidation. I can't see many other developers putting up with the status quo. Another year of this and a whole load of studios are just simply going to give up because it's a waste of time."
"A lot of people are going to have to stop making games because they can't afford to do it anymore. The dream is burned," Prince cautions.
The App Store and Google Play are the prime examples of the race to the bottom of the price range, and recent free-to-play trends seem to be indicating that the mobile industry is simply at the forefront of the industry's latest shift.