I don't know why I keep arguing, because too many games is totally #whitepeopleproblems, but something just feels off about the indie scene in the last year or two. The bubble pop article felt like an explanation to me.
noiseredux wrote:I suppose if you also think that having too many bills in your wallet is a problem cuz it makes it too bulky?
Narf. I know you're mainly going for comedy, but those are different things. More bills means more units of things of equal value. More games means more quantity, but often times less quality.
noiseredux wrote:You seem to be thinking of it as a problem because you need to "keep up." Why?
Because every time I look at a mobile app store, I want to gag. There are so many icons for so many crap looking titles that I don't even want to browse the store. The same will happen with indies. It's already getting more that way. Just take two major indie blogs,
http://jayisgames.com/ and
http://indiegames.com/index.html, and try to keep up with them for a few weeks. It's exhausting! There is sooo much content. And as more low quality games enter the mix, the appstore problem starts to apply to indies: it's harder to care about the whole endeavour. I already feel this way about Steam Greenlight, a process that I was originally excited for when first released. Now, I haven't attempted to Greenlight anything in months. It's hard to browse Desura anymore for the same reason. The storefront is a see of average game noise where it takes more and more patience to listen for the greatness deep inside the waters.
noiseredux wrote:This is a good point, and I'll grant you it.
Of course my points are good.
noiseredux wrote:Yeah if you feel like a game is missed at launch because of lack of marketing, I can agree. But if you find it next year because someone hyped it in a thread here or on a blog somewhere because it's an awesome game then the lack of marketing still isn't going to stop it from being discovered. This is how cult-classics are born.
I don't have faith in that process. Have you ever read the book
Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell? It discusses how major trends happen. It seems to me that a lot of things ride on the so-called "stickiness factor", which also corresponds with the ideas of
memetic evolution wherein an idea doesn't have to be good, just catchy. This is why of the millions of YouTube videos generated, it's not actually the most brilliant, interesting, or unique ones that rise up and gain notoriety, but rather "Dramatic Chipmunk" and "What Does the Fox Say."
Anyway, I realize I'm quite likely wrong about this and many games is not a real problem necessarily, at least as long as the quality to quantity quotient can stay in tact. I know I'm being a bit curmudgeony about the fact that the indie game scene won't be cool in the future in the exact same way that I'm used to it being cool in the late 2000s/early 2010s. Eventually I'll just have to adjust to the idea that I can't play every game I want to, and there are far worse problems to have in the world.