This is one of the reasons why the narrative is nonsense that renting games is better because you can easily own “too many games” if you keep buying them and then… oh no!!! You own too many digital games!!!
When you buy an indie game you are supporting art whether you get to the game or not, remember that, which isn’t to say buy random games but I think this statistic underlines how much it does matter to the smaller game developers to take a leap and buy their indie games. It helps that they usually cost 1/50th the cost of a AAA game lol…
The problem for all creators on the internet is discoverability. All the faults in the pre-internet publishing system, but those publishers did a huge amount of screening and reduced the choice paralysis on consumers. Now, we get the whole firehose of games, music, stories, movies, and who’s really got time for that? Who wants to spend the time installing 10 different, random games to give each of them a 10-minute test and uninstall? That’s 2 hours that could have gone into an actual good game, nevermind currency.
“They” used to solve discoverability by having “experts” decide where to spend advertising dollars. Algorithms try to solve discoverability by seeing what everyone else is playing, but that just amplifies the hyperbola distribution of plays & revenue. Most of those indie games will never even show up, unless you somehow search for them by exact name. And now with AI just flooding the zone…these statistics are only going to get more lopsided.
This is one of the reasons why the narrative is nonsense that renting games is better because you can easily own “too many games” if you keep buying them and then… oh no!!! You own too many digital games!!!
When you buy an indie game you are supporting art whether you get to the game or not, remember that, which isn’t to say buy random games but I think this statistic underlines how much it does matter to the smaller game developers to take a leap and buy their indie games. It helps that they usually cost 1/50th the cost of a AAA game lol…
The problem for all creators on the internet is discoverability. All the faults in the pre-internet publishing system, but those publishers did a huge amount of screening and reduced the choice paralysis on consumers. Now, we get the whole firehose of games, music, stories, movies, and who’s really got time for that? Who wants to spend the time installing 10 different, random games to give each of them a 10-minute test and uninstall? That’s 2 hours that could have gone into an actual good game, nevermind currency.
“They” used to solve discoverability by having “experts” decide where to spend advertising dollars. Algorithms try to solve discoverability by seeing what everyone else is playing, but that just amplifies the hyperbola distribution of plays & revenue. Most of those indie games will never even show up, unless you somehow search for them by exact name. And now with AI just flooding the zone…these statistics are only going to get more lopsided.