A bunch of indie game devs (including various friends of mine) are doing an AMA right now on Reddit. Go have a look (and ask some questions) if interested.
I found the answers this question a bit depressing though, given that the audience has increased 100-fold in the last 2 decades. Sad that indie developers still find it almost exactly as hard today as they did in the 1990’s :(.
2 replies on “Indie Developers do an AMA…”
Sure, the audience might have grown 100-fold but there are lots more games out there too.
Wild speculation based on gut feeling and nothing to back it up: there’s only so much “attention” to go around; it probably grows sublinearly. If returns follow a power law, it’s probably getting “steeper” as the audience expands. The hits (Minecraft) will be far bigger than they used to be; unknown games will probably be even more unknown than back then.
Yep … but I expected the audience to scale faster than the volume of games :).
I agree with your speculation, AFAICT that’s the nature of a marketing-lead sales process. And “good marketing” has traditionally been what small Indies lacked (and still lack).
e.g. the biggest growth outside big players seems to have come from former Web companies that specialize in marketing/advertising/SEO/etc, and have found that they can frequently (but not predictably) market any mid-tier game into a big success.