So, a thing happened on Twitter. As always. SpiderWebSoft founder and developer, Jeff Vogel, had a weird take on Twitter where he was arguing that there were too many games on Steam.
I still don’t understand how “too much” creative expression is a problem but hey, whatever.
His weird take actually inspired a very neat idea by Krikket: “Just One Percent“. Jeff’s point was that you wouldn’t be able to sit through and play 1% of the games created throughout the year without suffering from great despair. At least that’s part of his “point”, although I’m still not sure what he was trying to say.
Krikket took up this prospect and proposed a challenge of sorts where you play 100 new Indie releases! Anyway, the point is that there are a lot of Indie Games and just like Krikket, I, too, am gonna defend it until the end… even if I doubt that there will ever be an end to the sheer creativity of games that come out.
Truly, Indie Games are great. There are a lot of interesting takes on popular genres and because it’s less about marketing and more about creativity, Indie Games practically have no limitations.
While there obviously are a lot of “bad” games on Steam, I don’t think that they devalue the good games at all. Jeff’s point isn’t that “there are too many trash games” but instead he’s saying that “people shouldn’t go into game dev because there are already so many game devs out there” which is a weird take, honestly. Especially if you consider that Jeff re-released the same game at least five times in his career.
On top of that, as Jaedia said, you’re not supposed to play all thousands of games out there. You’re supposed to play what appeals to you and what you have time/money for.
There are plenty of games for all sorts of people available out there and I doubt that Steam has to curate games all that much given that I would have missed out on lovely games like SNKRX or Vampire Survivors if Steam were to have high standards on what a game has to do and what it can’t do.
Let’s talk about my personal rules for this challenge:
- My 100 posts on Indie Games only count the Reviews and First Impressions, not follow-up posts on games I reviewed.
- Funds are limited, so older games, free games, demos, Game Pass, and stuff from my backlog are all okay – BUT I’ll prioritize keys sent by developers, publishers, etc.
- The definition of “Indie Game” isn’t as set in stone as people might believe (post on that soon-ish? Maybe?) – so I’ll have the right to deem something “Indie” as I see fit.
- Rules are subject to change.
More importantly, though, this isn’t a change in plans, actually. I was thinking about posting more reviews this year, so I feel like this is a good opportunity!
It’s just that I now plan on reviewing 100 games this year instead of whatever I did last year. I was thinking of posting 31 reviews during Blaugust anyway but that may be too much of a challenge… Posting 10 per month though? Sounds reasonable!
I’m looking forward to the “feeling of despair” that I’ll get from playing too much Indie Stuff but jokes and shade aside, I think this is gonna be a lot of fun.
(Note: I had to edit this post a good bunch because I typed “10%” instead of “1%”. I never would have the time to play ~1000 games in any year.)
(Note (06/25/2023): I edited the post a lot again because the paragraphs were super long… and this post also contained a lot of instances of me sounding very mean… which wasn’t the intention. I removed some whole paragraphs, too, that weren’t adding much value, anyhow. I hope that this makes the reading experience better.)
Cheers!
This post was originally written by Dan Dicere from Indiecator.
If you see this article anywhere other than Indiecator.org then this article has been scraped. Please let me know about this via E-Mail.
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