Challenge Accepted! – Just One Percent

So, a thing happened on Twitter. As always. SpiderWebSoft founder and developer, Jeff Vogel, had a shitty 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. But his shitty 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! Technically, it’d be 120 but who cares about 20 more games, right? Or just go with 10 per month. Easy. Anyway, the point is 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 low-effort 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. 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 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:

• I’ll document every Indie Game that I play in a spreadsheet that I’ll create in the next few days.
• 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.
• Early Access Update posts may count in case of major updates. 
• Revisiting an Early Access game for an updated review also counts.
• Games streamed on my Twitch channel also count.
• Mobile Indie games (if I do review any) also count.
• The definition of “Indie Game” isn’t as set in stone as people might believe (post on that soon-ish) – so I’ll have the right to deem something “Indie” as I see fit.
• I may add more rules to this as time goes on.

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 isn’t much of a change. 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! Especially if we count my “First Impressions” posts that are technically “reviews”, too, as actual reviews. I feel like that works. 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. I try to be as “positive” as possible or rather one of my philosophies in life is to be “for” something rather than “against” something but sometimes I slip up and end up making a snarky comment or a few and regardless of that: I’m glad that it sparked something interesting and nice in the form of Krikket’s post and this one here. 

If you want to participate in this “challenge”, feel free to comment under this post or to DM on Twitter/Discord or even mail me. I’ll probably end up making a “hub post” where I document different participating people and the rules + spreadsheet and that sort of stuff. That way, people can easily find it and check out other Indie Game enthusiasts!
(Edit: I made a mistake at one point where I accidentally hit 1 and 0 at the same time on my numpad, resulting in me saying that I’d play “10%” instead of “1%” of the games released on Steam. This mistake meant that while I said I’d play at least 100 Indie Games this year, 10% would entail 1000 games per year, which is not possible, I think. Anyway, error’s corrected! Thanks for pointing it out, Krikket!)

Cheers!

This post was first published on Indiecator by Dan Indiecator aka MagiWasTaken. If you like what you see here and want to see more, you can check me out on Twitch and YouTube as well. If you find this post on a website other than Indiecator.org, please write an e-mail to me. Thank you!