So, back in January of 2022, veteran Indie developer and founder of Spiderweb Software, Jeff Vogel, published a thread that blew up on Twitter about the “Indie Game” industry.
Buuuut this post is about a challenge/project that was sparked in response to his Twitter thread at the time. According to him, “pointing out how the world doesn’t need 10k new indies a year on Steam will make people super angry”.
His suggestion: Prove it by going out and actually trying 1% of those games.
This right here is the late wrap-up post about this.
I’ll provide some context in the next section but I don’t want to stir up trouble. I don’t want to bring up weird takes again just to start drama with some person (that I don’t know personally) on the internet (of all places).
I respect Jeff Vogel a lot. I like a lot of his takes… and his blog is cool!
Context or something!
Some of his key points were about there being too many games, game design degrees costing too much, people barely playing some Indies out there and some other things… but Twitter doesn’t allow for nuance and thus, his thread from January blew up and people called him out for “gatekeeping Indie Game development”.
The thing is that Jeff has a lot of experience and even at the time, it felt like he almost understood the issue at hand… but somehow he blamed it on devs or whatever. Felt a bit misguided, perhaps, for a lack of a better term.
Anyhow, Game Dev is an art form and people don’t always do art to make a living… some people create something just to try stuff out and see how it goes.
On that note, look at this thing I made!!
And yes, I followed a tutorial… and then I changed stuff until it sounded good… and I’m pretty proud if I say so myself! Of course, it’s not perfect… but it doesn’t have to be.
Me trying this out doesn’t mean that I wanna become a musician or producer or whatever but rather… I’m just gonna try stuff out and have fun in the process. I doubt anyone would argue that there is too much music, right?
Anyway, today I didn’t really wanna talk about his take(s) here. I mean, everyone has weird takes from time to time (trust me: I have a lot!) – and generally speaking, I like his articles on “The Bottom Feeder” a lot.
Rather, this post is to highlight the result of a challenge we did as a blogging community… and by “we”, I mean Krikket organised the thing and it was a lot of fun. Go check her out!
The Challenge!
So, in his thread at the time, Vogel talked about people having to try just 1% of those games. According to him playing only these new Indies for a whole year would bring people to despair after just a month… which was not the case.
Anyhow, I set up some rules. I’d be able to only play games from this specific year/period… aka 2022 up until February 2023.
I’d write my thoughts down on every game I’d play or that I’d want to feature. I ended up playing a lot more games than I covered but if you want to check out my 1% of games released in 2022 over here that’d be great.
There are lots of reviews and first impressions over here! (Documentation)
Generally speaking, I play a lot of Indies and because of that, I didn’t really feel all that bad about the challenge. The actual challenge, for me, was to keep writing posts.
I am currently in a bit of a slump and time has not been a luxury I had. As you may be able to tell from my Humble Choice posts being late, for example, I’ve been quite busy.
Between health stuff, the move’s paperwork and university stuff, time has not been something I had a lot of these past few months, so I delayed updating the list quite often and I delayed this post a lot. Then I wrote about other topics that I just found more important, like my Hogwarts Legacy post or this Pride article.
So, the real challenge was sticking to the plan and covering games. I ended up covering a lot of Indies on Twitch but I’ve only counted those 100 on the Just One Percent tab, personally.
Wrap-Up Summary!
I had a lot of fun and theoretically speaking, I could possibly also create a list of all the Indies I played since January 2022, hence showcasing even more games, many of which I haven’t written about yet… I’m lowkey thinking about doing that still.
Would that be something you’d like to read?
It’d be a late “my past year in games!” post with me detailing my activity each month until now based on my Steam Library.
A hundred games cost a lot of money, so this wouldn’t have been possible without the many developers and publishers that provided me with review keys or who published their demos to Steam and Itch.
I’m sorry for not being able to cover them all… I’m still trying to catch up… Mental and Physical Health, as well as Real Life obligations, make it hard to do this… alone. Contrary to what a lot of devs believe Indiecator is a one-person project.
And thanks to you for reading my posts and reviews and stuff, including this one. This was fun. Don’t hate on Jeff Vogel, please. Again, everyone has weird takes from time to time and that one was “weird” at best, I think. I respect Vogel a lot as a person and developer.
I’d love to hear Vogel’s thoughts on any of this, actually, so if Jeff has the time, maybe he’ll reply to this. We’ll see!
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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