Indie Developers Deserve Better

Capitalism and False Scarcity Is Ruining The Indie Game Industry

There was once a time where the idea of releasing your own game seemed absolutely possible. For a short time indie game publishers made the individual believe that anything was possible if they just tried hard enough. It is now 2021 and just like the American Dream. The idea of being able to publish a game with a little hard work and funds is a false narrative.

This is incredibly obvious to most minority indie developers. I’d never even considered writing about it until today because everyone knows. Especially ever since IGN bought Humble Games. I have personal experience with pitching to them and the landscape for what they consider an indie game has changed entirely.

So of course you may be wondering what spurred on my decision to write this article then. Well, like most stories; it starts with the the main character of twitter of today. Who does this title belong to for me? Well you may know them as Super Rare Games. Known for limited physical releases of digital games.

What has put Super Rare Games under my intense scrutiny? Well, it’s not good news that's for sure. It was only just today that Super Rare Games had announced that they had a new marketing scheme available for indie developers everywhere!

A real way to get out there in the game industry! It has everything! False scarcity! Unclear amount of money you’ll earn! And no way to release it in any other form!

As you can imagine. There are a lot of confused people in the comments and quote retweeting this post.

I don’t even know where to start with this honestly. I think the thing that might best sum it up is that this is like bringing NFTs into the real world. There is absolutely no reason why there can’t be a digital and physicals release of these short games. The idea of false scarcity is a huge problem already and doing it to indie game developers is absolutely horrifying. Especially pretending like it is their ONLY option.

Re-inventing artificial scarcity is a great way to get their games pirated. -DUSTOFWINTER

Indie developers deserve so much better then this. This isn’t the way. It should never BE the way. They should be given every opportunity there is to get their games out into the world. You know what the worst part about this is? There is going to be people who can’t GET these copies. Again creating a false scarcity that does not have to exist. Which is going to encourage massive scalping or auctioning. I can’t understand why anyone would want this no matter how desperate. Physical releases of games are expensive to produce. How much money are developers getting from this? Or is it payment through #exposure :).

As an indie developer I can only imagine how the people who are going to be tricked by this must feel. They are desperate and I know exactly how they feel. They do not deserve to have this be perhaps one of their only options to be known in the gaming sphere.

I am so sorry to my fellow developers. We deserve better. You deserve better. We will fix this. We CAN fix this. Your game deserves to be seen digitally, physically and be documented down along side AAA games. Never think you have to settle for less. You created something wonderful and don’t let anyone tell you this is the only way.