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My favorite indie game is The Stanley Parable. The combination of "choose your own adventure" and comedy hit me in a way that no other game has before or since. Just a wonderful experience.

It takes A LOT of resources for a person to create a successful game. It's tough. One solo developer I talked to admitted that it could take 4-5 YEARS before their game sees a full release. That's 4-5 years without making a cent off of the game (aside from Patreon support, of course).

As for the difference between whether an indie game becomes successful or not, frankly a lot of it comes down to audience awareness and luck. A dev could make a totally unique game that does things never seen before, but if they aren't on social media trumpeting it to the masses, no one will hear about it. Sometimes it's just plain dumb luck.

One dev I talked to had his game played by Markiplier. It caused the number of downloads for his game to skyrocket. If Markiplier doesn't play his game, his career path is completely different.

The indie market is extremely saturated and it is harder than ever to stand out.

Hello! I would absolutely be interested in learning more about that scene of game making! Honestly, when I think about it, that's a segment of game making that's in a blind spot of mine. If it's alright, could I message you to get more info?

Man, those are good questions.

I think overall, allowing more people to create things that they love is a net positive, even if it's harder to stand out. I've talked to devs that have released games that legitimately only reached a dozen players, but they were still happy that they were able to create and release their game at all. Creating and releasing a full game is an accomplishment on it's own.

Honestly, I have no idea how things could change to promote games better. I wish I did haha it's a very, very difficult problem.

Perhaps surprisingly, the biggest difficulty is just finding a way to contact a developer or studio. There have been countless times where I see a game that's doing something unique, but the developer doesn't have a website, email address, or their Twitter account doesn't allow them to be messaged. If you're a developer and are reading this, please, PLEASE provide a way to contact you!

It was a combination of ideas, honestly. Almost a decade ago I got a degree in Journalism from the University I went to. Since then, I've always had a love of good storytelling. As the years have gone on since then, I've just observed the distinct lack of real journalism in video game press. Every once in a while you'll find an excellent piece of journalism where the writer does investigating or interviewing, but those articles are few and far between.

A few months ago, a podcast I listened to recommended a Polygon article by Mike Mahardy about Josef Fares (you can read it by clicking here). It was a fascinating article about Fares' life. We as readers would not have known about the struggles he went through without this article. I just had this thought click in my head like "there are thousands of developers in the world and we know nothing about them."

And that seemed wrong to me. Like, we know so much about athletes, actors, musicians, etc., but we know NOTHING about individual game developers. So I decided to do something about it and quit my job to start this website.