Classic Games vs. Indie Games

After purchasing a handful of RPGs from Good Old Games and Xbox Live, Tales of the Rampant Coyote’s Jay Barnson reveals why such easy-to-use download services has him a bit worried as an indie developer.

One of the secrets of the console game market’s success – the console makers wipe the slate clean whenever the market gets too crowded with games. That way the newer games don’t have to compete so much with a large back-catalog of titles (many of which are now available used or at reduced prices).

The PC doesn’t have that, and instead game-makers relied on the nature of the platform and kept our minimum specs creeping up year after year. And the fact that that in a brick-and-mortar world, those older titles don’t usually stay on the shelf very long to crowd out your brand new game. But now, part of the challenge PC game publishers are facing now is that the ol’ dog is having trouble keeping up now. We’re hitting the law of diminishing returns on technology. Besides the fact that it is costing more and more to keep pushing that bar of visual quality higher, the kinds of gamers that at one time would annually drop a hundreds or thousands of dollars to maintain the ultimate gamer machine have defected to the console camp.

And then you have the indies. Like me. Particularly, those indies who are delving into familiar categories. The restoration of these classic games to the market means indie games have to jockey with some heavy-hitting old warhorses for position along the long tail. And it’s only going to get longer. And the indies won’t have the price advantage against these titles for which any residual profits are pure gravy.

But this means Frayed Knights is going to be going head-to-head against Gothic 2 Gold and Arx Fatalis. And do I really want a player to choose between my game or Fallout? Especially when Fallout costs less? Holy crap!