Open Frameworks for Game Distribution

Lately I've been thinking a lot about indie markets. This has been brought about by conversations I've had at college. I'm starting to notice that at RIT a lot of people own and buy games but don't play them; and when they do play them, they don't finish them, or they rush through them.

There are problems with this approach. It encourages players to speed through games and not really think about them.  Because gamers are buying games based less on actual interest, and more on a fear of missing out on the game or the sale, it elevates the importance of single markets to developers.  Getting your game out there, with press, on Steam on a sale, is in some ways more important than the full game experience.  Have a clever twist, get good reviews on the four or five biggest review sites, etc...

It's a somewhat messed up way for the market to work.

Now, everything I just said is an overstatement.  You can get and find a larger variety of games right now than you could ever get - ever.  And if you're an indie - this is one of the best times, ever, in history, to be an indie.  The tools you have, and the people who are willing to look at your games, and the way people interact with your studio and the freedoms you have to publish, and public perception of indies - this is the best that we have ever had before in the history of gaming.

I don't want to discount any of that, and it's important to keep that stuff in the back of your mind.  But there are some problems and difficulties, and maybe if we could get past those, we could be *even better* than we are right now.

One of those difficulties is that as gaming audiences have grown, our distribution markets haven't grown as much.  The big thing people are using still is Steam - Steam pretty much allowed for the modern indie movement in the first place, and it's still the big place you want to see your game if you're an indie.  But if you have 800 people looking at Steam, there's a set number of games you can put on the homepage.  And if you get 20,000 people looking at Steam, that number doesn't go up or down.  As the market widens, exposure doesn't become less important, and the space to advertise doesn't rise at the same rate.

There are ways we can handle this.  Markets have a tendency to consolidate unless there are forces keeping them fragmented - but games are by nature pretty fragmented, and we ought to be able to feed off of that to fragment our markets as well - which could potentially be beneficial to both new developers and gamers.

It's something I'm still thinking about, but it's something I think can be helped by making more Open distribution methods for games. Steam is making some progress in this area, but stores like Humble Bundle have done better in the past, and better servers/distribution methods running on Open Source software could potentially do better.  It is something I'm still thinking about though, so at some undisclosed point I'll write more, maybe on the other blog.