So, in my efforts to whore out market RPC, I’ve been looking all over the web for places to post my game.One thing I’ve noticed in my adventures is how many indie games with full fledged teams exist, and how few of their games ever get completed.
From what I’m seeing the ratio of games started to games completed is huge. If I had to pull numbers out of my ass I would guess that about 50+ indie projects get started for every one actually completed, and this isn’t even counting the ones that are obviously “doomed to fail” made by people wide-eyed and wearing thick rose colored classes (We all know quite a few of those). I’m talking about serious development projects with actual mainstream potential. Is it extremely common in the indie development world that so many indie devs just get bored and quit? I understand there are many possible roadblocks along the way, like your artist quits, funding runs dry, lead programmer dies of a brain tumor, and so on and so forth, but the amount of incomplete games out there is absolutely staggering! I can’t imagine that that many vanish due to reasons beyond their control.
Anyone else have any input on this phenomenon? From what I’ve seen, it seems simply a case of extreme burnout more than anything else, where the team either falls apart or, they can’t stick to one project long enough to actually complete it. While the other issues do come up, I can’t imagine them being so common as to knockout thousands of indie games for the handful that push all the way to the bitter-sweet end.
TIGSource is the best example of this, page after page after page of top notch games, and a huge amount of them are dead and a lot of them look beautiful, with artwork and coding well beyond my abilities.