Damn, just when I was starting in gamedev again. But was there really ever a bubble? As long as I remember it's been insanely difficult to succeed. These sort of complaints have been going on in indie developer forums for years. w.r.t Steam, it sounds like the Apple App store all over again (or at least played out in slower motion). Enormous/easy profits for the early adopters, then diminishing returns as competition increases. For different reasons; new technology (iOS) vs careful curation (Steam). I'd say actual game quality improved as a result though. It's all good for the consumer!

Making games is just fun, everybody and their dog wants to do it. To succeed commercially a game can't just be good, it has to be insanely polished, deep, or unique. (Yes, or lucky... and preferably all of the aforementioned.)

Bubble has already popped IMO. Been making indie games since 2007 myself. This years PAX East was just insane at least 120+ indies all showing off their games. Compare this to the first PAX where it was barley 30 indies. Couple this with the insane amount of games released on Steam every day now (10+ indie games just today). There is just too much competition and not enough of the pie to go around.

We are seeing small sect of the indie community starting to pull away from everyone else in terms of media coverage and awareness. (Klei, Vlambeer, Capy) They are amazing developers and deserve the recognition its just becoming a deeper and deeper pool every day.

For fun, try reading this article again but with "developers" replaced with "musicians".

Putting out an 8-bit JRPG platformer with RTS and FPS elements isn't going to make you a millionaire any more than putting on some flannel and recording a record with three chords will.

Makes me sad.

The part that got so much easier was distribution. Steam and appstores did that making it easy (maybe too easy?) to just make a game and get it sold.

If something's fun, easy, and make's money - you'll get a lot of people doing it.

I couldn't get past the "preamble." This writing style is just impenetrable. Wordy for no reason, with pointless pop culture references and annoying clipart & captions that fail to amuse.

Previous HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7781117