The festive season is well and truly upon us, which can only mean one thing! …Actually, that’s not true, it means loads of things to all sorts of different people. But to an Indieventure listener, it means our increasingly established tradition of putting together a two-part end-of-year round-up! Tune back in for our Game of the Year list discussion on December 22nd, but first, it’s time for a more free-form look at the year that was.
If you’ve listened to one of these before, you’ll know that this episode can end up being quite… cathartic for your trio of hosts, who’ve once again witnessed a year in the games industry that can generously be characterised as full of highs and lows. But aside from… all that, what were this year’s big trends in indie games specifically? We delve into the unusual prominence given this year to longer indie games, indie game sequels, and indie games as digital third spaces (because we know “friendslop” is mostly meant as an affectionate joke but haven’t we landed on a much better name there?). Also, expect some spicy takes on whether Steam’s monopoly in the PC gaming market is causing them to increasingly become more of a problem than a champion for indie publishing.
We end as ever with our hyperfixations, and Rachel is keen to bring your attention to Thinky Dailies, a new daily series of in-browser brainteasers from our good pals over at Thinky Games – guaranteed to make you feel smarter than Wordle as well as being much, much less cursed. Liam is eager to highlight the excellent and highly timely video essay Greed is Destroying the World by Drew Gooden. And finally it’s a rare musical recommendation from Rebecca, who’s been listening to the Mountain Goats and their amazing new concept album, Through This Fire Across from Peter Balkan.
Our music was written and performed by Ollie Newbury! Find him on Instagram at @newbsmusic. Meanwhile, you can find us at indieventurepodcast.co.uk or wherever you listen to podcasts. Don’t forget that you can now join our dedicated Discord too, and be sure to check out our new Steam Curator page if you simply still can’t get enough of us!
Comments:
I always love these episodes and the more serious discussions (and the goofs too, don’t worry! the tonal shift here was wild in the best possible way).
I wanted to chime in and add that I think one factor that sometimes gets overlooked with regards to Steam’s monopolistic nature is that they didn’t just get there by making playing games more convenient (as was rightly pointed out in the episode). But they offer such a vast set of features way beyond the simple act of purchasing and playing games like any of its competitors do. I’m not even talking about library organization, cloud saves, video recording features or any of that. It’s more or less a social media site! You get your own profile that you can deck out with garish (or tasteful, if you fancy that more) avatar borders and background images, that you can set up to display your favorite games, screenshots, reviews or even just random art that definitely 100% is always your own. It’s MySpace for Gamers™, literally the only thing missing is it letting you play a random track from a soundtrack you’ve purchased on your profile.
And regrettably, on the flip side, you can also voice terrible opinions on games of developers whose personal views you disagree with and claim that’s a valid review or a forum discussion and it’s probably not even going to get taken down by Steam staff. (I’ve recently seen developers mourn the fact that an islamophobic review was deemed okay by Steam staff despite the developers asking for it to be removed.)
But yeah, I think this is a huge factor in why Steam is so willingly accepted by many as the monopoly. I’m willing to admit I’m part of the problem – I appreciate having one place where I can essentially build my own little game library and showcase. Yes there’s services that offer that too, like Backloggd or whatever, but I ALREADY have a Steam account, you know?
Speaking of Steam, if you ever come across a game in your wishlist that has been removed, you should still see the game ID in the URL (after /app/) if you analyze the link of the relevant wishlist entry. You can then pop that ID into SteamDB.info and see what the game used to be.