Cliff Harris, an indie developer behind Democracy 3 and Gratuitous Space Battles, writes about making and selling games.
HN commenters follow it as one of the few still-active blogs, with regular updates on bugs, patches, and indie game development.
Official announcement - https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/blog/announcing-the-epic-games-store
"Developers receive 88% of revenue. There are no tiers or thresholds. Epic takes 12%. And if you’re using Unreal Engine, Epic will cover the 5% engine royalty for sales on the Epic Games store, out of Epic’s 12%."
"From Epic’s 12% store fee, we’ll have a profitable business we’ll grow and reinvest in for years to come!"
This is great news for indies who Steam seems to be ignoring[1] lately in favor of AAA. Maybe that will eventually put enough pressure on them to at least reduce their cut. There's been increasing concern over whether it's worth it for indies given the lack of visibility. If you have to push an audience there anyway, is it worth the 30%? Jason Rohrer[2] and Positech Games[3] for example have been successful outside of Steam keeping a much larger piece of the pie.
1. http://greyaliengames.com/blog/steams-discovery-algorithm-killed-my-sales/
2. https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2018-03-12-jason-rohrers-off-steam-paid-off
3. https://www.positech.co.uk/cliffsblog/2018/11/23/selling-games-direct-from-your-website-in-2018/
This reminds of the game Kudos http://www.positech.co.uk/kudos/
It's a game where each game day you get to make 4-6 choices what to do with your time. Like relax and watch TV from 7 to 10pm or take a class. Based on your choices new opportunities open up or don't. It was so in my face to see my life presented like that. Sure it's obvious but more though provking in a compressed time span.
That is not in anyway to imply that everyone has the same opportunities or that people born into poverty don't have serious hurdles that the rich don't. But, there's also a huge middle ground of people in the middle class who choose not to take advantage of the choices they have. I've done the same. I've wasted years playing games or watching TV or reading HN. I'm not judging that to be a bad choice of my life and certainly there's a balance of entertainment, relaxation and other. At the same time, at least for me, someone that grew up middle class, I can clearly look back and see all that time I could have done something that would have made me rich or at least far better off by now that I didn't do.
>There is an issue with Bertrand Competition: it excludes the impact of marketing; it assumes that one pair of shoes is as good as another pair of shoes; it doesn’t factor in the cost of comparison, or the cost of switching, all of which are real.
Well that's an understatement. There's definitely a race to the bottom and it saddens me. At the same time, games aren't commodities. Shoes is a pretty laughable analogy.
I've been excited about some devs recently fighting against the race to the bottom:
868-HACK - $6 on the App Store. http://indiestatik.com/2013/09/11/868-hack-sales/
The Castle Doctrine - $16. No sales ever. http://thecastledoctrine.net/seedBlogs.php?action=display_post&post_id=jasonrohrer_1389812989_0&show_author=1&show_date=1
Democracy 3 - $25 for an indie game and I think has only had one 50% sale. http://positech.co.uk/cliffsblog/2013/11/19/lessons-from-launching-democracy-3/
Minecraft is a similar example (~$27) but people tend to blow that off as not relevant to the conversation because any other game isn't Minecraft.
A game I love playing is Democracy 3[1], I believe it's an excellent example and exercise of simulating democratic systems. There are so many toggles you can tweak, dozens of policies to enact, setting whatever budget you want for each policies. Maybe around ~50 different situations (think GDP to pollution to gang wars) all interconnected with each other, and a bunch of voting groups - every person belongs to several groups (religious, rural, commuter, socialist etc...)
As a newbie, it quickly becomes evident how difficult it is to make an overall positive change in the society - because most tweaks that would make something better by X% will make something else worse by Y% - and since everything is connected to everything that leads to chain reactions. More often than not I end up getting assassinated by the second term. :D
[1] http://positech.co.uk/democracy3/, https://store.steampowered.com/app/245470/Democracy_3/ on steam
Cliffski's blog is one of the only ones I follow that is still active. Not every post is on development progress, but enough that I find it worth following:
http://www.positech.co.uk/cliffsblog/
A couple of recent posts I liked:
https://www.positech.co.uk/cliffsblog/2019/12/16/stability-productivity/
https://www.positech.co.uk/cliffsblog/2020/01/14/trying-to-avoid-the-small-indie-valley/
It seems like a lot of what you're saying is from the perspective of a lifestyle that you want, not from the perspective of what a successful or failed business would involve.
There's a bit of interesting stuff on cliffksi's blog:
https://www.positech.co.uk/cliffsblog/2018/10/03/state-of-indie-dev-2018/
https://www.positech.co.uk/cliffsblog/category/business/