I don’t want to pan them, as it is always easier to be the clever one afterwards: But imho their idea proved to not work out. “Indie”-Gaming, “Social”-Media and the Internet in general opened up channels to avoid the publishers and big conglomerates, but the structures that they criticized where mostly just replicated in a weakened form as the rules of the market still apply (you already pointed this out in the OP).

Something that frustrates me about the discussions around indie game development, both in the community and in published articles, is that a lot of it focuses on money and marketing and on development primarily as a business venture. If you just search for “indie game cost”, the first results will ludicrously tell you to expect to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars making one. The games media in general is guilty of conflating “indie” with “professional,” partly because articles about glossy, pretty games get the most attention from readers, but also because games that have 800 square foot booths at PAX take a lot less effort to find and cover than obscure freeware on Itch. It’s basically in their interest to push hobbyists out of the conversation, unless it’s some viral streaming hit that they can similarly exploit.

It is upsetting to see so many stories of people quitting their jobs and living off of their savings to develop and release a game, hoping to be able to make it into their new full-time job. I sympathize with the people who don’t make it, but I don’t think it’s a wise decision. Designer R implicitly cautions against doing this (“They are made at night, on weekends, during vacations or whenever one can… in essence, it costs little or nothing to make a scratchware game”), though Designer X might be romanticizing subsistence living a little too much.

The scratchware folks didn’t really seem sure how their work could be distributed; maybe they were hoping to sell it in ziploc bags in local bookstores, like some of the very early pioneers did. I think though that they definitely did not foresee indie games exploding as much as they have. There are literally hundreds of thousands of them, of varying quality and states of completion, and the underground manifesto points out that this is a huge problem for discoverability. The scratchware people wanted to sell their work as an alternative to AAA productions, but they were not anticipating nearly infinite competition in their space. Indie developers still ironically rely on the loudest media voices to make themselves visible, whether that be streamers, the traditional gaming press, or even just favorable storefront placement. The people with the biggest platforms still have a lot of power to dictate other peoples’ success, and they use that power to further grow their own platforms, not spotlight deserving creative works. If they didn’t prioritize expanding their own brand over everything else, they wouldn’t have large platforms to begin with.

I get it; if you make a game, you want people to play it. And I don’t begrudge people wanting to make a little bit of money from their thousands of hours of hard work, any more than I begrudge people selling handmade jewelry on Etsy. But most of us will never be lucky enough to make a living solely from our personal art, and even established professional independent studios are often only one failed release away from shutting down. I think it is a mistake to go into this hobby (or really any hobby) with a primarily commercial mindset.