If you have been around for a while, you may remember this article. It was written in 2000, right about when games were getting to be really big business, but long after the age of shareware, and long before the indie explosion (which I would put at starting around 2008 or so). It is basically a screed against the state of the emerging AAA industry, much of which is still true if not even worse, and a call for smaller teams making cheaper, smaller games.
The term scratchware never caught on, but I think a lot of modern indie and hobbyist works fit into it. On the other hand, some of what we call indie projects are now as bloated and expensive as the AAA projects of twenty years ago.
The central summation is this:
The phrase scratchware game essentially means a computer game, created by a microteam, with pro quality art, game design, programming and sound to be sold at paperback book store prices. A scratchware game can be played by virtually anyone who can reach a keyboard and read. Scratchware games are brief (possibly fifteen minutes to an hour or so), extremely replayable, satisfying, challenging, and entertaining.
I think this is a little too confining, but it was written 23 years ago, when games were almost solely distributed at retail. A broader definition would be more suitable for the digital distribution era.
The underground games manifesto reminded me of scratchware. How do you think the two compare? What ideas do you agree with and disagree with?
Yeah, it is frustrating. I remember a thread where small “Indie”-Devs shared the losses they produced, some where deep in the red. Sometimes I found people who lived on the cost of their partners or family to go into game development. Its indeed not a wise thing to do, but there is a whole industry (book authors, marketing people, asset sellers and especially those who run the asset market places) that prey onto people who try to realize the dream of living from game development.
At least some of the scratchware guys seems to had internet distribution in mind - and while they couldn’t foresee the “Indiepocalypse”, it would have been possible to foresee that the problem roots deeper. But thats spilled milk. It is - in every case - true that Indie devs rely on the powerful players within the curation segment to gain visibility. It might be noteworthy to point out that the amateurs in this segment suffer from the same problem - amateur streamers, bloggers, reviewers can hardly get any audience, they are also cut out from visibility. It would be great to get some of those who are into this but don’t aim to go commercial on board.
About the last paragraph: You are right, if you want to make money making indie games is a bad idea. When I ways younger, I occasionally made some bucks with street music - my average wage per hour easily outweighs the money I made with my online game and music projects combined (I’m defacto slightly in the red here: Paying for Steam and Server costs is easily more than my revenue - not that I regret it). Going in a direction that would be commercially rewarding (might work, might not work) isn’t interesting to me: I want to be a game dev, not a entrepreneur - and I’m quite sure many others feel the same way.
I hope that we can establish a place or places where people play the games other people made without the commercial mindset - even through the road seems to there is surely rocky.