The indie game market is a crowded scene, with thousands of games released every year by passionate developers and shovelware penny-hopefuls alike. Why do so many titles get zero traction?
To answer this question, I examined every new game released on Steam each day, for seven consecutive days. This selection was limited to English-language titles available in the United States Steam store. I obfuscated the section of the store pages that showed price, rating, and review count, to avoid bias. Then, after making my own assessment of each game, I made predictions about each game's stats, and recorded this in a spreadsheet. I then compared my predictions with the actual price, rating, and review count taken from the Steam store page seven days after release.
The following a general summary of my observations:
Level 1: The “Nobody Even Tries It”
This stage weeds out the vast majority of indie games—upwards of 90%—before a single meaningful player review hits Steam.
- Poor art styling: The game looks visually unappealing.
- Lack of Foreground Content: Foreground refers to the elements the player directly interacts with—characters, enemies, objects. The game looks empty and low-effort.
- Lack of Background Content: Flat, boring, or missing background assets without visual depth or environmental cues.
- Uninteresting UI: Games with clunky menus, generic HUDs.
- Cliché or boring mechanics: The game shows zero sign of interesting mechanics.
- The Four MAWS: The game falls into the “Four MAWS”—Medieval/Magic, Anime, War, or Space. These settings and genres are impossibly overdone and too oversaturated for indie devs to get noticed in.
Level 2: The “We’ll Pay You In Feedback”
Of games that managed to get even a single Steam review, about 90% went on to sell only a few dozen copies and struggled to reach even ten reviews (in the first week post-release). However, even among these few reviews, there are common themes:
- Too complicated too fast: Players get overwhelmed.
- Poor technical performance: Poor CPU/GPU performance, no keybindings, bad input, lack of “smooth” feeling, crashes, and bad/nonexistent native language translations and localization are surprisingly common pain points.
- Directionless gameplay: After 20–30 minutes, the player still has no clue what they're doing or why they should care.
Level 3: The “Wow, This Actually Made Money!?”
Less than 10 of the games I analzyed during my week of observations had more than 10 reviews, and they were all relatively "big name" indie titles many people have heard of. So, everything at this level beyond this is based on my observations of relatively successfuly indie games over the past decade or so. It's safe to say only about 1% of all indie games reach this point. If they get even a little marketing push, they’re likely to sell in the hundreds or thousands of copies. This is basically the target level for most indie devs. Still, these barriers tend to hold them back:
- Lack of whole-content satisfaction or replayability: This alone is a complex and separate subject within game design, but simply put, if the player doesn’t either (1) walk away with a smile, or (2) want to keep playing from the start, the overall experience will be unsatisfying.
- Devs or publishers annoy away the community: Unprofessional developers alienate the community. Poor behavior—such as being outright racist or hateful online—can shutter indie studios and damage reputations.
- Broken promises: Devs who abandon roadmaps, go silent, or fail to patch glaring issues destroy trust.
- Glacial patching or feedback: Players report bugs and wait months for fixes—or never hear anything back. That kills momentum and goodwill.
Level 4: The “Big Indie” Pitfalls
These are games typically made by indie studios operating with multimillion-dollar budgets. These teams should be past the early pitfalls, but they face bigger, more complex challenges:
- Perceived pricing unfairness: Overpriced base games, shady DLC practices, or overly aggressive monetization push players away.
- Toxic player communities: Even if the devs are doing everything right, a self-cannibalizing player base can ruin a game.
- Shady business practices: Stealing data off players’ computers, CEO on the news in handcuffs, etc. Trust evaporates quickly.
- Cash-grab sequels and intellectual property dumps: It’s like private equity came to town.
- Development hell: Budget mismanagement or poor planning can sink years of effort, resulting in rushed, unfinished, or abandoned projects.
Beyond the Indie Realm
Beyond Level 4, you're in the territory of AAA studios, where different rules apply.
Final Thoughts
For indie developers, avoiding the traps laid out should be relatively easy. Why do so many games fail to rise above these early hurdles? Is it simply lack of awareness?