Its not the indie part, its the games themselves. They are mostly either BAD, or very niche. It blows my mind that some people think there is a vast market for 1990 style platformers.
I bought several indie platformers. Super Meat Boy, Braid, Noitu Love 2, and a few others.
I also bought Deadlight.
I think there is a fairly huge market for platformers. However, it's certainly a very crowded one. There are over 500 platformers on Steam. Want to make one with pixel graphics? There are already 97 of those.
But it does not sell very well. So puzzles are off too. As an indie, you cannot really compete with FPS or MOBA genre. Someone might suggest RTS, but RTS is replaced with MOBAs.
The only genre I see lacking and what would be easier to sell on Steam are RPGs. But those take a lot of time and effort to build. If you work alone, it's hard to justify 2-3 years of development before making any money.
I'm currently considering what will be my next game. Perhaps a 4x game that would have a vast and complex world that lives on its own.
From the trailers, I can't really see this as a puzzle game. For me, examples of puzzle games are rather
* most games of Zachtronics (but in particular Ironclad Tactics is not)
http://www.zachtronics.com/
* the Hexcells series
* Antichamber
* The Bridge
* Sigils of Elohim (but even "The Talos Principle" only in small parts (which does not mean that it's a bad game))
etc.
For me, a puzzle game is really about solving difficult problems in a rather relaxing way. In other words: Whether you are able to solve a level will only depend on your capability of puzzle solving (i.e. intellect) and not your reaction times.
Most puzzle platformers do not satisfy this criterion, so I mostly can't consider them as puzzle games (which does not mean they are bad games, but often bad puzzle games).
Thanks for the feedback. Yes, there are some puzzles where timing is important, maybe 25% of all puzzles in the game.
The game that inspired me to create Seeders was Braid. So you can expect similar mix of thinking and platforming.
Since the game is not selling well, I guess there are many other players that share your opinion. I'm considering to remove such puzzles completely. The game will be 25% shorter, but it still is very long (all players that completed it clock over 10 hours of play), so I don't think it will be a problem.
I would think that you would need to hit some of the underserved genre/subject niches to be successful. There are a bajillion dungeon-crawlers, military shooters, 4X fantasy/space games, 2D platformers, fantasy rpgs, casual puzzle games, zombie survival games, etc. These combinations have a lot of widespread appeal, but the market is really saturated.
The thing with niche genre/topics is that most of the successful players have a pretty established track record of delivering an above-average product - see Paradox, the Close Combat series, many of the hex-based wargames, the author of TFA. There are also in many cases established classics that are timeless, so if you're going into that space, you need to either have an interesting spin, or really outdo the classic. Just building a clone isn't going to get you very far.
After looking at the Steam video Seeders doesn't look very marketable. The main character is stiff, doesn't change. It's almost off putting. The art style in general is sloppy and generic.
That said I'm sure there are plenty of games with exceptional art styles that aren't selling well either. It's not just over-saturated by less than professional art, gameplay or whatever, but by good art.
And they keep talking these turkeys up in Game Press like amazing wonderful games that you just have to buy, 10 star reviews etc. People got burned putting down there hard earned money for garbage walking simulators with crappy art. Most people I know who might buy 10$ Indy games are much more sceptical and careful with there money now. No one believes the reviews any more, either go to Youtube or word of mouth by someone you trust there taste. A few select sites give credible reviews but there rare.
I used to be a frequent buyer of indie games on steam. But, my buying habits have changed significantly recently. A while ago, interestingly around the same time that the chart's lines started to plummet, I stopped buying indie games. Why? Because too many of them were uninteresting. And, because I'd been burned by buying highly rated or highly popular titles, only to be disappointed.
I think part of the problem is that the review system is all screwed up. I'm sure that there are a lot of games that I'd love to play. I just don't know how to find them.
In the good old days, there were respectable publications where reviews were detailed and relatively accurate. I don't know what the replacement is.
Part of the problem is that there are just too many games. I often come across potentially interesting games that have one or two reviews from third-tier sites, or even no reviews at all, because reviewers simply cannot test all the games coming out. Unless you have connections or a good hook to bait sites in with, I guess you're not getting reviewed - and of course, the things that make a game interesting to the press don't necessarily make for a good game.
I blame the trend of early access releases. I got burned by a few kickstarters early on. I'm never giving anyone money for a game that I can't play until the future. This means pre-ordering AAA titles as well. What's the point in pre-ordering if I don't buy a physical copy? The pre-order bonus stuff is way out of control.
Now, there may be some good indie games on Steam, somewhere, but to me it's buried under the pile of of greenlit / alpha / early access crapware.
I've abandoned greenlight/preorder as well. Especially frustrating with greenlight is when friends play to death an unfinished game (normally some sandbox style thing) and get bored of it well before it is done. Then once it is done no one interested in it anymore having moved on to the next unfinished game.
Terraria, Space Engineers, Star Forge, Rust and other have all burnt me in this manner.
My current strategy is to buy the games I am interested in, but not play them til they are 1.0, and I encourage my friends to wait to play as well. I have been waiting for Starbound to be released, for example, but I haven't touched it yet.
Well, that sucks.. I guess I'll wait a couple years and see if things thin out a bit before trying to make a game. There are some real quality titles out there anyway. Maybe I'll just play one instead.
That's the classic mistake! Make the game now, but at a sustainable pace, and then release it after things improve. If you wait until things look good again, then you've already missed the chance to get in on the new ground floor.
A lot of this parallels indie musicians, too, except I'm not sure there ever was that spike where an indie musician could release an average album online and make a bunch of money.
This situation is entirely the fault of "Game Journalism" which spent a good two or three years showering praise on the magical "Indy Developers" who are in large part a narrative invention to fill page real estate and promote there friends crappy projects.
There was a string of highly celebrated indy games that were truly garbage and people quickly came to the conclusion that there was collusion between the "Game Journalists" and the "Indy Developers". Once people started to research these connections in many cases it turned out that the developers were close friends of the journalists or even involved in relationships.
GamerGate was the start of the process of publicly connecting the dots and showing the collusion between these shady characters. The response was a massive coordinated attack and smear campaign on "Gamers" by the very people who were being outed. The war rages on to this day and probably will for years to come.
There never was a large number of high quality Indy Games. Game journalists did a huge amount of damage by promoting garbage and then attacking the very consumers who they were claiming to be catering to. To most gamers these Journalists have lost all credibility.
you can find out more about who these "Game Journalist" are at Deep Freeze.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q4F-zdpFb9I