There’s a new game, called Love, just released last month by one-man indie developer Eskil Steenbert. If you have time, you should check out the gameplay demo video, it looks very cool and interesting and unlike anything else out there. Like with most indie games, it’s also astonishing it was created by just one person.
About a month prior to its release, its creator wrote a post explaining his reasoning behind, god forbid, actually charging money for the game, and in the middle of it all was this quiet indictment of the conventional wisdom:
“… The idea that we can produce more things, with higher quality, and fund it with smaller payments seems unrealistic to me.
“The smart money is not the ones trying to survive on microscopic payments, but the ones creating a platform to skim money from them. Apple wants the games on the Appstore to cost next to nothing, so that people buy more iPhones even if its not sustainable for the vast majority of developers. Google wants to you to think that you can become an overnight millionaire when everyone suddenly flock to your lolCat page with google ads on it, when they really make money on having millions of websites with their ads on that get a few hundred views each.”
And it makes me wonder whether this brilliant internet business model of giving your work away for free and then making money off the eyeballs is going to work when all the eyeballs are doing it too.
