Is the indie scene over-saturated?

There's far more **** films than great ones, particularly since the rise of independent film in the early 80s/90s and advent of home video. There's an overwhelming amount of bad books compared to the good ones, and that's never been more pronounced than with the increased prominence of ebooks and self-publishing. Same with podcasts, paintings, whatever. It's a result of democratisation - the easier it is to create and publish / release something, the more junk that's going to get out there.

With games, it's perhaps compounded somewhat by the medium's deep integration with digital distribution: while there's always been a challenge in getting a film into cinemas or a film festival (or, in gaming, on to retail shelves), in the last 10 years it's become very easy to release a game to a whole lot of people. This has only become more pronounced with the likes of Steam's increasingly hands-off approach to curation, although a more curatorial spirit can be seen somewhere like the homepage of itch.io. (not that curation is always a good thing - look at the recent refusal by GOG to allow the widely acclaimed Opus Magnum on their platform, thankfully something they later backtracked on).

So yes, there's a lot of crap, and there's definite problems for developers who are trying to get the message out. Sometimes I feel whether I hear about a game is down to whether Twitter's algorithm just luckily happened to show me a recommendation from a game-maker or writer I like - I only randomly stumbled across Genesis Noir a day or two before its Kickstarter campaign ended, even though it looks exactly like my kind of thing.

This is easily countered by indie gaming being in very rude health creatively as a result of the very same processes that have led it to being overpopulated, competitive and overwhelming. As someone who often prefers experimental stuff these days, I'm thrilled that developers are out there making art games like Oikospiel, The Norwood Suite, Anatomy, Samorost 3, Opus Magnum, The Beginner's Guide, Kentucky Route Zero, Engare, Naissancee, Gorogoa etc... These, alongside the bigger name indie gems & masterpieces, are the reason why the oversaturation has to be accepted: because the more people there are making games, the more likely there's going to be interesting, weird, ambitious, or just straight up great ones.

No matter what kind of games you're into, there's almost certainly interesting independent games worth looking into (well, maybe not licenced sports games ). If it takes 50 underwhelming pixel art platformers for every Celeste, that's a price I guess we have to pay. Thankfully we can choose to only play the good ones.

I wouldn't envy being a developer trying to make a splash in the indie scene, but hopefully most talented ones can find at least a niche to sustain them - Cosmo D is unlikely to ever be a big name like Jon Blow, but one can only hope he finds an audience who can sustain his work. As a player, though, I guess the key thing is to try and establish one's own discovery networks - following interesting developers & critics on social media, or checking a wider range of platforms than just the Nintendo eShop or Steam frontpages etc... It isn't always easy - personally never have quite found somewhere to give me the reliable fix Kill Screen used to provide before the owner went and ****ed that up. But even if I miss some stuff, there's always tonnes of recommendations out there, and plenty of great games