Recently Magical Time Bean’s Ian Stocker has spoken about his happiness over being chosen for the Steam Greenlight initiative where his title Escape Goat saw release through this platform. Stocker has noted that PC indie developers are under serious strain outside of the Steam environment;
“To survive as a PC indie dev, you really have to have your games on Steam. There are exceptions to this, like Minecraft, but statistically speaking, you’re going to need to be on Steam to make a living. Before PAX, and the whole Greenlight thing came through for me, I had just about given up on being a PC-centered developer, and planned to put all my efforts towards consoles. It was encouraging to see Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo suddenly become so indie-friendly, with self publishing on their new consoles and stuff like that.”
Such a comment does seem to make sense, with Steam holding a massive grip on the download market for PC gaming whilst also supporting many Indie titles, most developers need such a system to get their name and title acknowledged.
Magical Time bean is now working on Escape Goat 2. Do you think indie developers do have alternative ways to achieve sales in this competitive market? Let us know what you think in the comments below.