dot com was regarded as a bubble and seem to have the same amount of sustainability as indie games: good ones are good and bad ones are bad
Dot com was a bubble because you could call your company anything with a “dot com” on the end and get funding for it without a business strategy. Indie games never got that treatment.
Well I guess because you can’t really invest… even without funding you have tons of un strategy on indiegala
And without the investment angle, there’s no bubble.
A bubble isn’t “they’re really popular right now, and there’s a whole bunch of them popping up”. That’s a fad. A trend.
A bubble is always in reference to investments. It’s a pump-and-dump scheme at the level of the whole economy. The housing bubble isn’t because there’s a glut of houses on the market, it’s because people are trying to market houses as an investment opportunity for market squatters and landlords.
And yet some of my favorite indie games are games practically nobody’s ever heard of. Most recent was Metal Unit, a game that I don’t know how I have in my Steam library and somehow evades the internet’s favorite rule despite the main character being an anime girl in a bodysuit. At time of writing there are 17 players in-game.
So while good games are good and bad games are bad, the good ones may not necessarily be sustainable.
