There's some moral issues about big publishers' business practices. Somehow, almost all racing games for example are EA. Like it's actually crazy lol - so despite wanting to play them, we do not wish to do that. Similarly, a lot of other co-op games are Ubisoft.

So looking for recommendations! Almost any genre and type are appreciated - only exception is games with pixel graphics (just really unpleasant to look at for me).

The other day, I happened to stumble on a YouTube video where the creator explored the problem of “discoverability” of video games on platforms like app stores, Steam, and Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo’s shops. That’s something that has been bothering me for a long time about the Apple App Store.

By pure coincidence though, this morning, as I was browsing through the “You Might Also Like” section at the bottom of a game that I am interested in, I began to go down a rabbit hole where I ended up finding a good handful of games I had played on Steam that I wasn’t aware were available on iOS/iPadOS as well. It’s quite sad, because these are games that I really enjoyed, and I paid for them on Steam, a platform that Valve (understandingly) neglects on macOS, whereas I could have played them optimized for iOS/iPadOS.

The creator in the YouTube video didn’t really have a solution for this problem, and it seems to me that as the industry grows, and more and more “slop” begins to flood these platforms, it will only become harder and harder to discover the good indie games buried underneath it all.

I feel this intense urge inside me to start some kind of blog or website to provide short reviews so that at least some people will discover these games. We definitely need more human curation.

I’m also appalled that so many of these games on the Apple App Store have little to no ratings. No one makes an effort to leave behind a few words so that other people can get an idea of whether it’s worth to invest their money in a game.

I guess that there isn’t really anything that can be done about the issue of discoverability. As an indie developer and publisher, you just have to do the that best you can to market your game, and hope to redirect potential customers to your website or socials, where you should clearly list all the platforms that your game is available on (surprisingly, a lot of developers don’t do this). But that’s about all that you can do. The rest is luck.

With all the talk of layoffs and studio closures, I wanted to know what the opinions and general experience is like as an indie game dev. How viable is it, how successful can you really be with that career and what challenges can crop up?

I started making my own game a while back and got extremely discouraged by the layoffs and technical hurdles I was running into, to the point where someone told me maybe I wasn't cut out for it on discord. This really killed my drive, and it would be awesome to hear about some success stories or even some struggles that you may have overcome.