The Long Tail in Independent Games
In the retail market for games, it's very much a hit-driven business. A major publisher expects one or two hits a year to carry the rest of their titles - a couple more may break even or make a minor profit, but most games lose money. At least that's the story they tell. The truth is, the top 5% or 10% of the titles released in a year make some insane percentage of the money, and everything else sells a pathetic number of units.

There has been a lot of discussion in some forums about independent games suffering the same fate. The cool thing about being an indie is that you don't have to chase the "sure bets" of the big-business retail world. But nobody wants to put thousands of dollars and man-hours into creating a game that won't do anything but lose money, even on the small scale that most indies work on. Portals are reporting that if a game isn't on the front page, in the top 10 or top 15, it's never going to bring in much in the way of sales.

Wired magazine online published an article a few months ago that can be found at http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.html which shows how places like Amazon and Netflix are changing this. Not that this changes the economics of things immensely - you still have the same curve in terms of sales. A top 10 game is still going to disproportionally outsell a game a few places lower in the rankings. But it means there's no "cut-off." These companies are making half (or more) of their money from products that just wouldn't be available otherwise.

From a games perspective, this could mean some small hope for the strange, niche-y games or some of the diamond-in-the-rough games out there.

So could a portal evolve that is the downloadable equivalent of Rhapsody? Maybe. It would have to feature a really solid means of guiding the customer to product that they might enjoy - something far beyond what's currently available. But there's a cost associated with computer games that could prevent this from happening - technical support. With MP3s, there's a very low overhead for supporting everything, due to the standards that are out there. But with computer games, a portal doesn't necessarily want to deal with customer service headaches associated with people trying to play a DOS game under Windows.

But is this a problem in the try-before-you-buy model of shareware? I don't know. It's an interesting thought, though, isn't it?

Labels: Indie Evangelism

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 5:51 PM (Permalink)