As a AAA vet (Metroid Prime 4, Remnant, Crysis 3), I assumed that gave me a tiny leg up, and my solo-dev indie game, Carceri, might do OK... Boy was I wrong! It flopped so deeply, so profoundly, that it's honestly hilarious. And it seems I have a lot of company.
In our Age of Infinite Options, most Indie games fail. There's simply not enough time (or money) to allow all games to succeed, or even get noticed.
Consider how saturated we are in 2024 (per Steam DB):
- There's almost 100k games on Steam now (98,298)
More than half were released in the past 4 years (53,360)
- 15,257 games were released on Steam this year (through Oct)
That's more than the first 11 years of Steam combined! (11,323)
- That's roughly 1,525 games a month, 350 a week, or 50 a day.
More games release per month than the first 6 years of Steam combined! (1,383)
- Also, consider the saturation of TV shows, movies, books, podcasts, streaming content, etc that compete for our time/money.
In this free for all, a few games win the Indie Lottery, while the rest hold a losing ticket. They not just fail, but are completely unknown, like Carceri. Is it good? Is it interesting? Nobody knows, because nobody's tried it. Hell, nobody's even heard of it.
So, to honor the absurdity and madness of it all, I made a trailer/music video dedicated to the thousands of unknown games out there facing the same fate, but might just deserve more than Zero. And in that same spirit, Carceri is now renamed Carceri Zero. Yes, it also has new content, but with zero players, who would even know?
To coincide with this, Carceri Zero is 20% off from Nov 4 to the 11th!