I remember, years ago, fighting to get a game put on Steam. Applied for developer access, paid the fee, then spent hours a day doing promo and ad runs to boost GreenLight position. It was a huge waste of time and ultimately led to a situation where I had people paying me for the game directly. If Valve said "Give us $1000 and we'll let you put your game up", I would have done it.
When Valve started talking about removing GreenLight and opening the floodgates, I remember so many developers absolutely fucking thrilled they could just add their games for a direct fee, as if the sudden influx of new games wouldn't drastically lower their chances to actually be discovered. A very small percentage of devs (myself included) had our fingers crossed that the submission price would be $500 to $1000 to weed out obvious cash grabs and low-effort shit. It was interesting to have coversations with developers who were completely taken aback by those who wanted the fee raised. Almost none of them viewed game development as a business, but all sweared to be "full-time indie developers" and that $100 was completely unrealistic. A little bit of questioning and 9 times out of 10 it was revealed they were either collecting unemployment, lived with their parents, or had a husband/wife working full-time to support them.
There was a survey out circa 2014-2015 that showed some fuck-huge percentage of indie developers made less than minimum wage, and that seemed to reflect in the conversations I was having.
Ultimately Valve set the price at $100 and essentially sealed the fate of every single one of these developers. Who cares if you can get your game on Steam? Everyone else is on it too. Now you need an advertising budget (much, much more than the "ideal" $500 - $1000 submission fee) and enough time to bash out deals with Twitch streamers/YouTubers to play your game for an hour. Even during the Greenlight days you'd get shitloads of traffic for the day or two you were still on the front page. Now I hear stories of developers submitting games and getting next to nothing.
It's really cheapened the experience IMO. You can put a ton of time into developing something, but then fall short on the budget needed to get eyes on it. I know people like to believe that if you make a good game it'll get picked out eventually, but I don't think that holds true. It was nearly unheard of to see indies getting publishing deals a decade ago - now it's commonplace. Not so "indie", is it?
The other option, of course, is to make a vaguely shocking horror game with an edgy premise and hope some Twitch streamer plays it for 15 minutes to their audience of 10k. Price it low enough and then you've made a few grand for a few weeks worth of work. Repeat. The last gamedev event I went to was 100% focused on "building games to attract YouTubers" and was hosted by someone who had made a shit, one-off game that some popular YouTube channel featured. The takeway was that the game didn't need to be perfect or even all that enjoyable past a few minutes - as long as you got a bunch of people to play it, you'd done your job.
As much as I dislike Epic's tactics, I do like that they at least want to curate the experience somewhat. It gives me hope that maybe we can see smaller, less professional indie games come back into focus on a bigger platform than something like Itch.io. There's a ton of hidden gems out there that just don't have the push behind it to make it big.
