Steam researcher, marketing consultant, and indie game advisor Chris Zukowski has been talking about a new "golden age" of indie games on Steam for a while now, so I was keen to dig into the idea during an interview at GDC.
Simply put, Zukowski sees data to support his theory that multiple genres are currently enjoying the kind of Steam boom that hit roguelikes after the release of Vampire Survivors. If you made a game like Vampire Survivors in that window, you had an above-average shot at success because the audience was hungry for more of that. And right now, a lot of genres are going through that on Steam, meaning devs with overlapping ideas, or the agility to pivot to a new project in that space, can get a piece of that pie while players get more of the trend they've fallen in love with.
This is something Zukowski suggests to many developers: a return to the old way of making games by doing short and fast projects to get your name out and build your skills up, maybe find a winner along the way to help with funding, and then commit to the multi-year dream project with a better foundation. These so-called golden age genres are ripe for that kind of experimenting.
"It sounds like a bad thing, but it's almost like the player base was drinking and their inhibitions lowered," Zukowski tells me. "The whole player base who liked these Vampire Survivors-likes, they weren't so judgmental about a game. You didn't have to market as hard and all that stuff. If you hit that genre, you're like, 'This is Vampire Survivors,' people were like, 'Fine, let me try it. Oh, that was fun.' Or it wasn't, and they moved on. If you were in that, that was really great.
"But now this year, the reason I call it a golden age is, not only do we have Vampire Survivors, but we have all these other genres that are having the same thing, where the whole audience's inhibitions are lowered and they're willing to try more types of games."
A Vampire Survivors-type game, like breakout hit Megabonk or Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor, can still move mountains, Zukowski notes. But because there are so many of those games now, "the bar of quality goes up and up." He reckons other genres still have that early forgiveness, with audiences hungry for more and ready to forgive a few rough edges.
"This is why I love PC gaming," Zukowski says. "There's just more acceptance of jank." Whereas consoles, with their stricter approvals and more cumbersome patch pipelines, have "so much cert to go through."
A few truths coexist here. Game trends are cyclical, so there's a hot new thing every few years. Right now there just might be several hot new things on Steam. And making a game is always hard and never a guarantee of success, no matter how favorable the perceived market conditions. But Zukowski's theory makes some sense when you look at the genres in question: idle and incremental games, friendslop, and horror, as well as new-age Survivors-likes. He also tips his hat to narrative-led games where good writing can do a lot of the work, and rage games like Chained Together, though it can be harder for those to really catch fire.
Idle games like Rusty's Retirement and its many imitators speak for themselves, as does the enduring popularity of Banana and similar incremental clickers on Steam. Horror games are an evergreen one, Zukowski says, because they're often short by design, can be carried a bit by emotional impact, make good use of lo-fi aesthetics, and have a loyal audience – all good things for small teams who may be inexperienced or working with very limited resources.
Friendslop is the talk of the town, and "a good mid-tier company play," according to Zukowski. At GDC, Peak co-developer Aggro Crab also advised prospective indies to make a friendslop game before the fad dies. Zukowski points to recent standouts like Burglin' Gnomes and We Gotta Go. The latter, in particular, demonstrates his view of Steam right now.
"They've got the story that, I think, is why I call this a golden age," he says. "They had a game that underperformed. They released it, it was a big game, multi-year thing. And so they kind of panicked, they went, 'We gotta make a new game.' And so they made one pretty fast, which is this, We Gotta Go. So that's, again, it's the perfect test case. And I'm always saying, if you're stuck in development hell or something bad happened, pivot quick to one of these things and see how it goes. I see it as a good barometer.
"Some people mistake the term gold rush and golden age," he continues. "They kind of conflate those two. I don't think it's a gold rush. But one analogy to a gold rush is, OK, they found gold in California and Alaska. If you're in Vermont, you're not going to find gold. You've got to go to California or Alaska. It's the same thing. It doesn't affect everybody. You gotta be able to go for this type of thing."
The takeaway, he stresses, is that "it's reducing the barrier to entry to make these games," reversing what he saw as "more of a winter" for indies where more high-profile, high-fidelity games were more of what was cutting through. We're still just working with averages, of course, but the friendslop craze, in particular, makes a convincing argument that there's gold in them there hills. And this type of audience snowball works so well on Steam because of the platform's discoverability tools, and because of the average PC gamer's appetite for new stuff and their tolerance for some jank in, especially, indie games. Big publishers charging $70 or $80 might find PC gamers less tolerant of jank.
