The meme has caught on that indie games are facing difficult times. Nicholas Lovell made the point about two months back when he said that Valve had started the race to zero, but this sense of impending disaster has been floating about the scene for a while. Most recently Jeff Vogel's post entitled The Indie Bubble Is Popping nailed it, explaining it all as a simple supply and demand problem. As supply increases in a market of relatively fixed size, prices decrease. Eventually the benign conditions turn malignant, and then everybody's in the soup.
Privately I've heard many similar sentiments of doom. Speaking with indie developers there's the sentiment that the good times have passed, and some have even darkly hinted that they feel the ladder needs to be pulled up lest all is lost. Many are looking to the safer havens of consoles, particularly to Sony, to shield them - but history would indicate that that kind of help only lasts so long. Taking all that in mind I took to Twitter this morning to think these issues out.
I ended up here:
