That should not prevent smaller operations from succeeding. The 'space' theme is still used (see SPAZ, FTL even if they are indies).
I think that the 'simulation' genre is not as popular as before, flight simulators (combat or otherwise) have become rarer.
It's an old argument: publishers say "we won't make that game because it won't sell" and the market says "we can't buy that game because you won't make it".
But it's understandable, most of these companies have to show quarterly profits so they are adverse to risk. Creating a game that will cost millions of dollars and years to make for a genre that has stagnated, for whatever reason, is a huge risk.
The small developers are the key to filling this niche. Things like the recent indie resurgence and Kickstarter have made this more evident. The problem is often the large publishers buy these small developers and then proceed to destroy what made them special.
A few space sims, so to speak since SPAZ and FTL aren't quite the same, are out now and there are a few with big names attached in development by independents. If these have decent returns, on small developer terms at least, then I expect the large publishers to follow along spamming the genre.
But only if they can figure out how to get them to be fun on consoles. Which is another side of the problem of stagnating genres but that's a different discussion.
Actually they do a massive amount of market research. It's not that they're ignorant of what the market wants, it's that the type of game you want is unprofitably niche.
By "unprofitable" I mean it's a matter of where to invest their money. It's not that niche titles would be unprofitable, it's that other options will always have a better risk-reward balance.
The rest of your statement seems to support what I was saying about their needs of showing quarterly profits which prevents risky projects.
There's nothing stopping them from going into niche markets if they wanted, just budget accordingly. There is money to be made in the long tail but the large publishers are just unable to see it that way. But the thing is, some of the "niche" markets are potentially huge but they'll never know because they'd rather push out the upteenth version of sports games and military shooters. A number of genres are stagnating right now not because no one wants to play them but because no one is making them.
The game will probably cost at least $5M to make. The kickstarter just scraped $1.25M by calling on the core market. The game still needs to sell at least another 250k at full retail price to break even, and that's after many of the core audience have already bought it through kickstarter. Under perfect conditions, that level of sales on PC alone would already put in in risky territory.
As for indies, well yes, publishers already fund those as part of their portfolios. The ones that look like they're going to break even, at least.
The potential problems you describe sound like budget and project scale problems to me, not that the genre couldn't make money. If one wishes to spend 5 million plus on a game that only maybe 250k will actually pay for then you are destined for failure. I don't believe I stated otherwise.
If you have a large publisher funding your project, then you aren't an indie title. Plus I pointed out that they do these small projects from time to time to see if there's a chance a genre will be popular again for them to spam the crap out of. I didn't say that these projects were intended to make money.
Correct. But given that large, complex software projects take time and manpower to create, there is a subset of games and genres that simply cannot be developed and hope to break even.
It's not just the publishers 'at fault'. Developers don't want to downsize or go bankrupt, therefore they won't tend to develop games that won't let them pay wages in future.
There are alternative funding methods, but before kickstarter it was mostly arts grants and the like. Tale of Tales have developed several small art games on art grants, IIRC.
> If you have a large publisher funding your project, then you aren't an indie title.
No, not at all. ThatGameCompany are an indie company but Journey was bankrolled by Sony. Does that mean that it's not an indie title? Fez was created by Polytron, published by Trapdoor and distributed by Microsoft. I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft at least partially funded the XBLA version of Minecraft. DoubleFine's Brutal Legend was paid for by Activision, then dropped and picked up by EA (a big court case ensued). As I mentioned above, Tale of Tales have developed games using government money. The list goes on and on, because it's a very common way of working.
If Journey was bankrolled by Sony, then no, it is not an indie title. But then "indie title" can mean different things to different people. My definition is the thought that a major publisher was not directly involved in the development of the title. Fez is an indie title despite being "distributed" by Microsoft; I wouldn't give Microsoft much credit as a distributor just because it was on XBLA. Minecraft is clearly an indie title whether Microsoft partially funded the port for their system or not because that was not the original game. There could be debate whether the XBox version is an indie title at that point though. Brutal Legend is not an indie title if funded by first Activision and then EA.
Valve provides an interesting contrast here: with Steam/GreenLight they run a scaleable distribution channel for large numbers of small indies, taking a percentage without making particular and huge bets. It's like an index fund vs. managed fund, where the latter does intense research into specific options. Often that research in anchored in comparative analysis where someone has proven a juicy market exists (ex: Guitar Hero having a million clones in its wake).
Valve are not typical developer/publishers. They are the gatekeeper, like Apple, Microsoft or Sony. Everything they do is to bring customers in to their walled garden. Their games have effectively infinite budget and can be seen as loss leaders.
Greenlight isn't amazingly helpful for small indies because it requires your game to hit a critical mass of popularity like kickstarter. Unlike kickstarter you need to have already developed the game and have it float about on greenlight for 6mnths+ before you see any return (after Valve's XX% cut of sales).
If you have no greater ambitions than the average MMO gamer, you can do well solo. And if you are smart about it, you can amass quite a lot of wealth.
If you want to own territory or have fleets, then you do have to join a big corp.
I wonder why no one has made a mainstream space sim game since (X3 is a notable exception, though the learning curve is quite steep). Between this and Star Citizen, there seems to be legions of space nerds like myself, ready to throw money at even the possibility of a good game.