Amongst the chaos of E3, I managed to grab a coffee with an old friend, Pietro Riva of Santa Ragione (Fotonica, Mirror Moon), who is a great designer and Very Smart Bloke, and chewed the fat over how increasingly difficult it is to find traction for experimental games on Steam. Back in 2012 when we launched Dear Esther, we had three things going for us.
Firstly, it just resonated with players and the word of mouth around the game was huge – in part due to the love of the 2007 mod amongst the mod community (which meant we knew we had something that wasn’t just for art-gamers, whoever they might be, but was loved by a large number of FPS players too). Secondly, Valve loved it, and it was built on its engine, coming out of its mod community, so it made sure it got front page profiling – the holy grail of being on Steam. Thirdly, there was just less on Steam overall, and certainly nothing like Esther. We stuck out like a depressing, incomprehensible, slow-moving thumb.
Those days are gone. Getting seen on Steam is now more important than ever, as the sheer volume of titles continues to swell, and the pressure of Early Access and community curation certainly doesn’t seem to play in favour of more experimental games. There’s a very definite sense that the initial glory wave of arthouse gaming has passed, the bar has been raised, and it’s difficult to stand out. For a studio as established as Tale of Tales [creators of Sunset] – despite whether or not their games are your taste – to only manage to sell a few thousand units is quite scary.
By the time this is published, it will be clear whether Her Story’s online adoration has translated into cold hard cash, but it’s sitting on the Steam front page as a Top Seller as I write this, so indications are good. So the audience and the appetite is there; we’re still interested in trying out new things, paying to support experimentation and innovation as a community, and it’s important to remember that amongst the many issues we still face. In the wake of Sunset, there have been calls to explore different models of funding to support experimental games, government subsidies, even demands that bigger companies offer something not a million miles away from patronage. I’m not sure how I feel about this. I’ve always been a little wary of KickStarter and Patreon (particularly Patreon, but that might just be the people that are on Patreon) but the competition to get a slice of the action within the open market is definitely toughening up. Equally, both Dear Esther and Everybody’s Gone To The Rapture received prototyping funds from the Arts & Humanities Research Council, so we’ve been lucky enough to succeed in both the subsidy sector and the open market.
But I still love the fact that as an industry and community, we fund our own art. That has always given me real optimism for the future of gaming, and I’d hate to see it ghettoised through public subsidy. Nobody ever said all games should be like Dear Esther, or Sunset or Her Story. No-one is going to take away our robot dinosaurs any time soon (god, I hope not because, you know, ROBOT DINOSAURS!). But we have a responsibility as a community to understand that the interplay between mainstream and experimental is a critical part of games and we all have a responsibility to support it financially, or we risk more than the occasional studio closing. Experimentation is the lifeblood of gaming.
Dan Pinchbeck is the creative director at The Chinese Room, currently working on Everybody’s Gone To The Rapture. His views aren’t necessarily representative of games™