In recent years, indie games have gained considerable popularity. Every year, more and more interesting projects appear and gain favor with players. Such positive changes in the market have led to the fact that indie games have overtaken AAA and AA projects in terms of the number of copies sold and almost caught up in terms of revenue, according to the VG Insight report.
Despite the rapid development of the indie sphere, such results were achieved not least due to the large number of indie projects. In 2024, more than 13 thousand games were released, 99% of which were indie projects.
The indie games market has been growing steadily since 2020, when the pandemic began. The biggest growth was in third-party projects. However, all other sectors have also seen growth, even if these are games from people for whom development is just a hobby. In addition, indie studios have become more stable and most of them are releasing their second and third projects, and experienced developers are gaining more and more financial success with each release.
The report also indicates that indie games on Steam generate the same revenue as large AA or AAA projects. However, the statistics here are a bit of a stretch, as indie projects include the recent hit Black Myth: Wukong, which, although theoretically can be called indie because the studio self-published the game, does not fall under the usual definition of indie.
As a reminder, Black Myth: Wukong became the most popular single-player game in Steam’s history a day after its release. At its peak, the game gathered 2,415,714 players and became the second most popular game on the platform overall, behind only PUBG, which once gathered 3.2 million players at the same time.
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