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Thomas Was Alone dev Mike Bithell has said that we don’t have the data needed to accurately assess the health of the digital games market.
One school of thinking is that the boom of digital indie games has now led to bust. This supposed phenomenon is called the ‘indiepocalypse’. Others argue that simply isn’t happening.
The real frustration is that there’s just no way to know.
The indiepocalypse is incredibly difficult to have an opinion on because it requires access to everyone’s data. You need to know how everyone’s doing,” Bithell told MCV.
People are very quick to read into small amounts of data and people don’t understand the data they do have. They don’t understand the gaps. They don’t understand what the numbers they’re looking at mean and are making big assumptions.”
Bithell did add, however, that by looking at data that is available and comparing it to his genuine sales numbers of Thomas Was Alone and Volume, a lot of the information doing the rounds is widely inaccurate.
He added that his personal sales journey, and that of his admittedly successful friends, suggests things have never been better for digital indie games.
The answer to the problem is that everyone should share their data and then we’d all know,” he conceded. But that favours people like me because in that scenario the numbers would make me look good."
UPDATE: The last sentence has been amended to better reflect its intended meaning.
