This is the sort of future I have expected for awhile now. Fewer multi-million-dollar celebrity-making hits but far more people being able to make a comfortable living off of serving a niche audience. Now that distribution is worthless, creators don't have to chain themselves to "publishers" who skim almost every penny the creator creates. Back in the Bad Ole Days before the Internet, distribution was such a titanically difficult problem to solve, they earned that skim... but they really have no call to it now. That opens things up dramatically.
This is what I have found. I started indie game dev a back in 2009, and I'm finally to the point where I'm making a very comfortable living, but by no means a millionaire. However, having a small company with some fellow devs is now in the realm of possibility, which is a long-time dream of mine.
Edit:
My games are mostly mobile. I am really excited about the figures he posted for Steam. I just got one of my games greenlit on Steam (SimpleRockets) and I hope I can sustain further development on it.
Distribution is easy but marketing certainly is not. That is why people still turn to big name distributors since they come with a built in marketing and promotion machine.
That is absolutely true. Distribution is by far not the only important factor to consider. It's just that distribution so totally dominated everything for over a century that its commoditization radically changes everything. Most companies offered other services (marketing, logistics, team management, etc) and made some money on them but distribution was an order of magnitude more important and where they made their real money. Now with distribution being essentially solved, those other things become much more important.... but those things can also be more easily and efficiently solved by independent contractors and people not hampered by the giant distribution networks and existing distribution agreements that the big publishers are saddled with. Those things were absolute GOLD for a century. Now they are a noose. What interests me now is the value of aggregation. It was mostly taken for granted when distribution was a much larger problem, but now aggregating things together and making it easier for customers to find things is far more important. When you've got millions of products available to you, learning about the products you are interested in and being able to find them all in one place becomes more important. It's a far easier (in terms of material cost, not intellectual challenge) problem to solve than distribution, though. So these companies are really going to have to radically shrink their profit margins in any case.... and modern businesses can't even deal well with slowing growth, let alone actual shrinking...
There's a difference between a value-add, and a gatekeeper. And a gatekeeper can get away with skimming an asymptotically high percentage of the profit. A value-add like Steam is nice, but it's not essential the way that BnM distributors were, so that keeps their cut and control at reasonable levels.
