I agree that it's nice that indies are able to produce games with good-looking 3D graphics. But you fundamentally have to ask whether this is sustainable -- that is, whether enough people are buying these games for them to even remotely break even.

I don't have any way of directly seeing the sales stats for these games, but there is publicly-available knowledge to give you a pretty good idea of where they are, generally. First, keep in mind that Steam sells the vast majority of games on the PC right now, and all other services put together still add up to a relatively small minority. (#1 on Direct2Drive is peanuts from what I hear; I have never released a game there.)

If you go here:

(http://store.steampowered.com/stats/)

And then click on the link at the bottom, "View Steam players per game", to expand it, you can see where the games are relative to each other, in terms of who is playing simultaneously. This is not the same thing as sales, of course (it will be dominated at the top by heavy multiplayer games) but it will still give you some idea of perhaps how many people are buying a game on any particular day, for games that aren't heavy multiplayer experiences like that.

So, search down this list for Zeno Clash and The Path. Both of them are pretty far down there. Zeno Clash is just a bit below Braid, which I can tell you right now is bad news. Disclosing how much Braid has sold on Steam would be a violation of the publishing agreement, but I can say that if you add together all PC sales from all PC online publishers, and extrapolate that through the end of 2009, it probably would not be enough for Braid to break even, if Braid had only been released on the PC. Maybe it would barely break even. Braid has done quite well, overall, but that's mainly because of the Xbox 360; I do not at all envy anyone trying to sell a game that's PC-only right now.

So you have Zeno Clash, a game with really nice 3D graphics that was probably kind of expensive to make (ACE Team lists 7 Key Members on their page at (http://www.aceteam.cl/)), and this game is selling less than a cheaper-to-make 2D game that, despite being cheaper, probably wouldn't have made back its budget either (had it been only released on the PC). So, that doesn't look good.

(And keep in mind that Braid is a pretty short game, so it is probably underreported on this list of simultaneous players, compared to longer games, if you are trying to figure out sales).

Then you look down the list and see The Path, and it's pretty obvious that making another one of those will not be possible without a large arts grant and complete lack of profit motive.

So, I agree that it's great seeing people make these games, and I'd love to see more, perhaps this becoming a well-established paradigm for indie game development. But is that realistically going to happen? Only if the PC market changes tremendously.

Hi. I'm one of the devs of Zeno Clash, so I just wanted to add my two cents in regards to the feasibility of making these type of games (and a bit in response to Jonathan's reply which is quite insightful).

Zeno Clash has not been a huge seller still. We are currently covering the project's cost and it would be correct to say that getting a XBLA port would be the next step to help achieve the financial success of the game -and this is something we are pursuing at the moment.

A couple of things should be noted in regards to ZC and the discussion about 'Single-A' games:

a) We developed it from Chile. The cost of life is perhaps half the cost of living in the US, so in terms of revenue you could say that each dollar we get for this games is valued 'twice' what you would get if you made it in a 'expensive' country. Taking this into account, I think we will likely see similar projects come from other countries in the future.

b) I believe one of the things that is very important in a project such as ZC is the fact that you are creating more than just a game; you are creating an expandable intellectual property. The world, characters and story of Zeno Clash are a huge part of the game. I think creating a sequel and expanding the universe of a game like this can be more effective and profitable (in a long term) than with many indie games, since they are usually based on the novelty of their game mechanics and design. Maybe a 'World of Goo 2' or 'Braid 2' would be less successful than their previous installments. But if we developed Zeno Clash 2 with an open RPG world, with many more characters and a continuing story; that adds tremendous value to the series and can eventually make the game a hit. Perhaps I'm wrong, but I believe that 'Single-A' games in many cases have better chances of becoming franchises.

Hopefully it sees the light of day. Independent studios have been taking a beating lately.