Arcen Games in trouble

[akeley]

Sadly, the harsh realities of indie development hit one of my favourite studios: Arcen Games. Seems their just-released roguelite Starward Rogue shares a similar fate to loads of other titles: great reception but very poor sales.

Chris Park, Arcen`s main man describes the situation in a lengthy post here: https://arcengames.com/great-work-on-starward-rogue-team-now-youre-all-laid-off/#comment-2325

Very honest breakdown of what happened, recommended reading for anybody interested in commercial indie game development.

It`s also - of course - a bit of a cry for help, but nothing this old cynic would consider unfair or inappropriate. And they`re really worth supporting - even if I don`t like all their games,  I have huge respect for them for trying original concepts in stale genres.

[Holsety]

It`s also - of course - a bit of a cry for help, but nothing this old cynic would consider unfair or inappropriate. And they`re really worth supporting - even if I don`t like all their games,  I have huge respect for them for trying original concepts in stale genres.

This. I don't know if I could honestly call any of their games great (or even good...), but I never felt like they made "safe"/boring games.
Big fan of both A Valley Without Wind games, despite the presentation.
I'm not surprised to see them in trouble, but it still sucks.

[getter77]

Definitely a bad way they've found themselves in---hopefully they can turn things around again as they've managed to bounce back from adversity a good few times now.

[Krice]

great reception but very poor sales.

When people are going to learn that anything close to roguelike doesn't sell. You need to give people what they want, simple and easy to learn games. I think lot of "indie" developers fall into a trap thinking that they are creating something special, but in fact they are just a small development studio with overcomplicated plans for games and too much money spent on development, in a vague hope that their game will become a success.

[akeley]

You forgot to mention how much ADOM sucks, I`m disappointed.

The rest is (again) an example of trying to bend facts to your narrative and falling flat: if anything, it`s not being "close to roguelike" that hurt Starward`s Rogues sales - Arcen`s audience is mainly used to their slow, strategy, turn-based games and so didn`t really dig a twitch shooter (and said as much in the comments section).

As for "simple and easy to learn games": apparently Caves Of Qud sold as much as Sproggiwood when launched commercially despite the latter fitting into your description. But let`s not logic and facts get in the way of someone`s fixation, it`s too much fun as it is 

[Krice]

As for "simple and easy to learn games": apparently Caves Of Qud sold as much as Sproggiwood when launched

I don' t know either of those, but sometimes you can get lucky. It can be difficult to predict markets in a way that even totally crazy ideas can work as we saw with Minecraft. The main problem is I think that today's markets are hopelessly saturated with huge amount of games.