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That seems like a reversal of cause and effect.

Indie developers were (and to an extent still are) pretty important on computers. People made (still make) a living selling software for double-digit dollars direct to the customer, and many of them were very well known.

The App Store model provoked a race to the bottom because everything was centralized, there were rules about how your app could be purchased, and pricing went all the way down to a dollar. The old model of try-before-you-buy didn't work. People wouldn't spend $20 sight-unseen, especially when surrounded by apps with a 99 cent price tag. It's not so much that people don't care about indie developers as that indie developers had a very hard time making it in a space that didn't allow indie-friendly approaches to selling software.

No surprise that such a thing ended up in a situation where high-quality software doesn't sell, and most of the revenue comes from effectively gambling.



If every single indie developer disappeared and didn’t make software for computers - to a first approximation, no one would notice a difference.


This did happen and you're right, no one noticed a difference.




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