I have been thinking alot about this subject lately. It seems that everyone is making maket place portals, Apple, Android, Intel, Xbox live and Steam just to name a few. This seems like a pretty nice way for indie developers to develop there skills and post their projects, not to mention making bringing in potential cash flow. The reason I have brought this up, is because, I term myself and my skills as an indie C++ game programmer.

Apple and Android (Google) has an attractive market place for developers to earn a decent living creating these apps and games. So I heard Windows(Microsoft) will be incorporating into there new OS (8) a marketplace. I hope they will allow indie dev's to make apps and games for the PC's that people would consider buying, as most of the development for PC's are C++ based, (Games that is).

What is your thoughts on this, just seems like games for the PC's are declining.

Shakey

I've been keeping an eye at EBGames/GameStop and noticed that the PC games section has been shrinking and shrinking each month. Also I haven't seen any new / original games released in over a year or two now that I actually want to buy. Everything seems to be a remake of some other game or just part n+1 of an already existing game. I'm not sure if big game developers are just opposed to releasing games for the PC due to piracy or if there are other reasons.

I also have noticed that online games or games that require an internet connection to play are a lot more popular now then they ever were.

What is your thoughts on this, just seems like games for the PC's are declining.

You yourself listed Steam - which incidentally was around years before Apple decided to start doing this - so I don't see that PC gaming is missing out, if anything, it's at the forefront of digital distribution. The question of whether PC games are declining or not in general is separate to the issue of digital distribution.

Also consider that an increase in games being distributed online may be why you now see less of them in the shops. (Can you buy phone applications in shops? No, because people are busy downloading them from Nokia etc.)

Personally I was using an online shareware distribution website that handled payment for a 10% fee _14 years ago_. These days I only do open source in my spare time so I've no idea what's around now, but possibly such things still exist? Certainly beats Apple's "innovation" of creaming a 30% cut from developers.

I think that there are several factors at work. First, online marketplaces are very different on specific devices than on a PC. The value of the app store and android marketplaces isn't convenience or value, but the exclusive access to selling programs to those platforms.

PCs will (hopefully) never have such limitations. Steam was important because it promoted convenient access to games at low prices (depending on what country you're in). Steam was an alternative to buying a disc in a store or even online, and now other services are popping up to do the same thing but for licenses of specific companies or franchises.

I predict that as people get more used to the idea of multiple steam-like services we will see at least some that cater to smaller development houses, like an ad hoc publisher for indie studios. But as newer services compete with steam and each other we'll probably be stuck with multiple services with shallower libraries and relatively little indie access (compared to app store and marketplace) until steam's dominance is broken up a bit more.