I was chatting about this briefly on a discord, but I've been thinking about it since then and I'm going to post here to organize my thoughts. I'm not an expert though so don't take this as truth.
Many people talk about the cycles of innovation - the idea that, metaphorically, big trees eventually fall and then the undergrowth goes wild until some of them turn into big trees and the cycle begins again. Or dinosaurs and mammals, although that's less obviously cyclical.
But that metaphor suggests that there's an inevitability to this that's not really present, I don't think. There's more dependent on outside forces making something change that allows for this - the chainsaw cutting down the tree, or more often the slow shift of climate that makes the trees die off.
Anyway, here's what I think happened. There were a LOT of different things that coalesced at the same time to allow the rise of the experimental wave of games. A big one was the advent of Steam, and digital distribution more broadly. In the early to mid 2000s, it's bizarre to remember, but most games were sold on discs in stores. That costs a lot of money and there's huge gatekeepers blocking the way in. It took years for Steam to be seen as a viable store, and for them to start adding non-Valve games, but suddenly there was a viable path to players that did an end-run around the gates.
The internet was also happening, and this exposed more people to more types of games. Importantly, it also exposed people who did not think of themselves as game players to game makers, and people who did not think of themselves as game makers to the possibility of making games.
Another piece of the puzzle was similar processes happening in games journalism - thanks to the internet and other factors a bunch of journalists decided they wanted to write about games in new ways, new types of games for new players, and a lot of people also decided they could write about games. So this meant that the places that people looked to learn about games were suddenly as or more excited about weird experimental small games as they were the bigger ones from existing parties in staid genres.
Similarly in the big studios, more people were becoming excited by new ideas and contemptuous of the same old way of doing things - people who knew their craft but wanted to do something more experimental.
And then also at the same time another set of gates were being bypassed on the making side of the equation - cheaper, easier tools were there for making games (mostly Unity to start but as the wave grew also Twine, GameMaker, etc) and suddenly you didn't have to make your own tech from scratch or pay a company millions to license something.
And lastly I suspect that the Free Money era had something to do with this too - lots of dollars floating around looking for something to attach to, fueling publishers' and platforms' high risk tolerance. But I know little about that so I'll leave it there.
So, gates breaking left and right - cheap and easy tools, a viable path to players, a trusted cheering section, a diverse, angry, curious crowd of creators, an engaged and open-minded audience eager for New things! It was a really cool time that feels so far away now. And what happened is that the trees grew and the paths around the gates got new gates built on top of them.
That's not to say that indie games are dead, or creativity and experimentation aren't happening any more - they clearly are. But in every "how to sell your game on steam" article or Twitter thread you can see that there's rules and gates and people to be appeased - and less appetite for weird stuff because you need to fit into the right holes to make it through the gates. Steam isn't the hidden path any more, it's the main road. Unity isn't a secret weapon, it's the standard. Queer stories, narrative-focused experiences, experiments mechanics, audiences beyond the young white dude aren't a rising groundswell, they're the reality of gamers. This is great!! I'm glad the definition of games and gamers has expanded, but it is harder, in my opinion, to push the boundaries further now.
In order for this to happen again, we need a break in the dams somewhere, or really in multiple places at once. Valve and Steam are the new gatekeepers, using algorithms to decide what is relevant to players. Unity has become a tech company chasing the latest New Thing in hopes of boosting stock prices and getting acquired. Games journalism has had incredible wounds from multiple places. The internet is becoming a broken shopping channel.
Again, I hope this doesn't come across as me saying "no one is making weird cool commercial indie games like we used to!" From my perspective, though, that mountain has gotten steeper and harder to climb. That's my last inept metaphor.
So..... I agree with most of this post. But there's one bit I want to - well, it's a topic I'm known for harping on, so harping on it again, because I think it's been widely forgotten even by many people who were there at the time - and the brain drain in indie and journalism has robbed us of even more who would remember it.
2010-2011 Steam was a gated community. I cannot stress this enough - in the pre-greenlight and steam direct days, the way you got onto steam was to Know Someone At Valve Who'd Get You On. And then you had to contend with the gatekeeping - because let's be clear, valve had very explicit opinions on Who their audience was and if your game didn't fit it they would refuse to sell it. I know all this because Gaslamp Games hired a contractor whose entire job was that he knew a man at valve and his time was spent convincing this man to publish our game even though valve didn't think Half Life 2 players would enjoy a roguelike. (Visual Novels had to contend with this kind of skepticism even worse, for years and years.)
So here's the thing about that. Because it changes the calculus a lot. When you were on steam in 2011 you had very little competition. At most one or two games launched a week. Often far less. And this came with priviliges - specifically, when you got published on steam, you were allocated a number of "Front page carousel slots" that you could activate when desired - usually on release or when you were doing a big DLC or sale - that forced your page to appear on the front page of steam, front-and-center. The personalized, Algorithmic Carousel that exists now was not a thing. It was, at that time, hand-curated. This was a free service every game published by steam got. Valve would sometimes offer additional carousel slots as rewards for doing things they liked (usually participating in their feature launches).
Can you IMAGINE how huge this was???? The simple fact was that getting on steam at all in 2011 functionally guaranteed some degree of success because it blasted your game out, aggressively, to every single user for lengthy periods. There's simply no modern analogue and I'm not even sure how you'd create something like it that didn't - just as steam did back then - cater directly to the most privileged, the ones who look the most like the people who work at valve. There's a lot of talk about how indie 'democratized game development' but while it did open doors, the doors were always opened widest for the people who already had connections. It's not a coincidence that nearly every single person starring in Indie Game The Movie had previous AAA experience.
This is all to say that I'd think very carefully about looking back on that period with rose-tinted glasses. Yes, a lot of doors opened, but there were a lot of doors that remained firmly closed, too - especially to those with marginalizations. We shouldn't forget that for every success we saw back then there were tons who were never even given an opportunity. IMO for all the tumult of recent years there's a lot to celebrate in terms of marginalized indies finally getting a chance to be seen, and I'm far more eager to find ways to go forward to more of that than I am to reach back. (Except, perhaps, in the case of journalism, who has suffered nothing but losses in the meantime.)
