... Not making any money is a big deal. You kind of need money to eat.
You'd save money because you would only be buying the games you're absolutely sure you want, instead of the ones you think that look kind of interesting and decide to wait for them to go on a bundle. I'm gonna wager you don't wait for Nintendo's games to drop in price.
It's their choice in the same way jumping down was the choice of someone surrounded by flames on the roof of a building. These devs chose to run through the flames, because they don't have any other choice if they want to survive. See, when you sell games for pennies, you create market expectation about the price games should be selled at, and so devs who develop games that should be sold for $15 are forced to sell them for $2 on sales or bundled with 7 other games for pennies, because the market simply won't buy them at the standard price anymore. Couple this with Steam greenlight, which effectively opened the floodgates to allow anything to enter the platform, and you're pretty much recreating the exact situation that lead to the crash many years ago: Steam is a flooded market where the customers don't have any real way to tell what's good from bad, so they're just buying what's marked down, which makes it impossible for the larger companies (mid-tier developers like Paradox and indies like SuperGiantGames categorize as this) to make a profit off of their sales.
That could eventually lead to those larger companies making the good games to throw their hands up and give up on investing time and money on the platform. It's impossible to tell exactly how this will manifest at this point, but you can be sure it won't be any good for the industry or the customer.
But you know what? I'm sorry for targeting you. It's not your fault and it was stupid of me to insinuate it is.
You would save money in the sense that you'd get more games for less money but many of those may not even get played as they are just part of the bundle and not all what the buyer may want to play especially with a current backlog. Wouldn't this imply that the buyer would not buy this game at full price? Assuming that to be true then there's probably something wrong with, not only how they market their game, but their price point to begin with; or maybe it's a niche title in which case they shouldn't be expecting a big profit anyway; though there's a positive side to it in that the game and its devs get exposure to consumers that would quite easily have overlooked their titles among all the others on the Steam market.
I often do wait for Nintendo games to drop in price, that can definitely take a while with Nintendo games unfortunately so the price point can keep me from buying those games altogether; that's more related to my own budget management though since I have been pre-ordering PC games that were higher on my wish list than Majora's Mask 3D for example. Comparing Nintendo games to indie games is a pretty odd comparison though since the majority of Nintendo releases are for established franchises or remakes/ports of games that already have a large following, not really a comparable situation to a small indie dev.
Indie devs need to know how to survive in this market, not just fall victim to it. Kickstarter and other methods of crowdfunding are there for a reason and have done very well to give devs that present something that a lot of consumers want to see made with enough funds to work with. I don't believe Puppygames has ever used crowdfunding like Kickstarter, which is probably part of their problem.
In the industry today devs need to be planning ahead of their first release. Chances are their first release will be lower budget (unless crowdfunded successfully) and lower popularity than future releases, at least in its initial release stage. There are so many devs out there now, development is so much cheaper and easier to get into that you need to find a way to get noticed. By selling at an appropriate price on Steam and later releasing your title in a bundle allows you to be known as an established dev, now with a larger following your next title can sell at a higher price point to a larger audience. I was almost going to say that they did it to themselves but they're just part of the ever growing indie development scene. This large and still increasing number of indie devs and indie game releases has lead to a really competitive market (combined with mobile indie devs) causing the perceived value of their games to decrease.
The perceived value of indie games is lower today than ever and it's due to an increasingly competitive market, F2P games, cheap mobile games, indie bundles and Steam sales (though this is probably changing a more broad perception of the value of games as a whole). So I wouldn't say Steam is primarily to blame, it's just the way the industry is heading due to a combination of things.
Steam Greenlight is good in concept but it needs/needed more controlling. Steam customers can post user reviews and there are discussion boards for each game so not having any real way to not know what's good and bad isn't true.
It's hard for indie devs, it always has been, but I wouldn't blame this on Steam alone.
