Artistic endless runner Race to the Sun has been available on the site of developers Flipp Fly for a month now and despite receiving positive press from Kotaku and Edge, the team are finding sales proving to be sluggish. They have gone into the details on their blog.

Flipp Fly decided last year to move away from the mobile scene which has been dominated by free-to-play micro-transaction funded titles and focus on the PC scene. However, despite receiving positive feedback from outlets like Kotaku and EDGE sales have fallen off a cliff edge since the initial launch excitement. Lacking a Steam release or being featured in a Humble Bundle is really hurting the team as they say on their blog “I’m just not sure it’s realistic to expect to be able to support yourself solely with self-distribution via your website in 2013, unless you’re Minecraft.”

Whether or not this is an entirely fair judgement is not for me to say, but I do get the impression that people are more and more often only looking for games on Steam or via the Humble Bundle unless they come from a big indie studio like Tomorrow Corporation or Mojang.

It might just come off as naivety from the team, but it does show how difficult things can get for indie developers.

What are your thoughts on the way indie games are being affected by Steam and the Humble Bundle?