
Formed in 2009, the Archive Team (not to be confused with the archive.org Archive-It Team) is a rogue archivist collective dedicated to saving copies of rapidly dying or deleted websites for the sake of history and digital heritage. The group is 100% composed of volunteers and interested parties, and has expanded into a large amount of related projects for saving online and digital history.
History is littered with hundreds of conflicts over the future of a community, group, location or business that were "resolved" when one of the parties stepped ahead and destroyed what was there. With the original point of contention destroyed, the debates would fall to the wayside. Archive Team believes that by duplicated condemned data, the conversation and debate can continue, as well as the richness and insight gained by keeping the materials. Our projects have ranged in size from a single volunteer downloading the data to a small-but-critical site, to over 100 volunteers stepping forward to acquire terabytes of user-created data to save for future generations.
The main site for Archive Team is at archiveteam.org and contains up to the date information on various projects, manifestos, plans and walkthroughs.
This collection contains the output of many Archive Team projects, both ongoing and completed. Thanks to the generous providing of disk space by the Internet Archive, multi-terabyte datasets can be made available, as well as in use by the Wayback Machine, providing a path back to lost websites and work.
Our collection has grown to the point of having sub-collections for the type of data we acquire. If you are seeking to browse the contents of these collections, the Wayback Machine is the best first stop. Otherwise, you are free to dig into the stacks to see what you may find.
The Archive Team Panic Downloads are full pulldowns of currently extant websites, meant to serve as emergency backups for needed sites that are in danger of closing, or which will be missed dearly if suddenly lost due to hard drive crashes or server failures.
This talk on YouTube by Tom Giardino from Valve goes over the state of Steam in 2018. He gives a lot of good information but in regards to Valve's decision to "open the floodgates" he shows these graphs:
From these graphs we can tell that Steam has been getting a higher amount of games succeeding over the years. Another interesting graph from the talk is this one:
And so based on these we know that more games have been succeeding on Steam than ever before, and that Steam users are buying more new games than ever before. The argument Indiepocalypsers always make is that as Steam opened up, it became harder to succeed. And even with those graphs you could still make that argument.
If in year 1 50 games made $100K in the first 30 days, and in year 5 100 games made $100K in the first 30 days, that seems like pretty good progress. But if the total number of games released in year 1 was 500 and the total number of games released in year 5 was 5000, we have a pretty drastic decrease in the percentage of successful games (from 10% to 2%).
So all things being equal, your chances of succeeding are lower in year 5 than they were in year 1. But this makes one big assumption, which is that all things are equal. If you're willing to concede that you're an average indie developer making average games then yes, based on this logic the Indiepocalypse is very real. If you don't consider that to be the case though then things are looking increasingly better :-)
For more on this I've written two relevant articles before: Luck Isn't Real and Hidden Gems Don't Exist