Non-curated platforms (AppStore, Google Play, XBLIG to a lesser extent) already are 'flooded' by most reasonable definitions, and you probably can point the finger at Unity, flash, and other low-cost engines and tools for bringing us here. But its not really clear this is a bad thing -- it certainly makes getting seen (and so, being successful) harder just because its so difficult to keep your head above the tide, but honestly if you think you're entitled to be noticed in the first place then you have bigger issues to deal with.

I'll draw an analogy to a lottery -- whether 20 million, 20 thousand, or just twenty people play Powerball next week doesn't affect your personal odds of winning. When a great number of people play, the odds increase that the jackpot will be split, but its not any more or less likely that you'll be among the winners. Like a lottery, the big winners are a select few who take the lion's share of revenues--that is, the top 100 apps probably earn about at much as the entire rest of the catalog--and those at the complete opposite end of the spectrum take home a negligible amount of revenue by comparison, even en mass--so whether there's 10000 more crapware apps this week or not really doesn't detract from the potential revenue pool in the big picture of things. Roughly the same amount of money will be spent this week as last, and the same 90% of that will go to the same 100 apps. This might sound depressing, and maybe it is, but it does demonstrate that the amount of crapware isn't something you should waste energy lamenting.

Just concentrate on making a good game, try to develop some recognition, and really have a focused blitz when you launch. I'm understating the difficulty of these tasks of course, but they're the only part of the process you have any control over, so you just have to make everything of it that you can. These are the things you'd have to do to be successful whether there are 100 million competing apps or 100 thousand -- if the biggest feature your app has is a lack of competition, you're doing something wrong, and its not any way I'd want to make a living. If in the end you're not making money, no one's taking money out of your pocket that you're not letting; there'll be no one to blame but yourself.

Yeah, I agree with the above posters. The only non-flooded markets at this point are the less popular ones, and the newer ones. For example, the Tizen store won't have too many apps to start with, but given a bit of time I'm sure it will be flooded. The one that might escape this fate is the Blackberry store due to them pulling out of consumer devices, but everywhere is relatively flooded.

Competition is indeed a good thing though.Without it, things don't get better. Game players win because games have to be better to compete, and us developers win because game engine creators have to compete as well due to increased competition between each other for us devs. Unity is winning that battle for general gamedev by far. It has been around the longest, and even has the free version that now exports to mobile platforms. I think given time, GameMaker Studio has a real chance to take a fair share of the market. GMStudio has been getting more and more powerful, and far outdoes Unity in the 2D department, and even with the 4.3 update for Unity that will have some 2d things, GameMaker will still be much better, but for 2D. For 3D, Unity is king, and will likely stay that way. I should also mention that there have been free to use game engines out there for years, as well as free IDEs and other development tools for the various programming languages. Remember that even Microsoft released the Express version of Visual Studio starting years ago and hasn't stopped. So I'd say nothing is going to change, as also mentioned above, crap games are going nowhere, and won't sell, and therefore won't really take any market share from the good games. Even in the F2P market, gamers choose with the wallets, and crap games won't get chosen, so if you can make good games, I don't think you have to worry much about the flooded market, as no matter how many games are made, only the good ones will be in the top 100 charts at any given time.

AAA video games rely on art assets heavily so indies cannot compete on their market. Indie may use Unity but he will not have realistic models, details, voice actors, mocap animations.... indie can do a single catchy play mechanics, such as tetris.

I have to disagree with this one though. Indies can indeed access all of these things. i'm not saying that indies can really make full AAA games, but realism, voice actors, all of that can be easily done by indies....with a budget. Indiegogo and Kickstarter were created to help create a budget for those indies that can prove themselves worthy, and many have done so. I agree that most indies won't be able to follow this path, and I also agree that it is something that will take much longer for an indie team than for a AAA studio to do, but yes, indies can pull AAA quality if they are so inclined and have the budget. Hawken is a good example of such a game. I'm not saying it does everything you mention, but they started as a pretty small indie team using the UDK, and have since been able to make enough to purchase the actual Unreal3 source license. I'm not sure what kind of deal they got with Unreal, but it happened in some fashion, and I doubt it was for free. Also, if you look on Unity's showcase page, you will see many pretty high quality games. The ones you see for PC are good to look at because many of them were for mobile and so weren't near AAA quality. The ones for PC however, and the one called Rochard released on consoles, are good examples of quality games by indies. So yes, indies don't have to stick to simple tetris mechanics. The catch is that for most of them, it is better to do so because we don't have the time or budget, or experience even, to do higher quality stuff. Also, we want to release more than one game in our lifetime, and most don't have a big team, rather are working with 2-4 people.