How they got started is simpler to answer... but where they are going is harder to say. It depends on the community, whether all the current developers are actually willing to cooperate with one another, or whether we'll be having one or two man teams who just develop small little games every now and then. An ideal situation would see more people following in the footsteps of Out of sight Games, banding together with third parties and introducing them to the idea... but few other people seem to be up for that challenge. As I see it, A Hero's call is going to be the biggest step we've taken in probably 5 or 6 years. so where we will go depends on what happens after that game comes out... if more people don't foolow that example, we will never take steps forward to catch up to even the mainstream indie game quality standard and will be given repeats of more side scrollers, space invaders or point and shoot games that call themselves high quality fps titles.

Only one interjection... STW is not quite close. Otherwise, there would actually be decent moderation... but that isn't quite the point.

It's obviously not impossible, as is shown by A Hero's call. All it requires is the amount of people who are willing to make that effort and go through the whole process.

One challenge is that gaming technology is changing at such a rapid pace—and gaming standards with it. I actually think VR, and the accompanying advances in head-tracking and 3D audio, presents some really incredible opportunities for accessible gaming. The problem is that the investment needed to get into VR development is pretty substantial. For any indie dev, it's tough to make that investment work when you don't know what the returns on your investment will be; even more so for dev who are developing for a much smaller market, such as blind gamers. The tough thing is that you could start working on a VR project today, and four years from now when you're ready to release it, who knows where the market will be?

One thing I think we haven't considered when asking about the future of audio games is that, someday, it may converge with the mainstream market. I know that seems like an impossible dream to most of us—but there are people in the game industry working tirelessly to make it happen. Their goal would be to see increasing attention to accessibility in gamesacross the board, perhaps to the point that someday we don't have to talk about audio games versus mainstream games—we just talk about games. It sounds crazy, and it's probably a long way off, but there is really a lot of momentum building in that direction. Consider Microsoft's implementation of a speech API for Xbox developers, EA's recent fixes for the visually impaired, and so on. I've spoken to people in the industry who have commented about design meetings where they're starting to ask questions like, "How can we make this item easy to find without sight?" So I really do hope that the future of audio games will simply be games—games that everybody can play.

Hi
Well I don't agree about stw. There are (yes) audio games that are close to the mainstream level like Shadow Line, Paladin of the Sky for its content but not sounds I think, most of VGStorm's games are quite good games. Swamp is great also. I think A Hero's Call will be a big thing for a brighter future for audio games.
Edit: woups, how I forgot the BK series? There are few audio games that are valuable, but compared to the early two thousands, seems that our audio gaming world is getting better as time passes.

I want to clarify about the whole "stuck in the 1990s" thing. Audio Games are barely relatable to 1990s games. Side-scrollers don't inherently suck. It's just that there are like 2 in Audio which are worth considering comparing to mainstream side-scrollers. Sure, sound quality, whatever, but gameplay and content are rarely anything compared to even the 1980s. We have a few titles that push it toward the mid-late 90s, and those aren't the side-scrollers. Swamp, Manamon, and maybe the endless stream of drama-spawning FPSs sorta-kinda invoke 1997-2005. It's not that we need things besides side-scrollers (we do), but that we need side-scrollers that wouldn't lose to Super Mario Bros 2 without a fight. We have BK3, and that's more Megaman without the timing-sensitive traps and puzzles (and way more content than the 1990s Megaman games, so it kinda balances out?).
As a general rule, Audio Games suck. At this rate, the mainstream will become fully accessible, or they'll find a general workaround for blindness, or the world will be devoured by Galactus, before the number of Audio Games which can compare to the massive libraries of pre-PS2/xbox games gets to double digits.

A Hero's Call is a massive step in the right direction, but it's been in development for several years, has done pretty much everything right in terms of the process and funding, and is still not availible. We could have 5 of these secretly in production, now, and nothing will change for the remainder of this decade.
Now, maybe I'm more pessimistic than usual because I have been fighting tooth and nail to get enough sleep and have failed for several nights running, but I'm not seeing anything big enough to catch us up to the N64 coming along any time soon.

Muhammad: I appreciate the shout-out, but for fairness' sake, Out of Sight Games really shouldn't be listed in a list of top audio game dev until we've released a project that can be judged on actual gameplay, and not just from its demo audio :-)

CAE_Jones has a really good point, which is that the development cycle for small indies is unforgiving. Even more so for small indies who can't hope to make a living off their games and have to develop in what time they can find around day jobs—and since the audio games market is such a small niche, that's probably going to remain the case for audio game developers unless we find a way to market to the mainstream as well.

CAE's also right that the issue isn't that we have outdated genres. Check out big releases on Steam and you're going to find tons of side-scrollers. The issue is that mainstream devs are pushing the envelope—creating games with high production values, interesting premises, compelling writing, and so on. That's what we need to be doing. There's nothing stopping a blind dev from making a blind-accessible side scroller with a riveting story, powerful script, and engaging features akin to anything being made today—and a game like that wouldn't be stuck in the '90s, it would be every bit as modern as a 3D Call of Duty clone or anything else.

Big Gun: Regarding my comments on post eight, I'm not saying that the future of audio games lies in developers going back and making old games accessible. With very rare exceptions, that's probably never going to happen. What I'm talking about is developers making new games with more and more attention to accessibility, until hopefully some day the mainstream titles being released are just as playable by the blind as they are by the sighted.

I agree with Joseph Westhouse, we shouldn't include titles that are still in development.  If we include games based on developer promises, USA Raceway would be at the top (or near the top) of this list.  While the game doesn't exist, the odds of it being completed are just as high as they've always been. 

You guys are making me depressed.

A blind legend? The blind swordsman? Zombies! run, Aurifi, rubber ducky, and many others have been hyped as audiocentric games, but are also playable by the blind, and yet people forget that so easily
the Tommy Edison Experience? blind guest speakers at indi dev events? those competitive blind killer instinct, street fighter, and Mortal Kombat gamers getting articles on major gaming news sites like Katacu? and I'm barely scratching the surface, because I'm not even really part of that world, I just pick things up here and there.
This is the best time for audio games we've ever had, at least from what I've seen while part of the community, and that's been for around 12 years.

I have no problem with never having allot of games in this community, I just hope for content, replayability, and quality at par with that of other small Indi teams.
It's utterly unrealistic to expect mainstream quality or mainstream integration, though the small things, like audio cues in injustice for instance, are appreciated and useful, and that's fine IMO.

I get jealous just like everyone else when a sited friend plays something spectacular, which is a thousand miles ahead of what I have, with a massive open world and epic story, but then I just remember the simple fact that I will almost certainly be assimilated into the rest of the world population within a few decades, do to advancements in biotech, and that the profit margin VS cost of modifying existing mainstream games is so utterly infinitesimal that it's not even close to being worth it for a publisher, even for the PR.
E.G. I will change for them before they change for me. And so what, why would I expect anything else, I am a tiny minority, and I have it good where I live, I've got nearly all the necessities covered, I have a place in society even if it isn't quite an equal one, and my government has given me a safety net because the majority of people want it that way.
So yeah, I like games, allot, and other things too, like audio dramas and podcasts and such, but they aren't important, not really, not like braille on signs in public buildings, or bumps on the ground near train tracks, or all the grants I can apply for to get access technology, living skills, and O & M support, so I'm cool with waiting for the most part.

And yes, I understand that this is a gaming site and that we're all here for the same reason, to talk about games and play games, but still, the fact that we can even access the internet and computers in general as well as we can is something to be grateful for.
I'm not saying I like the flood of shitty no effort games any more than you guys by the way, but constantly wishing for something you can't have undermines the enjoyment of what you do have, which, by the way, is still allot better than nothing.
Games are for fun, first and foremost, so if your having any fun at all, the game has succeeded at it's main goal, weather or not it's on par with anything else or not.

I also realize that if I had grown up on mainstream games as a sited person, then been introduced to audiogames, that my view may be different, but it's not like I haven't experienced them, darksouls, skyrim, fallout 3, world of tanks, mk9 and mkx, ss4, injustice, Battlefield 4, mech warrior 3, Resident evil 4, the list goes on, I've seen them played and gotten invested in some of them enough to read the story and look up gameplay, even if I don't own a console or attempt to muddle my way through the more inaccessible ones, AKA the massive majority, for some small amount of satisfaction.
I don't hold it against anyone for trying though, after all how would we have learned that many fighting and rhythm games were at least somewhat playable if no one had dared to take the chance, then painstakingly  spread the knowledge through menu guides and move lists, teaching friends to recognize the sound cues in all the cinematic background noise, etc.

It's not all roses and sunshine, I get that, right now we're in a bit of a slump, the most popular games are getting stale, but for the past few years we've been enjoying a revitalization of a community that had remained relatively unchanged in how it operated for nearly a decade, thanks in large part to Swamp, which gave us a new, higher quality multiplayer experience, much closer to mainstream than what we'd had before, and less so RTR which gave us an updated successor to audioquake, then BGT came along  and gave all the old devs a kick in the ass do to the hugely increased level of output it caused; but also to social media, mostly Youtube and Twitter, which helped to spread the message to a wider blind audience, and then to the mainstream world.

I can't believe I've written almost 5000 characters for this post... Never mind I can, it's what I do. :-D
P.S. Mason isn't much of an innovator, he got almost all of his ideas from BK and Swamp, he can code some interesting stuff, but he is in no way reliable.

Excellent post Defender.

Rory, I am sure I don't experience the frustration in exactly the same way, but I too have run into the wall of trying to get sighted people to play audiogames.

For me personally, I struggle to play audiogames that do not have any graphics.  Even silly things like menus displayed visually change the whole experience in ways I can't really explain.  I've been around for how long... several years right?  In all that time I've only been able to really get into Sounds RTS, and that was because it had graphics I could enable.  I've tried other games, some with graphics and some without, but I can't help but admit that the lack of graphics is likely why the games never dug deep and found a place in my life.  I would play them just to see how they worked, but I didn't ever feel compelled to go back and play them for actual enjoyment.

Philip Bennefal's jungle strategy game was something I really thought I would enjoy because of the rules and gameplay.  As much as that type of game appeals to me, the only way I could keep myself enjoying it was to write my own program to give myself visuals while I played.  Believe me I felt pretty stupid spending the time to do that to an otherwise well written game, but try as I might, I cannot seem to convince my brain that it doesn't need eyeball input to have fun.  LOL!

I wish I knew the answer, if there even IS an answer.  It could just be in how our brains get wired after a life of visual input.  Vision represents a massive amount of incoming information, and I wouldn't be surprised if shutting that off is like asking a drug addict to refrain for a short period of time.  When sleeping or even in a sensory deprivation tank, one of the first things that the brain of a sighted person does is start filling in visuals.  For better or worse the brain hates sightless'ness so much it will flat out start making crap up just to avoid the emptiness.  I know this paragraph won't really help anything, but it shows how strong of a demon we are hoping to defeat.

Because I've seen how much I depend on visuals myself, it's easier but still frustrating to see how it keeps my family and friends from playing the audiogames I've created.  In these past several years, I've only been able to get maybe 3 or 4 family/friends to ever sit down and try audio games.  The only way I got those 3 or 4 people to do it was to show them first that I had included simplified graphics, which of course defeated the whole reason I wanted them to sit down and give them a try.  Unless I'm forgetting something, I don't believe I've ever been able to get anyone to play a game without any graphics enabled.  I have been able to do it myself, but then again I have a motivation to do so that they just wouldn't have.

The best chances you will have are to get yourself friends who grew up with Atari and Nintendo.  I find that people from that generation grew up seeing that gameplay trumps graphics, and are more willing to play games that don't have the latest and greatest 3D photo-realistic graphics.  You'll still have the same struggles talked about above, but at least you'll have a shot.  Younger players have been raised in a world where games are literally judged by how good their graphics are!  I have people in my life who will not Lower themselves to playing a game that is 5 years old, just because the graphics are lower in quality to what is out right now.  They move from game to game, literally disgusted by what they played a few years ago.  I don't understand it myself, but in their minds the older game's entertainment value has literally rotted away as newer advancements roll out better Looking games.  It seems insane to me, but then again a lot of millenial's attitudes seem insane to me, ROFL! 

The truth is that, as much as we might like to say, "Can't sighted gamers just close their eyes?", sighted people's brains are conditioned to process data in a certain way. It is not easy to flip a switch and try to process data in a different way. It's not a matter of just trying harder—it's a matter of learning how to process sensory input in  a completely different way. So personally, I think that crossover games (games playable and enjoyable by both blind and sighted players) can work in one of two ways:

1. Like Aprone said, there needs to be enough graphical feedback to alleviate some of that sensory processing for the brain. Ease the burden of how much data the brain is trying to process through sound by giving it at least some baseline visuals. The more the better, obviously, but some sort of GUI, however basic, is a must if we're going to expect sighted players to play anything that relies heavily on audio.

2. Limit the amount of auditory processing required to play. Think of a game like Papa Sangre—totally dependent on audio, but actually marketed to sighted gamers. If you really think about the design of that game, you only need to focus on one or two sounds at a time—the chime or whatever it is for the next beacon point, and perhaps another sound that indicates a threat. Compare this to a game like Swamp where you might have multiple zombies surrounding you, plus text reports on health, ammo, etc. For those of us used to relying on sound as a primary source of information, it's easy to juggle all that input—not so for the sighted gamer. Hence why I think Aprone was so wise to introduce some basic graphics.

Of course, the best option would be a game that not only has baseline graphics to ease the burden, but enough graphical feedback that a sighted player wouldn't even know it could be played without sight. That's going to take a lot of work, and is going to require awesome sighted devs like Aprone who are able to do graphical work while still considering accessibility from the ground up when designing—but it's possible.

And regarding projects that never come to fruition—I'm sure the other devs here can relate, but getting a game finished is incredibly difficult, and takes a long time. And if you're working on a project that's large enough to require a team, it's hard to keep the team together for that long of a period—especially if you're not seeing any income to make it feel worthwhile. It's understandable that sometimes teams disintegrate, or projects fall through or get sucked into a perpetual development black hole. Sometimes that's because of management issues, or lack of motivation; other times it's because people have situations change in their lives, and they're no longer able to continue the incredible sacrifice of time and effort required for game development. When I think of everything the Out of Sight Games team has been through—losing members, adding members, having people go through some serious personal situations, dealing with jobs and school and families...it's crazy to me that we've made it to where we are, and it doesn't surprise me at all to think that so many developers don't make it. Not that we've "made it"—wait until we release AHC for that pronouncement...but I'm just saying, no dev wants to promise a game and then fall through. So when it happens, there are bound to be so many reasons we don't know about for why it fell through.

Compare a computer with a itxbox360's GPU but a sound blaster chip from Windows 3.1, with a Sound Max Digital Audio card but an 8600 for graphics processing. Once the brain has spent enough time allocating neural realestate to a specific task, it takes a little more effort than swapping out your audio/video cards to get the necessary processing power to switch focus.
Or to put it another way, your brain has a faster, intuitition-driven system, and a slower, deliberate thought-driven system. Things that are sufficiently reenforced eventually get installed in system 1, and everything else has to pass through system 2. Sight is so broadly useful that alternatives are less likely to find their way to system 1, if someone has sufficient vision. So what comes naturally to the blind, the sighted have to literally think about, and concentrate on explicitly. It'd be like having to consciously control all the necessary muscles in your legs, feet, etc, every time you walk.

Also, agreeing with Joseph. When you aren't a big company, or at least working on something no fancier than Tetris, it's a wonder that anything gets done at all.