I’ll take indie games overflowing with heart/soul/purpose/ a story to be told any day over cookie cutter tripple A slop.

He then ran down a string of recent hits developed by independent devs and studios: Balatro, Baldur’s Gate 3, Helldivers 2, Clair Obscur—even the venerable Minecraft, an archetypal indie superhit before Mojang was sold into the Microsoft stable.

I mean, by that definition he’s not wrong.

It’s just that the way that works is indie devs become big enough to either become whatever the hell triple A means or get bought by whatever the hell triple A is.

Magicka was an indie game, I really struggle to fit Helldivers 2, a Sony-published sequel to a Sony-published game, into that same bucket. Ditto for Larian. Divinity OS? Sure. Hasbro-backed multi-studio Baldur’s Gate 3 with its hundreds of millions of budget? Myeaaaaah, I don’t know.

I think the real question is how you keep the principles that make indie games interesting in play when the big money comes in. I’m all for an indie-driven industry, but I’m a touch more queasy about a world in which major publishers use tiny devs as a million monkeys with typewriters taking on all the risk and step in at the very end (sometimes post-release) to scoop up the few moneymakers.

This has been true for 15 years, but video game execs don’t care about the game itself, they only care about the money it makes

i think the larger question about Indies is not how big they get its if they are private or public and i count private equity as public with a different name. the people making the game as in getting their hands dirty in the day to day of making games need to own 51% of the company’s stock and the value of that stock is influenced by investment speculation.

they need to make their money by selling the product they make not the shell game of jucing books for investors.

Finding funding for those indies is another matter.

Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the show?

I will say, I know a guy with a ton of extra cash who could probably practice what he preaches.

But finding the next digital unicorn in a sea of mid-to-shit titles is no mean feat. For every Warcraft or Marathon there’s a thousand flops.

That is, I think, what makes the AAA studios look worse than they have a right to be. They’re Frankenstein companies, cobbled together from the bits of a dozen early stars. But that doesn’t guarantee hits, it just guarantees brand recognition. The latest Blizzard title isn’t going to have the secret sauce of StarCraft because they already made that game once. Merging with Activision doesn’t mean making a game that’s better than CoD and StarCraft combined.

its not even the money the games make its the perception of what they could make and meeting invester expectations. thats how you get tango gameworks doing a good job and still thrown out on their asses.

John Romero hasn’t been relevant since Quake and arguably hasn’t been any good since Hexen/Heretic. I’m not sure why we are subjected to his “hot takes” on an annual basis.

edit: oh, I think he’s an asshole. I’ve met him, he was not fun.

A couple of triple AAA studios are pretty good. But quality has dropped overall by a staggering amount. Indies are either the greatest or worst games ever made. It’s not even just in games, it’s in music, animation, everything. Capitalism trends culture towards mediocrity.

So what happened to Ion Storm, then? If Indies are the future, where are the Daikatana sequels that fans should obviously be clamoring for?

Compare that to the other IS office, which published through Eidos and created Deus Ex and Dominion: Storm Over Gift 3. They operated like a proper studio and worked professionally.

Small and efficient studios have always been the way. Hands-off publishing has always been the way. It’s not indie vs. AAA. It’s just professional development and support.

I mean, this has always been the case. Before, it was modding. Anyone remember how much the fps landscape changed after the Desert Combat mod got hugely popular in Battlefield 1942? Hell, that mod alone put BF on the map.

I don’t know if I agree. Size has some impact. Risking the livelihoods of you and your friends working for peanuts in your bedrooms is one thing, being at the helm of a billion dollar business is a bit of a different beast.

But yeah, it does matter whether you’re public or private. A whole bunch of indie games are made by public companies, though. Definitely by corporate-owned companies and companies with big corporate investors.

By that bar a lot of the “indies” being touted here aren’t really… that.

yup. i don’t even watch produced movies or tv anymore. just YouTube or twitch pretty much. and if i do watch studio produced content, I pirate it.

A lot of nice people aren’t especially fun. I’m not sure it’s a great metric.

Indie is kind of a fraught term in whatever genre it’s used I feel like. It has too many connotations and too few clear definitions. How much big label backed mass produced “indie rock/pop” did we not get back in the early 00s music scene, for example. Same with gaming: see the whole Dave the Diver being nominated for best Indie Game despite being backed by NEXON debacle.

Baldur’s Gate 3 is tricky because while Hasbro was involved it was still self-published by Larian. It doesn’t feel right to me to call it an indie game, but… how exactly should we define them then? Is there a budget cutoff where a game is no longer allowed to be called an indie? If Sandfall uses their huge budget from the success of Expedition 33 to make a blockbuster sequel but stayed with Kepler as publisher would we refuse to call it an indie game?

yeah the mudding of the term indie is also a problem. indie should be used for independent privately owned studios. the “indies” made by big public company’s should be called something else. as all they are smaller games not independent games. like BG3 is a indie game but it’s not a small game at all.

honestly think the term indie for smaller games was created by the big public company’s as a way of keeping indies in their lane. they want them as the farm league feeding them ip and innovation. but not get too big to usurp them.

Well, go meet him I guess.

I’m not sure if he’s married to the same woman from 2001 but SHE was a lot of fun. Life of the party, always knows what to say. Just an all around great person to talk to.

Game dev is an industry where labor can look at capital and ask, “What would you say you do, here?” There’s no factory. There’s no raw materials. It’s just people and computers, and people have computers.

It’s simple

Game I like = Indy

Game I don’t like = soulless committee designed AAA trash

It often boils down to that, sadly, and it’s gotten to the point where I just don’t like using either term anymore.