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.

After People insisted that Sony backed Palworld was an indy. I knew the term had lost all meaning.

Wow. The thumbnail made me think this was going to be about Ozzy.

Neat article!

While I agree, listing successful games is just confirmation bias. For every indie darling, you’ve got hundreds of flops.

The reason triple a games are so mediocre is because it’s safe. You dont have to take a huge risk, and your chances of failing are smaller. Even if you do fail, the chances of recouping your investment are pretty decent.

Again, I think indie games are generally better than pretty much anything the triple a scene puts out. But that’s because they took a huge risk that happened to pay out.

Stevie “KillCreek” Case?

Let’s say the ratio is 1/5. Rather investing in 5 diverse small - medium projects @ 2 million each or in one big 20 million project with a increased risk for bad management decisions and safe (boring) story & mechanics which leads to at best ok ratings? I would choose the former but i’m not a CEO type.

triple AAA

thats like, at least 8 A’s, that must be very good

And we can’t even take self-published as a factor, because pre-MS Bethesda would publish their own titles too. Skyrim can hardly be counted as indie.

And the reason it has to be safe is not just because of investors, but because they’re giant companies structured for making big games. You can’t use a full team of UI designers on a small indie game with a fast development cycle. You can’t really split those resources up among 100 tiny projects either. So if you want to make use of your big company and your in-house engine and all that, you have to make a billion dollar game and it has to earn back that money and it can’t take any risks.

The problem is, it’s nowhere near 1:5. It’s more like 1:100 if we include only games with a decent amount of effort put in.