Indie Studios, Not Corporate Giants, Are the Future of Videogames

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Whether or not this is true, it sure seems like once the indie devs make a popular game, they get bought up by the corporate giants anyway. :(

As games from major publishers got narrower in scope, indie games had always existed out on the margins. The difference today is that rapid reductions in the cost of game development and the ease of distribution through platforms like Steam is creating an environment in which these games are actually becoming closer substitutes for triple-A titles.
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Wait..."rapid reductions in the cost of game development"? Where are all those people screaming that $60 is a great deal because games are so expensive to make these days?
 
Hardly play AAA games these days, Indie stuff's been great for me. Lotsa great stuff to try these days.
 
Megalith said:
Too bad 99% of them are horrible.
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Some of the best games ever made started out as Indie games. Though I hate the phrase indie games, but rather low budget games.

For example, ID software was originally a few guys in a garage. Through Doom and Quake, we got many sub games as well. For example, did you know the first Team Fortress Game was on Quake?
team-fortress.gif


How about Counter Strike, which started the huge military craze of games like COD or Battlefield?
Counter-Strike-1-6-Beta-for-Linux-Now-Supports-Localized-Chat-2.jpg


Then there's Portal which was just a bunch of students that created a game called Narbacular Drop.

No-Knees_portals.jpg


Which is odd that these games are now owned by Valve. What Valve does is recognize talent, and hire them. Give them a budget and watch the money roll in. Most game studios just watch what other successful games do, and copy that. Give it a massive budget with DLC and micro transactions.

Since Indie games don't have a huge budget, they're forced to focus on the gameplay aspect, rather then graphics and realism. Like Minecraft for example, which has to be the ugliest game ever made, but it's a lot of fun. Indie games are going back to the root of gaming, where gameplay and not graphics are are what matter.
 
Well they are until they make a hit and then become corporate giants.
 
Contrast is a blast with solid graphics, great music and unique playstyle and I got a whole hell of a lot more enjoyment out of it then say, the latest Tomb Raider chalked full of QTEs.
Double Fine is making some great games and self publishing through Steam, while not the most amazing graphically the play mechanics are pretty unique and tries to do something new. I've been playing the holy heck out of Spacebase DF-9 on both my Win7 PC and Linux laptop.
I'm loving the independent movement and Valve's support of them.
 
It certainly seems like part of the industry is leaning in the direction of indie. There are several big name creators that have shed their corprorate chains and have gone indie. Doing the crowd funding thing.

The current issue holding back some of this momentum, is that is has become clear that many of these people don't know much about managing a game project. So even though they may make WAY more money than originally asked for; they still go over budget.

Once this stuff get's figured out, I think crowdfunded indie games will really start to make waves. There have already been some pretty great successes, even from teams that weren't already well known. Such as "Skullgirls".
 
Btw the game industry indie doesn't mean poor it just means small team. Most indie developers are funded by large studios to make the game so the large companies still gets a cut and will stay around lol the article has a flawed base.
 
Both AAA games and Indie games continue to exist as they do now. The way we pay for things and how much we pay may change, but there will still be the AAA games from the big studios and there will always be new indies popping up.
 
Megalith said:
Too bad 99% of them are horrible.
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This.

They are generally based on very odd genres/settings and aren't really polished. The graphics are usually cringe worthy as well. You guys can pretend it's all subjective, but I believe younger generations like myself aren't going to be very interested in Indie games.
 
xIronCrossx said:
This.

They are generally based on very odd genres/settings and aren't really polished. The graphics are usually cringe worthy as well. You guys can pretend it's all subjective, but I believe younger generations like myself aren't going to be very interested in Indie games.
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Megalith said:
Too bad 99% of them are horrible.
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This.

I'm not fan of most AAA studios. But when you have 100 people working on a project, 9 times out of 10 you will have a better product. Not in any way saying that 9/10 AAA titles are good.

There have been a few indies that I have enjoyed but none that have been my TO GO game.

I believe that a lot of the fan fare for indie games is relational to the capabilities of the users computer.
 
I tend to care a bunch less when my lame indie game is a hack fest than my friends half baked unpolished bug fest full of childish troll hacking kiddies like BF4 and CoD. I am tired of paying $60 bucks for a game because I can watch the perps whiskers in real time 3d burn or fall out but the content is weak. Remember when a $29.00 game had 12 hours of excellent single player content and good multiplayer to boot, none of this 1.5 hours of boring single player and non immersive nonsense. Time to go reinstall SoF
 
Whatever will advertising firms do?

People don't honestly think EA and Activision are spending all that money on making games, do they? Apparently I'm the only person on earth who's played more than one Call of Battlefield: Modern Army Shooter. I can understand the confusion though, it's really hard to tell which is which.
 
Indie Studios, Not Corporate Giants, Are the Future of Videogames


damn straight! at least if my wallet has anything to say about it
 
AK0tA said:
Time to go reinstall SoF
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I assume you are talking about Soldier of Fortune? If so...amazing game. I loved SoF2, as well. Really sad when they tried to make a sequel and fucked it up royally (it wasn't even the same developers, IIRC?). Basically killed the franchise.
 
Well, boil it down and you have big publishers/studios who have IPs that they are almost slavishly devoted to perpetuating and indie devs that are having to build up an IP, typically from scratch. From there, basic economics.

The big studio has an IP, probably one they've acquired along the way and spent buckets of money on. As such, they need to milk that IP as much as they can. They have the money to throw at bells and whistles, so in the grand armaments race for shiny visuals, big studios are typically your superpowers; however, people both inside and outside the industry sometimes conflate "shiny" with "good" - if it has polished visuals, then they will forgive (at least in the short term) GLARING technical deficiencies. Some of that has to do with the branding/advertising too - after all, it's their job to show off the product, even if that job turns out to be turd-polishing. So it tends to be that big publishers produce the same monolithic products all the time because they are literally invested in making sure the IP survives, even if it means just making a shinier version of an old product and calling it new.

Indie devs are more interesting in this respect: rather than the IP defining them, they define the IP that they produce. Since they're not bound to some pre-conceived IP, they are more likely to be where you see the really innovative ideas (as Ashbringer pointed out, CS/TF and other mods, Portal's origins, etc) in the industry, out of which some of the more "successful" [i.e. big moneymakers/large fanbases] are subsequently head-hunted by the big studios.

It's evolutionary versus revolutionary if you paint it with a broad enough brush. I'm not saying that big studios can't be creative, but that it's not the typical order of business.
 
99% of all indie games are basically clones of old MAME/console games. That said, AAA games are mostly movies these days. Especially Sony exclusives. I am not paying for movies disguised as games. Fuck those morons.
 
xIronCrossx said:
This.

They are generally based on very odd genres/settings and aren't really polished. The graphics are usually cringe worthy as well. You guys can pretend it's all subjective, but I believe younger generations like myself aren't going to be very interested in Indie games.
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POLISHED you say?! Who has time for that kind of fan-servicing??? That is like, the least of our -- er, not even on our list of priorities and things to do. You just need to focus on THE GAME that we're making! :D :rolleyes:
 
dgz said:
99% of all indie games are basically clones of old MAME/console games. That said, AAA games are mostly movies these days. Especially Sony exclusives. I am not paying for movies disguised as games. Fuck those morons.
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I think a lot of the AAA games are pretty progressive as far as gaming goes. When you think of next gen systems at heart it isn't the indie games that people associate next gen with. Its the Witcher 3, its the Watch Dogs, its the BF4s...none of those are indie.
 
Am I the only one that thinks of a crappy 2D side scrolling game when I hear 'indie'?
 
King Icewind said:
Am I the only one that thinks of a crappy 2D side scrolling game when I hear 'indie'?
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No, you aren't.

While it obviously isn't entirely true, the quality of "most" indie games leaves much to be desired. Granted the quality of most non indie leaves much to be desired. I would say taht indie has a future in gaming, but isn't "The" future. I would say at best 1:100 indie games are worth a damn. I think I have found possibly 2 in the past few years that weren't total shit. However the quality of indie gaming has clearly gone up over the years and will continue doing so as developer tools get better/cheaper/easier. I see market space for Both indie development and standard AAA stuff. To me that is a good thing..more choice, more competition.
 
Dekoth-E- said:
No, you aren't.

While it obviously isn't entirely true, the quality of "most" indie games leaves much to be desired. Granted the quality of most non indie leaves much to be desired. I would say taht indie has a future in gaming, but isn't "The" future. I would say at best 1:100 indie games are worth a damn. I think I have found possibly 2 in the past few years that weren't total shit. However the quality of indie gaming has clearly gone up over the years and will continue doing so as developer tools get better/cheaper/easier. I see market space for Both indie development and standard AAA stuff. To me that is a good thing..more choice, more competition.
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I think Indie has shifted a lot in the last few years (although because we tend to lump a lot of the mobile and flash games into the Indie genre it has the perception of lower quality). I think the benefit of the "good" Indie games is they can tailor the games to meet smaller more specialized genres or communities within gaming. The AAA or publisher sponsored titles must attract the largest possible demographic (which is why most AAA titles are cross platform ... so they can achieve maximum market penetration).

Some notable Indie titles of the last few years:

Amnesia: The Dark Descent
Anomaly Warzone Earth
Avadon: The Black Fortress
The Banner Saga
Bastion
Braid
Cthulhu Saves the World
Dead Sky
Defender's Quest: Valley of the Forgotten
Defense Grid
Depths of Peril
Desktop Dungeons
Don't Starve
Dungeons of Dredmor
Eschalon
Evil Genius
Fate of the World
Flock
Fortix
Frozen Synapse
FTL
Greed Corp
Grim Dawn (Beta, release pending)
Highborn
HOARD
King's Bounty
Legend of Grimrock
LIMBO
M.U.D. TV
Magicka
Nuclear Dawn
Orcs Must Die
Osmos
Peggle
Plants vs Zombies (the first one was an Indie title)
Power of Defense
Prime World: Defenders
Psychonauts
Revenge of the Titans
Rogue Legacy
Sengoku
Shadowrun Returns
Sol Survivor
Spelunky
Terraria
Fate/Torchlight
Tower Wars
Trine
The Walking Dead
World of Goo
Pillars of Eternity (release pending)
Wasteland (release pending)
Torment (release pending)

So I think the Indie world is actually significantly improved from years passed.
 
kbrickley said:
...
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That list is interesting, because most wouldn't consider them all indie games. Magicka and Evil Genius were developed and published by different companies.

The Walking Dead was done by Telltale, are they Indie? By the technical definition I suppose they are, but then you could argue any of the big companies release Indie titles because they develop and publish their own games.
 
Megalith said:
Too bad 99% of them are horrible.
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Going with this. Plenty of good indie games. And indie simply means independent; it does not mean it has to be some oddball 2D cell phone type game with neon graphics. The issue is there is plenty of garbage released and people are paying $10-15 for it, probably justifying the fact they are buying garbage because it is "an indie dev" or the cool thing to do. Check out the new release tab on Steam. It is filled with trash that should not even be sold. An example was a game in which you explore a bare, near texture-less white box building. For $15. :confused: Cool idea, but claiming it is the "art style" for a white box map is lame. People are cashing in on the fools I guess.

The problem with Steam now is that there is so much indie garbage posted that it makes it hard to find the truly good indie games. I bet there are plenty of gems being missed because people do not want to search through the bargain bin section (New Releases in Steam).
 
Sublym3 said:
That list is interesting, because most wouldn't consider them all indie games. Magicka and Evil Genius were developed and published by different companies.

The Walking Dead was done by Telltale, are they Indie? By the technical definition I suppose they are, but then you could argue any of the big companies release Indie titles because they develop and publish their own games.
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I guess it depends on how you want to define "Indie" ... in my opinion (and the industry seems to be moving in this direction also), an Indie title is one which doesn't use a publisher or is made by an independent (not owned by another company or publisher) developer ... The days of a single individual creating a significant title are almost past but the days of independent small companies creating titles without the interference or restrictions of a publisher are starting to dawn :cool:
 
kbrickley said:
I think Indie has shifted a lot in the last few years (although because we tend to lump a lot of the mobile and flash games into the Indie genre it has the perception of lower quality). I think the benefit of the "good" Indie games is they can tailor the games to meet smaller more specialized genres or communities within gaming. The AAA or publisher sponsored titles must attract the largest possible demographic (which is why most AAA titles are cross platform ... so they can achieve maximum market penetration).

Some notable Indie titles of the last few years:

Amnesia: The Dark Descent
Anomaly Warzone Earth
Avadon: The Black Fortress
The Banner Saga
Bastion
Braid
Cthulhu Saves the World
Dead Sky
Defender's Quest: Valley of the Forgotten
Defense Grid
Depths of Peril
Desktop Dungeons
Don't Starve
Dungeons of Dredmor
Eschalon
Evil Genius
Fate of the World
Flock
Fortix
Frozen Synapse
FTL
Greed Corp
Grim Dawn (Beta, release pending)
Highborn
HOARD
King's Bounty
Legend of Grimrock
LIMBO
M.U.D. TV
Magicka
Nuclear Dawn
Orcs Must Die
Osmos
Peggle
Plants vs Zombies (the first one was an Indie title)
Power of Defense
Prime World: Defenders
Psychonauts
Revenge of the Titans
Rogue Legacy
Sengoku
Shadowrun Returns
Sol Survivor
Spelunky
Terraria
Fate/Torchlight
Tower Wars
Trine
The Walking Dead
World of Goo
Pillars of Eternity (release pending)
Wasteland (release pending)
Torment (release pending)

So I think the Indie world is actually significantly improved from years passed.
Click to expand...
Psychonauts is far from indy both in size of production and cost of production suggest AAA. There are other games like Trine whos budget although developer size would suggest closer to AAA. Although officially indy in video game industry means made cheap, AAA amounts to a cost of upwards of 8mil to create the game, this number changes every year it's more of a running avg of acceptable quality.
 
Sublym3 said:
That list is interesting, because most wouldn't consider them all indie games. Magicka and Evil Genius were developed and published by different companies.

The Walking Dead was done by Telltale, are they Indie? By the technical definition I suppose they are, but then you could argue any of the big companies release Indie titles because they develop and publish their own games.
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Officially they do, the industry itself rates indy based on cost to make the game, so cheap games equate to indy games. Large publishers often contract out smaller studios to do work like that and large studios handle large games. Either way it all goes though large publishers.
 
Semantics said:
Officially they do, the industry itself rates indy based on cost to make the game, so cheap games equate to indy games. Large publishers often contract out smaller studios to do work like that and large studios handle large games. Either way it all goes though large publishers.
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AAA games are definitely in that category based on cost of development. But I think the Indie definition these days encompasses multiple variables (Development cost, size of team or developer, genre, and publisher involvement). I don't think most publisher supported games can be classified as Indie because of the restrictions that publishers place on development or the developers, regardless of the budget (at least that's my opinion on it)
 
Semantics said:
Psychonauts is far from indy both in size of production and cost of production suggest AAA. There are other games like Trine whos budget although developer size would suggest closer to AAA. Although officially indy in video game industry means made cheap, AAA amounts to a cost of upwards of 8mil to create the game, this number changes every year it's more of a running avg of acceptable quality.
Click to expand...

Indie simply means independent. Though it does tend to refer to smaller developers with a smaller budget. A typical AAA title costs $40-60 million.
 
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