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.

Yeah, her. My ex wife and her really hit it off and we all had a great time at the party. The elite of id were standoffish, but it was quakecon and a meet and greet, so they were probably tired and over it. Carmack was cool though, and there were two guys I was vibing with, I don’t remember their names

I think Romero had already left id at that point but since they all came up together he was still welcome at social events.

Ok let’s use those numbers:

Let’s say the ratio is 1/100. Rather investing in 100 diverse small - medium projects @ 2 million each or in one big 200 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.

If being self-published were the only metric, many Nintendo games would be indie. So clearly that’s not a good definition to use.

Counterstrike was originally a Quake mod, then a Half-Life mod, before Valve hired the modders and made it into a standalone game.

And Valve, for that matter.

I guess we can just have games we like and games we don’t, and not have to classify them either way… The line is way too blurry. It’s a feel rather than a metric.

I wouldn’t for a second describe BG3 as anything other than AAA. But something like It Takes Two has a very indie game feel even though it’s put out by EA.

Thinking about it further, since it means “independent,” I would consider any game where the devs had an idea for a game and made that game without corporate meddling compromising their vision to be considered “indie,” and if that includes some games by big studios like Valve or Nintendo, then so be it. It’s a huge deal to be able to make a game like that nowadays, regardless of how much funding they had. There can be “small indie” and “large indie” games.

Ironically that probably brings in some of the most expensive games ever made, like Red Dead Redemption 2, The Last of Us Part 2 and Cyberpunk 2077. If Star Citizen ever gets finished, count that too.

RDR2 especially is an unapologetically slow paced cowboy sim, rather than the Grand Theft Horse everyone seemed to be expecting. Big games by big studios, left alone to do what their bosses know they can do.

I think a further distinction should be made when a game has hundreds of devs. When you get that big, most people become cogs in a machine, which is pretty corporate. Definitely requires more fine-tuning to get a good definition going, but “small indie” at least seems to cover what most people currently just call “indie.” at least.