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.
It’s simple
Game I like = Indy
Game I don’t like = soulless committee designed AAA trash
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.
If being self-published were the only metric, many Nintendo games would be indie. So clearly that’s not a good definition to use.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Nah, I don’t think it’s malicious.
The term has been muddled from the beginning. There wasn’t a concept of “indies vs triple A” until Microsoft started offering digital-only games under servere restrictions for size and feature set. Because that made people assume that indie = small and because some design tropes became part of the common understanding of the term we ended up in a very weird middle ground.
Before that happened nobody really thought about indie vs triple A, it was mostly first party versus third party. Games were mostly gated by storage cost and performance rather than budget, so games from big studios and small studios mostly looked the same. You could definitely have used those terms in the PS1 era to compare massive stuff like Final Fantasy VII or Metal Gear to smaller shovelware, but back then that was just the difference between good games and bad games.
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?
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.
Well, in this case I’d guess because his indie dev studio just got royally hosed by Microsoft, so he definitely has good reason to hot take the hell out of the relationship between major publishers and indie studios at the moment.
A lot of nice people aren’t especially fun. I’m not sure it’s a great metric.
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.
Stevie “KillCreek” Case?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Indie is the future of all entertainment. The Ironmouse x Vshojo situation just proved it. And I mean, look at the shithole Hollywood and the music industry have been for the last century or so…
There are no entertainment industries that don’t exploit the artists who make the actual product.
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.
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
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.
I’ll take indie games overflowing with heart/soul/purpose/ a story to be told any day over cookie cutter tripple A slop.
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.
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.
Counterstrike was originally a Quake mod, then a Half-Life mod, before Valve hired the modders and made it into a standalone game.
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.
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.
triple AAA
thats like, at least 8 A’s, that must be very good
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.
Wow. The thumbnail made me think this was going to be about Ozzy.
Neat article!
