Generic free mobile indie crap

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What is the point of being an indie game developer?

If you fantasize about working for Bethesda or Bungie, but you’re stuck making small-time games in your basement… that doesn’t mean you’re an indie, does it? Or maybe it does, now. Maybe indie isn’t a label I want, at all.

We have heard that the indie dream is dead. It is the apocalypse. Phil Fish tells us via twitter that we can’t succeed, we will never make it and there is nothing for us now. It seems like everything has changed back to how it was before Steam and the app stores even existed. Back when people like me started making games with no intent of selling anything. Just for fun.

So for now, it seems like indie means a few things. It means you’re in it for the money. Which means, you’re copying everybody else who has succeeded. Which means, you’re churning out generic games. Indie means mobile. Why? Because its a small screen with lower expectations. Because you can make a crap game and people will still download it. Indie means free. Even though the thing that makes an indie an indie is the attempt to make money, rather than just make a fun, artful game… indie games are now exclusively free. So indie is now a set of contradictions.

You have the freedom to make anything you want, so you force a generic game that matches what everyone else is doing.

You want to make money, so you give your game away for free.

You have the chance to let your voice be heard, but you self censor so people will hopefully like you.

You promote yourself but don’t help other indies out or support your community beyond lip service. (This one is particularly heinous).

If that is what an indie is, I’m not an indie, then.

Someone help me figure out what it is, then. What is a game developer who just makes a game because he/she likes it with no consideration for making tons of cash or getting internet famous in the process? Am I all alone in my perspective?

Anyone out there?

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You know I’m there with you brother. Some day I would like to take a crack at making money from it just from the fun of doing the experiment.

But it’s always been just a hobby for me. Something I do just for fun and to kind of give something to other people to enjoy.

Granted, there is no real need for people like me to do this anymore because as you said these days Indies are all basically giving everything they make away for free. At least for the most part. Still I’ll do it even if I never release anything because I enjoy it. And I think most of the things they are making are basically just clones of each other.

And I guess I still always think there will always be some people who will appreciate the unique spin I put on my games. I tend to make games that are different. Certainly not the mainstream Indie kind of games. Like Santa’s Rocketing Christmas Drop, the scrolling veggie shmup, the Halloween game and my Christmas game. Most people may not like them but I think they are at least different from the norm.

Most people around here I’d say probably don’t get the kind of stuff I make at all. They’d be (and are) telling me all kinds of things to change so I could turn my games into basically clones of other mainstream Indie games. If I am doing that then I see no point in even making them.

But yeah if I was doing it all for money then you’re right. No sense in trying to innovate really. No need to really make what you want to make or what I want to make. I’d find the hot sellers and try to put my own unique spin on those. I’d feel like I couldn’t really just do whatever I wanted because I would have to make every decision based on market acceptance. Or at least consider market acceptance and popular trends way more than I do now.

That’s just the difference in doing it as a business instead of a hobby I think. I want to do it for fun and then one day make something that although it was made entirely for fun it actually sells well too. That is my dream… one day.

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…if you just copy everyone else, you will never realize whatever style you can achieve on your own. It will never be your true expression.

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Define “indie”, we have “indie’s” with millions in the bank to spend all the way down to one man band’s. The platform range is broad and the types of games are also broad. So “indie” is a broad term…

It’s far from “doom and gloom” many hard working successful small indie’s out there, but they do deserve it… Like any “Art” type industry it’s a tough cookie to crack unless you have a lot of money.

I started the “indie” path for no more reason than Bioware don’t release games quick enough and I wanted to fill the “gap”. I don’t really care about money, I just need it to be able to produce the game within a reasonable time frame and have the resources to make a follow up… If I end up selling only 2,500 copies for example it’s game over. I tried, failed and that’s the end of it…

But it is comforting to see that developers that truly put their all into PC / Console platforms generally have done really well.

Anyway point being, there is always an exception to the rule. There’s many “indies” in the field punching well above their weight, putting their all in and if I was a betting man it’s those guys and gals I’d put my money on… As for the rest, well they’ve pretty much evened the playing field for themselves, let them fight for scraps whilst others aim for the sky.

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I’ve started calling myself a hobbyist…because…it’s stage one in my plan for world domination a hobby. They’re learning projects for the time being, so making money from them is far less important to me than getting them to work, and figuring out where the Gremlins are coming from.

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That word has no meaning anymore. It represents whatever you mean by using it.

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So then Rockstar is an indie developer. The world has truly ended.

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Yeah I think that is a big part of it. When I think of Indie and based on most of the forums and reddits I have read I think most others think this… an Indie is not some team of 7+ people (certainly not dozens like we often see in Indie Kickstarters) with tens of thousands of dollars.

Honestly I don’t even know what people like that are even thinking other than trying to ride the Indie train.

It’s probably changing… the definition I mean… as anyone and everyone of any size calls themselves Indie. But I think still most gamers think of an Indie as a lone dev or a small team. A team of more than even 7 to 8 people sounds more like a company than Indie. To me it is a lone dev or maybe ul to 4 to 5 people. Basically the more people involved changes it to me. Because it is the size of the organization that makes it more Indie or more corporate AAA like.

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I went to an indie meetup in LA. Basically, a bunch of guys showed up and there were two girls. At one point I got into a discussion about “what does indie mean?” She kept poking holes in my concept of what an indie is… to the degree that I couldn’t answer.

Indie isn’t a thing. It’s a marketing angle designed to reduce people’s expectations and encourage them to buy to “support the little guy”.

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Indie has just become a term to describe a game that doesn’t fit the ‘norm’, as if it’s an excuse so if people don’t like it because the controls are clunky, the graphics are ‘old fashioned’, the theme is a bit risqué etc then they can just say “oh, but it’s an indie game so that’s ok”. That’s why larger studios label themselves as indie, it’s front loading player expectations to manage the risk of failure or bad reviews.

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See that is just it… I think Indie universally is seen as the “little guy or gal” again kind of painting a picture of a lone developer sitting at home working in their spare time and making some excellent little game. Or perhaps the guy or gal and a few of their friends. These scenarios are very Indie. And this is what Indie has always been at least until recent years.

I mean Indie developers have been around for decades. They made shareware and so forth. Yes some of them grew to become more like budgetware companies such as Apogee & ID Software but still they were very much seen as Indie developers at least in the beginning. Shareware was their thing. Some such as Mountain King Studios I think remained just a lonewolf Indie developer. These were the ones from the DOS days. There were many others before that on the Amiga, C64 and other such computers of the time.

I think the term has become so loose these days because it became cool to support Indies. It became cool to be an Indie. So the past few years we have seen people forming companies with even dozens of people calling themselves Indies. To me they are not Indie at all. They are just another game company basically like a AA or A game company. They have far more in common with AAA than they do with Indies. But they want to ride that Indie fame train. That is my view on it anyway.

Now you on the other hand singlehandedly developing games that you want to make and trying to sell those games. That is an Indie. Or a few friends (whether online or offline) teaming up to build games they want to make and selling those games they are also Indie. 15 people teaming up with $500k of funding well honestly I don’t see how anyone can see that as Indie. That is just people forming a true studio. Sure it might be more along the lines of a budget game development studio but it is definitely more corporate than Indie in my opinion. Certainly I don’t see how such a thing could be seen as “the little guy or gal”. Others may well disagree.

I guess the important thing is what does Indie mean to you personally, @Master-Frog ?

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Indie is short for independent, and that’s what it means. That you don’t have a parent company running things; you’re not beholden to money guys who dictate what you can and can’t do. So you’re free to do your own stuff. It doesn’t matter if it’s one guy and no money or a team of 50 with a budget of millions…as long as they raised that money themselves and can do what they want with nobody else pulling strings, it’s legit indie.

–Eric

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That may very well be true but for me personally I won’t ever see it that way and support the team of 50 with a budget of millions in the spirit of Indie as I do for small teams and particularly lone developers. I’ve made that choice many times in my life. Having the option to support some guy or gal’s product or a big team’s product I supported the smaller one.

If Indie now includes even the team of 50 with a budget of millions then people need to lose the “support the little guy” motto. This is why I think for most people they still view Indie as the sort of cottage industry it has always been. Someone working out of their home building games by themselves or with a few others. Kind of like I see supporting the little guy as supporting the local income tax preparation service of a husband and wife team instead of going to an H&R block office or going to a farmer’s market instead of Walmart. That kind of stuff makes sense from the “support the little guy (or gal)” view. Again at least to me.

I guess as with all things… it all just comes down to personal preferences and views.

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Well, indie is indie. Like films…an independent film doesn’t mean it has to be some film students with an iPhone, it can be a “real” film with a decent budget, and as long as a studio isn’t controlling the budget, it’s indie. This allows the independents to take on scripts that a studio would pass on for being “risky” or “not a sequel” or “not a reboot”. Same thing with games; if you’re an indie you don’t have to do COD XXVI or Halo 37. I’m sure larger teams/budgets have more politics and compromises involved, but the core feature of “you can’t tell us what to do, nyah” is there regardless.

–Eric

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That makes sense and I can definitely get that definition from Indie. I think it would be great to have another term for it. Not sure what it would be. We have the term cottage industry that applies to the kind of thing I am thinking of but I’ve not heard it used in recent years for game developers. We had shareware and that was an easier way to pinpoint the “mom & pop” equivalent developers.

All I know is when I see a Kickstarter showing a dozen or more people sitting in some fancy office asking for $500k or more to build their dream game it just puts me off big time. If it is 2 to 3 people in one of their houses asking for $50k I am in a much more positive mindset right off the bat.

I know I am not the only one who has this view. I have read the same kind of thing on forums over the past year or two. Something worthwhile keeping in mind for game devs anyway. Might be a good idea to really emphasize “hey we’re just a husband & wife team” or “just 3 good friends” because then the anti-corporate guard doesn’t pop up. I honestly watch some of these kickstarters and think “dude, you have better equipment being shown in this video than most of the people you are asking for money from? I mean seriously?”

But yeah you’re right. I can see it from the perspective of an Indie is an Indie period. I just think it would be better to have a term that identifies the people who are doing it out of their houses not already loaded with cash just through pure determination and grit. Those are the kind of folks I want to support.

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So we have A, AA, & AAA. Maybe we have indie, indie indie, & indie indie indie? Or just indie & indie+

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I was always clueless and resourceless in my ambition to ever make video-games. Other than a little software called WinLogo, I didn’t have the means to do anything, not even a proper frame by frame animation tool.
Then I first started to come across little game engines it was great that would finally babysit through the process of making games. But never believed I could actually do it full time, only now I see a light at the end of the tunnel… hope it doesn’t mean I’m dying. Life’s short. Who cares about labels, or a word?? That should be the least of your concerns. You CAN make games, and you can even consider it profit from it, such are the great gifts of this modern era, that alone is all you need.

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If Indie means all of the things above, then it has no meaning. Except in people’s heads. You call yourself a non-conformist, so you’re “indie”. You have $500,000 but no “money guys telling you what to do” (doesn’t exist) that makes you an “indie”.

The truest test of whether you’re “indie” is whether you’re a hipster.

@GarBenjamin - It doesn’t mean anything to me, anymore. It is just something you can say you are as long as you aren’t AAA. Then again, nothing saying you can’t be a AAA “indie”… which only further proves the nonsense of it all.

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You’ve started out completely wrong in the premise of this post. Indie is not, has never been about, and will never be about, ‘copying everyone else who has succeeded’.

The hall mark of indie is the game studios that take a risk to make what they want, instead of sticking the the tried and true formulas. @Eric5h5 's comment about the film scene is relevant. Indie is about experimentation.

I play a lot of great indie games. Complicated space ship building simulators that require hours of learning actual orbital physics to succeed. Games about being a fungus growing in a dilapidated world. Games that explore the life of a tree. Asymetric dungeon crawlers where you alternate between playing the hero and the creeps. Cooperative construction games where you have to work as a team to stay ahead of the encroaching lava. Virtually impossible platformers. Twists on old ‘dead’ genres.

The indie scene is very much alive. And its very much producing creative and original games.

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This. If you look at the most common usage of the word outside of gaming, Indie has always meant something that steps outside of the mainstream. Independent film, independent music, etc. Those terms usually are associated with things with subject matter or style that you can’t see in theaters or hear on the radio. They are also associated with low-budget crap, depending on the perspective. :wink:

With regard to games, the word has sort of come to mean whatever anyone wants it to mean, because everyone wants to slap the label on themselves. There are certainly tons of “indies” who just clone whatever happens to be big at the moment. Usually they do so at a much lower quality level, then plop it up for sale. Those are the money chasers and the get rich quick schemers. They get a lot of attention because there are just so freaking many of them and I think it is sad that they are increasingly allowed to define what the word means.

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