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-plublished 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 and step in at the very end (sometimes post-release) to scoop up the moneymakers.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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-plublished 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 and step in at the very end (sometimes post-release) to scoop up the 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.