Gamers like to fight. We like to fight over which game is the best (or worst), and which company is the worst (or most worstest). We like to fight about shit that is so stupid and inconsequential that we don't even know what we're fighting over but keep fighting anyway out of sheer habit. But it seems like almost everyone on every gaming forum on the intertubes can agree on a few things. Namely, that the oversequelization and increasing homogenization of games sucks, and that the big corporate publishers are shitheads. (Electronic Arts? More like Evil Assholes!)
And while the increasingly online nature of gaming over the past generation has given those shithead publishers more ways than ever to fuck with us through paid DLC and the like, it has also given us more ways than ever to fight back. Like by supporting developers who forego big, corporate, shithead publishers. Because for the first time ever, a developer doesn't need to have or be a publisher in order to get his game on a console.
It also means that we can vote more directly with our wallets against homogenization and sequels out the yin yang. Even an idiot can see that these trends, deleterious though they are, are just manifestations of the natural risk aversion that comes from the explosive growth of budgets required to make today's AAA(A) games. If you've ever lamented that AA games are going the way of the dodo, or that survival horror and stealth games and tactical shooters are vanishing as all games blend into an amorphous action-adventure blob with focus group-approved levels of RPG elements... thanks to indie games, your salvation may be at hand.
But over the last day I have seen you - yes, YOU! - hurl more vitriol at indie games for being "not real" games than I have seen over the last few years combined. So please 'splain it to me, Lucy. What is driving the insane hatred of this single bright spot in the benighted gaming landscape? Is it that these games don't have enough graphics? Does it give you a sad to know that a game probably cost under 7 digits (and definitely cost under 8) to make? Do you wrongly believe that they are "not real"? (They do exist, I assure you.) Or is it something else entirely? Just what, dear reader, puts such sand in your vagina about indie games?
