richardhutnik said:
Indie, as a general concept, consists of a free lance artist or team of artists (artist here is in a broad sense) who do stuff they like without restraints of working in a corporate environment. They are typically free of marketing demographics and so on. They works, due to their size, generally can be all over.
From a business perspective, Indie means this:
* MUCH lower development costs. For the console makers, and Steam, it means that they can get content out there and only pay developers if their content sells. Development costs is pretty much on the backs of the developers. Their costs would be lower, because they don't have casts of thousands they need to pay.
* Much wider range of quality and originality of concepts. You are more likely to get experimental concepts done by Indies, and stuff all over the map. Of course, in this, you will also get a glut of clones of stuff that had worked, but that goes with the territory.
* Lower production value. You are not going to get a wide range of voice actors, Hans Zimmer doing the soundtrack, and what is equivalent to Hollywood Blockbusters.
* Game that feels far more old-school in nature. You will get evolutionary updates to old concepts. BUT, when you work with small dev teams, who are trying to make entertaining games, you are going to run into games that feel old school to some degree.
End result, is you have a flood of mixed quality, and a rare gem that will rise to the top and end up turning the industry on its head. For the console makers and steam, it is like buying huge numbers of lottery tickets, and hoping one takes off and becomes a Minecraft or Angry Birds. Costs to return on investment is what excites them. And the rare gems I speak of are what help the industry from getting stuck in a rut, and dying off from boredom.
If you see my CADERS link below, it started out with casual, retro, and neo-retro. With the flux of Indie, I then realize that neo-retro can fairly easily be replaced by Indie, because of the nature of Indie stuff being like old school.
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