Just a quick question along with this excellent read from colin moriarty
In recent months, I’ve felt an overwhelming sense of disappointment when I scroll through the comments of the coverage of “indie games” here on IGN (or on other sites and on Twitter, at that). While many folks praise these games (and a vast, vast majority of people who read IGN don’t comment at all), I can’t help but notice a lot of hatred cast against these games, too. This hatred doesn’t come from disliking the content of the game at hand. No, it comes from the game being “indie,” period. The word, to some, is used as a weapon. To others, it’s a reason to dismiss a game outright.
As a life-long gamer who has been playing for over 25 years, judging games like this totally bums me out. It’s wrong-headed, silly, and – above all else – wildly ignorant. It holds us back as gamers, and by muddling the message to players and developers alike, it holds back the industry at large, too. So I wanted to take a few moments to say something about this growing trend.
Before I even jump in, there’s a problem we have to overcome: the term “indie” is largely nebulous and undefined. To some people, “indie” falls into its actual definition; a developer or team of developers with no affiliation to or relationship with a publisher. This mantra, of course, is largely derived from the music industry, which is teeming with label-free independent artists, and has been for decades. (Indeed, the very act of being "indie" in the music scene is a sort of genre of its own. Sound familiar?) But in gaming, that’s not what “indie” means to most people who use the term pejoratively, which is where things get complicated and, frankly, devoid of any rationality.
We have a group of gamers running around judging products not by how good they are or assessing how the gameplay or storytelling is, but based on its production budget, how much it costs to buy, and how big the team is that made it.
To many of the haters who broadly judge a product as “indie” without measuring its actual merits, the term simply means any game that’s small, downloadable, or, better yet, a game made by a small team. Did you pay $10 or $20 for it? It’s indie. Are you playing it on PC or Vita? It’s indie. Did a team of 8 or 10 people make it? It’s indie. Are you unable to purchase it in a store? It's indie. If this all sounds insane to you, that’s because it is. We have a group of gamers running around judging products not by how good they are or assessing how the gameplay or storytelling is, but based on its production budget, how much it costs to buy, and how big the team is that made it. It’s profoundly bizarre, and that’s putting it lightly.
In a market still saturated with $60 games that are more often than not derivative of each other, people are actually mad that there are groups of daring, rogue developers unafraid to try new things, unshackled from the publisher bureaucracy, and willing to take risks to, more often than not, do something new and unique. There are people angry that the indie movement exists, even though virtually all of the fresh ideas are coming from their space. They're upset that their games are made on smaller budgets, as if the cost to create always equates to production value or quality. They need to justify hardware purchases based solely on triple-A experiences, and not what's necessarily the most fun or engaging. Isn’t that strange?
Games are cheaper than ever, even if you’re talking about $60 titles you buy in a store. The math is completely indisputable. And this is where things get even more haywire, because while any complaint that games are expensive is completely false from a historical point of view, discounting the downloadable scene “for being indie” also hides something else that we should be excited about: downloadable games, indie or otherwise, are cheap. Really cheap. Like, $5, $10, $15, $20 cheap.
You can walk into GameStop right now, fork over $60, and get a brand-new copy of Triple-A Game X, or you can buy six $10 games on Steam, Xbox Live Arcade, or PlayStation Network, and one or two of them (at least) will likely be far better than what you just walked out of the store with. Our new reality is one that allows us to buy games cheaper than ever, whether you seek a triple-A experience or an indie one, and quality abounds in both territories. Yet, some people walk around discounting and discrediting the latter while wrongheadedly attacking the former, as if they can't coexist in peace, and as if choice is a bad thing.
When I think about the best games of 2014 so far, my mind immediately goes to smaller experiences: Child of Light, Valiant Hearts, and the best one of them all, a true indie called Shovel Knight.
Is every so-called indie game good? No, of course not. Like the triple-A market, there’s complete garbage in the indie and downloadable space, and we mustn’t ignore that. But there’s great stuff there, too. Lots of it. Ignoring this "indie" movement – regardless of what that term really means to you – is a mistake. While I can’t wait for big, multi-million dollar projects from major publishers and huge teams like Far Cry 4, The Witcher 3, and Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End, I’m equally excited for Velocity 2X, To Leave, and Axiom Verge, games crafted by small teams with tiny budgets. There's literally no reason why those latter games can't be better than the former ones. None whatsoever. And their value isn't any less, either.
When I think about the best games of 2014 so far, my mind immediately goes to smaller experiences: Child of Light, Valiant Hearts, and the best one of them all, a true indie called Shovel Knight. Sure, South Park: The Stick of Truth, Infamous: Second Son, Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc, and others are up there, but let this be illustrative of a single point: these games can co-exist, make you happy, and complement one another. One doesn't exist at the sake of another, and both can justify purchasing of a console or handheld. PC gamers in particular already know this better than anyone else (which isn’t a surprise, since they’ve also been way ahead of the curve of the inevitable digital-only revolution). Indies and smaller titles dominate Steam, yet that doesn’t stop PC gamers from playing some of the giant games from giant developers, either. They typically don't look at the term "indie" in a pejorative light, because they're already exist in the comfortable space that consoles are slowly but surely headed toward.
The point is, both sides of the spectrum have weight and value, yet the scale is slowly (and demonstrably) being tipped toward the so-called indie side in terms of not only volume, but in terms of quality. And again, I don't mean indie literally; I mean it in the sense of how a lot of the haters mean it, describing smaller games made on smaller budgets from smaller teams. This shift marks an inevitable move as the mid-tier developers all but disappear, triple-A-reliant studios close down left and right, and the few big publishers left streamline their operations to make the most money (though I have to give a shoutout to Ubisoft here, a publisher that supports games across the spectrum, and Sony, who gives money hand-over-fist to studios it doesn't even own to create IP that isn't even exclusive).
…if you’re one of those people that dismisses indies, try to look at things from a new perspective.
Indie – in some way, shape, or form – is the future, my friends. Just look at our current landscape – bloated budgets, disappointing sales, and a fragmenting market – and then take a peek at a much more promising horizon, built on ingenuity and new ideas, untethered from absurd budgets and equally absurd commercial expectations that have already taken so many publishers and developers victim.
So if you’re one of those people that dismisses indies, try to look at things from a new perspective. If you call PS4 “IndieStation” and claim that there’s nothing on there worth owning the console over, tell that to people like me who have lost hundreds of hours to downloadable-only games on the console over the last eight months. If you judge Microsoft for jumping on board with indies, ask yourself why there are so many successful indie games on other platforms, and why they shouldn't take a hint. And if you want better value, more bang for your buck, and brand-new ideas, keep one foot in the triple-A camp, sure, but venture over to the indie space, too. If you truly love games, you’ll love them regardless of price, team size, or company of origin. And if you really love games, you don't need to spend $60 on games to justify your hardware purchases. Evidence to the contrary is all around you if you keep an open mind.
Wow that was a mouthful. Anyway, TL;DR version: Indies are awesome, try to open your mind.
