Doctor_MG said:
This isn't true. A few decades ago the cost of making a game was within the ballpark of what a current indie developer could do today (even less, actually). The most famous example of this I think would be Doom. Three guys started up a software company, id Software. Their first game was created by just four people and created in just three months (meaning it likely didn't cost much money). There first few games were published by Apogee Software, but they were never bought out or anything. After a few titles they were able to start self-publishing their own works, starting with Doom (made by five people within nine months). There are many other stories such as this (Insomniac, Epic Games, Bungie, Blizzard, etc) Basically, back in the 80's and 90's indie development was a significant portion of the market. Very popular developers today were getting their very humble begins as independent developers well into the PS1 era (Valve, Bioware, Treyarch, Gearbox Software, etc). Most of these companies were created by a handful of people with very modest budgets. The definition of "indie" just didn't exist because it didn't need to. Most developers (or at least a large sum of them) were already independent. When games became to huge to develop many companies started getting purchased because they just couldn't afford to do otherwise. Eventually the indie label started showing up because most developers were no longer independent. Also, I wouldn't be so confident in saying we have so much more variety in the gaming industry. We have more developers than ever, but way less publishers. Embracer group alone owns like 103 studios. It's the publishers that really get control over a product. |
This is kinda pointless, as all game - console or PC - were on a budget and made with a team which is considered indie today. The original Doom was made by 8 people, the original Legend of Zelda by 7 people (if I count right). So following your argument, back then EA, Nintendo, Activision, Sega and so on were all indie devs. Because nothing else existed. In the 90s (at least the first half) not a single game hade credits breaking 100 people or even 50. Probably people in 30 years will say, that Red Dead Redemption 2 was an indie title, because 'only' 1000 people worked on it.
And your publisher argument: it was never that easy to publish stuff as it is today thanks to digital distribution. People have very low hurdles to take, to publish on Steam or itch.io.
We still have the situation, that single devs nowadays can make a proper game because the tools exist and then bring it to the public.
Last edited by Mnementh - on 09 July 2022
