| Mnementh said: 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. |
You completely missed the point of what I was saying. Using the definition of what indie means today, the majority of devs were indie up until maybe the PS2 or HD era. The definition for what an indie game was didn't exist because it wasn't necessary. Saying that indie devs didn't exist isn't true, they did. What didn't exist was the definition for an indie developer. Before, it was simply a hobbyist programmer.
As for your RDR2 comment, that's very doubtful. The definition for what an indie game is has been consistent since it's inception. Also, unless you expect the industry to become so costly that games cost multiple billions of dollars to make, that wouldnt happen even if the definition did change.
Lastly, self-publishing a title is easier on digital storefronts, but finding success through that model is pretty difficult. Attaching yourself to a publisher is still the best way to get noticed by consumers and the best way to receive funding to fully realize your project. So, if you can't do that, you'll either spend years working as a passion project or you will emulate the popularity of another product first to receive notoriety/income. So, again, we run into a similar scenario. Getting a game out there is easier, but getting the game that they have a vision for might be harder (unless your vision is humble, in which case I would cast doubt that it's variety is significantly different than what is on the market already). I'm not saying that all of this makes the amount of variety virtually the same as it was several decades ago, but that the confidence that one has to say it absolutely does have more variety requires greater consideration given the factors above. If I went through every game released in the last year I'd have to weed through a lot more crap to get to the gems, and I'm not entirely confident there would be a huge difference in what those games were offering from the past outside of technical limitations.
