We are living in the best era for gaming

[Mnementh]

IcaroRibeiro said:

Bofferbrauer2 said:

Ever heard of shareware? This is how most Indies sold their games before the Internet allowed to do it completely without physical media. Another way was to develop your game and then mail it to potential publishers, though they risked having to sell the rights to the games when doing so. Finally, several indies simply went and self-published the games, which in the late 90's was relatively easy (They needed just a jewelcase CD in most cases).

As for 90's indies becoming classics, Doom, Wolfenstein, Commander Keen, (well pretty much everything from id software at the time became a hit despite technically being an indie developer until their acquisition by Zenimax in 2009), One Must Fall, The Exile/Avernum series (Avernum was originally just an extended remake of Exile), Constructor/Mob Rule, ADOM, Nethack...

Nope, never heard of shareware, shown how much indies are willing to use it nowadays. For indie developers digital distribution is a Gods send, much easier to release and distributed their games worldwide. That's why so many games were never released outside some markets in past (many never released outside Japan)

I'm perplexed that you listed using big publishers (at risk of losing their legal rights) as a truly viable way to publishing. Seems something hard to hear if you're a small developer. 

From those games I know Doom and Wolfstein, which I'm surprised to discover to be indies. 

Well, that's the thing, the name indies didn't exist, Doom had a normal sized team for the times. Doom was released under the Shareware model, meaning the first of three episodes could everyone copy for free and include on discs on magazines (remember, internet wasn't a thing everyone had back then). For Doom the shareware version contained the first of three episodes. At the end you got this message:

That was pretty usual, about a third of the game as shareware for free copying, so that the game reached a lot of people and paying for the full version. This often involved mailing actual money bills inside a letter and getting a disk back the same way.

Doom was self-published (Doom 2 got another publisher and released without shareware as boxed version), but prior id games including Wolfenstein 3D had one of the biggest publishers at the time: Apogee Software. So was it any less "indie"? Well Apogee also released their games via the shareware model and Apogee at the time were like 10 people. So also indie after todays standards. Because pretty much every game was indie if we apply modern standards. Lot's of the "big" game publishers operated from the garage of private homes. Because gaming was so niche back then.

And that is why todays indies still have it better todays than all game devs in the 90s, as you noted. They can reach a lot of customers via digital distribution. Payment these days can be made via online payment options, not mailed in a letters as dollar bills.