We are living in the best era for gaming

[The_Liquid_Laser]

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. 

A lot of these terms didn't really exist at the time, but there were similar things going on.  No one used the term "indie", but Doom was self-published.  No one used the term "free-to-play", because they said "shareware" instead.  But shareware was a way to get a whole lot of people to try the game for free knowing that a small percentage would buy the game.  (Demo is not quite the right word either, because 3 levels of Doom is more than what most people get to play in a demo.)  We also didn't have the word "causal", but that was my impression of the people who really liked Doom and other FPS games.  My buddy kept going on about how great a game Doom was, but I didn't think the game was too special.  I realized he never went to the arcade and the only console game he ever played was Tetris.  That is why he liked Doom.  Damn casual.

Of course, I was just an ignorant "hardcore gamer" at the time.  Now I realize that gaming needs casual gamers.  That is often how new genres become popular.  I saw the same thing happen to MMOs with World of Warcraft.  It was a game for "filthy unwashed casuals".   But if casual gamers play games for long enough then they become hardcore.  And they often need to try a game for free or for cheap, because they aren't that invested in gaming to begin with.  That's how the FPS genre started.  Doom became popular, because a bunch of casuals tried the game for free.

Last edited by The_Liquid_Laser - on 12 July 2022