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Forums - Gaming Discussion - We are living in the best era for gaming

Most good PC games and good console games of the last 40 years can be played on a single handheld today.
Even a lot of demanding games of the last five years. Thousand of good games.

That's a win in my book.



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This comes down to the ultimate question. What is an Indie game?
1. Pixel art style games
2. Game made by small team or an individual
3. Games with small budget
4. Games made for hobby
5. Games made without a publisher

Can't be 1, 2, 3, 4, nor 5. The answer is Indie games don't exist. Perhaps, every game is an Indie game. More budget does not equal AAA. I think it's important to understand what budget is used for anyways. I think people are using the word budget as if it's some magical word. Spending more money does not equal a better product. I kinda feel bad for these companies that gets the hate, but whenever it's a fan-made or indie game so many people praise it for the littlest thing. In fact you can easily make games nowadays without spending too much. I know indie games exist as a genre, but is it time to remove it? Imo I think this ranking is disrespectful to both "indie developers" and "AAA developers". What do you guys think.



Doctor_MG said:

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. 

Well, many developers don't need a publisher as middle man anymore, they can self-publish their game on Steam, Xbox Marketplace, PS Store, Nintendo eShop and the app stores. The percentage of games, where the publishers really had control over a product, was much higher before digital distribution. 



Conina said:

Well, many developers don't need a publisher as middle man anymore, they can self-publish their game on Steam, Xbox Marketplace, PS Store, Nintendo eShop and the app stores. The percentage of games, where the publishers really had control over a product, was much higher before digital distribution. 

Self-publishing is easier, but finding any significant success or exposure through that is very difficult. Developers with a vision for a game which costs some sum of money which cannot be obtained easily will find a much harder time getting a publisher than in the past. In addition, in the past, despite publishers having a significant amount of control, the risk was much more minimal for a product. Which allowed for more risky business ventures. 

So, if you want to self-publish great, but then your game is more likely to be very simple in nature and get much less exposure (due to the overwhelming amount of games in general). If you want a more complex game you'll need a publisher, but the game will need to be marketable to some extent. Is this conducive to a huge amount of variety? I think that can be debated and isn't as definitive as Mnementh suggests. 

If game development was as simple as just "self-publishing" then we wouldn't see the amount of developers that are being purchased. Most developers, to find significant success with a complex product, need an amount of resources that are practically impossible to get alone. Even indie studios are facing significant acquisitions, with over a hundred being purchased in the last five or six years. 



Shatts said:

This comes down to the ultimate question. What is an Indie game?
1. Pixel art style games
2. Game made by small team or an individual
3. Games with small budget
4. Games made for hobby
5. Games made without a publisher

Can't be 1, 2, 3, 4, nor 5. The answer is Indie games don't exist. Perhaps, every game is an Indie game. More budget does not equal AAA. I think it's important to understand what budget is used for anyways. I think people are using the word budget as if it's some magical word. Spending more money does not equal a better product. I kinda feel bad for these companies that gets the hate, but whenever it's a fan-made or indie game so many people praise it for the littlest thing. In fact you can easily make games nowadays without spending too much. I know indie games exist as a genre, but is it time to remove it? Imo I think this ranking is disrespectful to both "indie developers" and "AAA developers". What do you guys think.

Indie games are games that did not rely on a publishing party to fund the game in any significant capacity and are ones whose game was creatively independent. When we are talking about the budget themselves or the amount of people making a product, that's more along with the A, AA, AAA nature. IMO, you can absolutely have a AAA indie game if that developer has the funds for it. It's just that most don't because, when you get that big, you are likely to begin publishing titles and splitting up development teams. 

Basically, the "indie" status should be reserved for actual independent works, either creatively or financially. Whereas the number of "A's" should be reserved for the budget of a specific game independent of the developers status. 



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We are in the best era of gaming in that, we are getting huge, fun beautiful games from develops that have honed their craft for decades. I don't think we are ever going to be blown away by a game anymore. That feeling playing Mario 64 and running around in a 3D environment for the first time just isn't going to be there anymore. We have beautiful games now, but nothing blows me away any more.



Doctor_MG said:

Self-publishing is easier, but finding any significant success or exposure through that is very difficult.

So no difference than in the past.

Doom 1993 was an exception, not the rule. Duke Nukem 3D wasn't an indie game, it was developed by a branch of the publisher Apogee.

Most of the indie hits are newer games:

https://www.tuko.co.ke/421556-top-20-selling-indie-games-time-out.html

Last edited by Conina - on 09 July 2022

Conina said:

So no difference than in the past.

Doom 1993 was an exception, not the rule.

Yeah, there isn't a significant difference. However, there are less publishers now than before, and publishers are less willing to be risky, and game development costs more overall. This is why I don't think it's so easy to just say "there is way more variety today". There are way more games absolutely. But variety? I don't think it's as easy to tell. There were some real groundbreaking change-the-gaming-industry type games back in the day. Even ones that were self-published like Wizardry. 



Doctor_MG said:
Conina said:

Well, many developers don't need a publisher as middle man anymore, they can self-publish their game on Steam, Xbox Marketplace, PS Store, Nintendo eShop and the app stores. The percentage of games, where the publishers really had control over a product, was much higher before digital distribution. 

Self-publishing is easier, but finding any significant success or exposure through that is very difficult. Developers with a vision for a game which costs some sum of money which cannot be obtained easily will find a much harder time getting a publisher than in the past. In addition, in the past, despite publishers having a significant amount of control, the risk was much more minimal for a product. Which allowed for more risky business ventures. 

So, if you want to self-publish great, but then your game is more likely to be very simple in nature and get much less exposure (due to the overwhelming amount of games in general). If you want a more complex game you'll need a publisher, but the game will need to be marketable to some extent. Is this conducive to a huge amount of variety? I think that can be debated and isn't as definitive as Mnementh suggests. 

If game development was as simple as just "self-publishing" then we wouldn't see the amount of developers that are being purchased. Most developers, to find significant success with a complex product, need an amount of resources that are practically impossible to get alone. Even indie studios are facing significant acquisitions, with over a hundred being purchased in the last five or six years. 

You suggest that self-publishing is pointless, as you drown in an ocean of titles. But somehow the better titles find publicity over time. Undertale, Bastion, Minecraft were all self-published, yet still found success. So no, self-publishing is far from pointless.

I agree about the shortcomings of the big studios, but people here seem to believe Indies are somehow irrelevant or pointless. They aren't. And I am a big fan of 90s gaming, I grew up with it. But the reality is also, that back in the 90s we had a few studios making games. These days we have far more indies that operate similar to game studios in the 90s, and the tools and experiences allow for far more diversity and creativity. In this regard I consider today as a time, that is about 10 times the 90s, in number and quality of studios and games in the indie scene. And additionally we have the shitty AAA-industry, but I can choose to ignore it and play indies instead.



3DS-FC: 4511-1768-7903 (Mii-Name: Mnementh), Nintendo-Network-ID: Mnementh, Switch: SW-7706-3819-9381 (Mnementh)

my greatest games: 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023

10 years greatest game event!

bets: [peak year] [+], [1], [2], [3], [4]

mZuzek said:
rapsuperstar31 said:

We are in the best era of gaming in that, we are getting huge, fun beautiful games from develops that have honed their craft for decades. I don't think we are ever going to be blown away by a game anymore. That feeling playing Mario 64 and running around in a 3D environment for the first time just isn't going to be there anymore. We have beautiful games now, but nothing blows me away any more.

I mean, that's gonna be different for everybody. Younger people will always have something to blow them away the first few times. I was blown away as recently as last year by a game I may have mentioned multiple times in this thread. Though of course it's a different type of being blown away, because it's about the presentation rather than the gameplay.

That said, Breath of the Wild was a game that blew a lot of people away. Sure it's not the first game of its kind, but it completely rewrote the status quo of what an open-world game should be. It took the most popular genre around and shattered everyone's expectations of what that genre is, by making everything in the game be "open", rather than just the world. It has a level of interactivity we just hadn't seen before. Through all this it seems to have become the most beloved game in the world, at least from what I've seen. I've never met someone who's played Breath of the Wild and didn't love it, and that's a range that goes from Zelda fans, to Nintendo haters, to non-gamers. Even on the internet those who dislike it are few and far between. Maybe it didn't blow you away, but it sure did it for a lot of people.

That's true, and I agree Breath of the Wild is among my favorite games of all time.  But yeah it didn't blow me away.