There was just a discussion on Mastodon about how much merit the term “indie” still bears for small-time game devs:
Seeing that this place is somewhat directed to small indie devs, I invited the people there to discuss it here; there is a small lemmy subboard that I opened, but this is already heavily “shaped” through my terms and ideas - and I wanted some “neutral ground” to get in touch with others. Hope this is okay for the administration and the indigenous population here ;).
To sum up a few assumptions that were made at the Mastodon-Thread and elsewhere before:
The term “indie” is used to describe a wide field of non-AAA games, including productions with a high budget, a publisher in the back, or a rather big team that is involved
The bigger productions gain an aura through this: “Indie games” are seen as more authentic, experimental, “fresh”. (Although this might be in decline already).
Smaller devs suffer from this, as they are pitted along with games that have often a much better funded production and marketing.
The question that came up: Might another term help? And what could this term be? How can a community, or communities, be built up - and what should they center around?
Personally, I believe that a thing that small video game productions have is authenticity. The more money somebody throws unto a production, the more narrow the room for experimentation or rough edges get, as this involves risk.
I also think it is a good idea to try to embrace existent communities: Free/Open Source developers and modders, the interactive fiction scene, and maybe even developers of non-video games might be good fits.
I also believe that the act of trying to re-establish a community for truly independent games is inherently political: The market and its “invisible hand” didn’t just produce the optimal scenario for video game players and developers - as in many other areas of live, things are rather fucked up. I believe that addressing and reflecting onto this is also an important factor.
I guess the question is, what is the problem we are trying to solve?
If it’s exposure for very small projects, I wonder if a new term would help. It would only work if the new term gained traction, but if it gained traction, it would just end up co-opted by big projects again. If you called it poopy garbage trash, within a year or two you’d have studios like inXile proudly calling themselves poopy garbage trash.
You are probably right that communities built around playing and boosting small projects is key. I would go further and say that to really get to the rough gems and underdogs, a community needs to be genre-specific. People who are really passionate about RPGs for example are the ones who are going to look long and hard for new RPGs to play, and the most likely to give a zero-budget RPG a chance or try out somebody’s WIP. A general interest forum is mostly going to skim the surface of everything.
I don’t know many places like that, though. Much less ones that are worth visiting.
Part of the trouble too for me at least is that a lot of phrases that get brought up don’t really apply to my work. Guerilla? Eh… too aggressive for my traditional style and slow pace of work. Jammer? I’ve done jams, but they’re not my identity or my core interest. Art game? Definitely not. Zinester? NO. Scratchware? A dead manifesto that was more about sustainable commerce. Bedroom coder or hobbyist? Speaks more to the author than their work. Amateur? Technically true, but negatively connotative. Hidden gems? I wouldn’t presume that much. Underdogs? That one is pretty famously spoken for, I think.
The Indiepocalypse thing on Itch is probably an attempt to do this type of thing, but it is outwardly aggressive in stating that whatever you’re making probably isn’t wanted.
From my point of view, it is to find a term that allows small-time developers to at least find each other, and for players who are potentially interested into games done by such developers, to find them.
Just to explain this: As things are, I spent a bit more time in curating games than developing myself right now.
And in terms of curation, searching games by small developers takes as much (if not more) time as playing and reviewing them, as all available platforms are currently designed to keep the well-funded and/or established projects at the top.
If I don’t get recommendations (and this only happened a few times over the last few years), my primary option to find “small-time” games is to scroll through the hinterlands of Itch.io by hand.
I think this depends. If we just want another tame, open-to-commercialisation term (like “indie” games basically ever was, but that’s another story) - yes, this will only work out for a time.
If we - and this is what I attempted with “underground games” make the resistance against the logic of the market a part of the identity, it will attract mainly people who want to play such games - making it a much lesser attractive field for the corpos.
Genre specific forums and communities can indeed work out, especially if they have a sane and motivated moderation behind. Good examples for this are the rogue temple, the adventure games board or the IFdb. There are also a few good engine-specific communities.
But this is comes with various problems:
a) Niche genre communities have more developers than players:
This is, for example, a problem for IF-developers. Much more people there are writing than reading, and so a big part of the output is basically orphaned, and the communities sometimes involuntarily resemble a kind of pyramid-scheme, where only the most established within the community get any readers.
b) Developers are limited to serving existent communities:
So, you basically can’t “make the games you want to make”-either, but you are limited to serve a community that is somewhat open to small-time productions (due to not being served by the corpos) but still has enough players so that someone might play your game. Making a walking simulator? A breakout game? A platformer game? You are on your own.
c) Problematic communities:
Even if there is an existent, active community - it might not be a good one. We are both working at CRPGs atm, right? There is a rather big community existent for this genre, but it is both operated and infested by very mean nazis, so that won’t be an option for either of us ;)… If you want to make a nice RPG-community I’m all in (and probably can even bring a few people along, even more so if we include P&P-RPGs).
d) The problem you described above really exists here: As soon as a genre gets some traction, the genre specific communities will be again dominated by the big productions.
As said: If anyone is interested to run an nazi-free RPG board, gimme a note; I’m all in for attempting it, but imho this is another issue - it won’t help the racing game developer from the mastodon thread, it won’t open a community for the IF-writer, and it won’t help me if I want to create some abstract art game after my current project. So I do believe that there is also room and need for a community focused on small productions in general.
About the wording: I’d still argue that “underground” is a good term, as it also connects to earlier movements in other areas, is pretty easy to understand, and at least gathered a few people who sympathize with it already. It could be shortened to “ungame” (as this issue came also up), which also bears a interesting historical reference.
The Indiepocalypse is really good if you want to get some pocket money for your game. I think we made ~70bucks with it (compared to 50 with Itch combining all of our games, and effectively -100 with Steam). Over that: I had some contacts with another dev who released at the same issue as we did, and I sometimes still use their releases to search for interesting developers, but the overall value for community building seems rather limited, especially since it is rather gate-kept by its very nature ;).