What attracts you to indie games?

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1

What is it that makes you want to look for and play indie games, specifically, as opposed to bigger-budget games?

For me, it is the simple fact that indies are still making the kinds of games that I want to play, and big publishers generally don’t. My most formative gaming years were in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and as an adult, my taste ultimately came back home and calcified around those years. Old-school action and roleplaying games are what I want, and indies are offering them. Big publishers rarely do, and when they do make an attempt, they fail as often as not. Even veteran designers from back in the day seem to have forgotten how to make games; the younger generations who grew up with the classics are doing a much better job of bringing them back.

I take personal offense at the sentiment I often encounter that “indie” is automatically synonymous with “avant-garde” or “experimental,” the implication being that the thousands of traditionalist indies (from unknown to wildly successful) aren’t even worthy of the definition. They deserve better than that.

2

i think the simple answer on my end, if the question is just about comparing to the greater industry is that i just cannot identify a place for myself in the latter. selfishly perhaps, i think i’d struggle a lot in an environment like that, where i don’t necessarily have a deep connection to any given project, and in a ‘professional’ gamedev situation, if the past is any indication, i really struggle deliberating internally on if i’m truly giving 100% or 120% effort when it ends up being that the 80% is what lands closest to what the real expectation was, and i second guess myself constantly over if i’m doing enough. i’d also really prefer not to worry about getting laid off every release cycle.

i think ive largely settled on the idea that if there is anywhere in the games sphere for me its probably one i carve out myself, hence, indie

i think when it comes to being avant-garde vs having ‘traditionalist’ focus on reviving childhood things, it’s all really cut from the same cloth? the purpose to being indie is to allow that level of choice, and, i think you can be highbrow or lowbrow or midbrow about it how you see fit. and i think the spririt of making something on your own, for yourself, in a space that has become so heavily commercialized, is pretty counterculture regardless

3

Well, I agree with that. If one just says that indies typically make games that AAA won’t, or that they can make games more honestly and personally without interference from a billion-dollar corporation, yes, that is broadly true. I don’t object to those statements. I do object when someone carelessly defines “indie” as carrying specific expectations that I don’t care to meet. Indies are great because they don’t all fit in the same box.

4

i think indie games tell stories that you don’t see AAA games even acknowledge the existence of.

in the vast majority of AAA, the boat isn’t rocked, nothing is believed in whether loudly or quietly, minorities are relegated to set-dressing, the status quo is king. it’s been that way for as long as i can think, and really, the moment i found indie games was the moment my adult-self started to actually believe that games could be a medium i would like working with as an artist.

they’re also more human in their construction, more transparent, unrestrained, and accessible; people on this forum can play and make indie games for 0$, and kids without any disposable income (or even parents that would/could pay for games for them) can play and make indie games for 0$. (EDIT: caveat: people still gotta eat and be housed. so this doesn’t quite hold as much water as you’d think; i should know :pensive: )

this point is succinctly demonstrated both by potentially some of your own lives, and in this video about “lethal company” and its developer zeekerss, who started developing games in roblox at 12.

there’s a dark side to that, of course; the fact that an industry has its fangs in people this young or younger, and is essentially able to extract money from “voluntary” child labor through implicit exposure to their products and manipulation.

but as long as they keep away from industry, anybody anywhere can make any strange thing and express anything they want to express.

(it’s why i think rough-cut first-time projects on itch and steam should, 9 times out of 10, find support and encouragement, and not the ridicule that cringe-culture pushes us to revel in when exposed to the art of kids and teens. but maybe that’s me preaching to the choir.)

i think they’re extremely neat. they look, think, sound, and feel like nothing that a 7-8+ figure budget can create. in needing to make all the money and manpower sunk in make a line go up, AAA loses the humanity, and humanity is what i need in the art i love, and in the art i make.

6

I think indie games tend to be more honest than AAA games, in the sense that they are true to a vision. AAA has so many hands involved and so much deference to what the mass market will tolerate that any strong core vision tends to be obscured. although there are exceptions.

Rhianna Pratchett talked about how, as “writer” on the Tomb Raider reboot series, she was mostly brought in after the fact to add context and dialogue to a bunch of scenes and set pieces that were already decided on. She considers Heavenly Sword to be her best work in games because she had the most freedom there, and Heavenly Sword does have some of the best storytelling I’ve ever seen in a AAA game (and I do not typically seek out or have much interest in games solely for their storytelling).

Minerva Labyrinth is not a “story game”, but it does have far more storytelling than anything I have made to date, and that storytelling has changed a lot since I conceptualized the project. It started out as something more candy-colored and tongue-in-cheek, but as I worked on it over time, the characters found their true identities and the story and atmosphere turned darker and uglier. I resisted this at first, but it is simply the story that the game wants to tell. I have poured a lot of my own negative emotions into it because, in this case, it’s the most honest thing to do. I don’t know that a AAA game, which is all pitched and storyboarded and executive-approved well in advance, not to mention dreadfully expensive to revise, would have a lot of freedom to evolve that way. Even if it did, it would involve recoordinating an awful lot of people to get them all on the same new page.

Of course, indie still has bandwagoners and fad chasers. Every artistic space has its cynics, I guess.

7

I love this perspective. I think even for indies this idea of ‘honesty’ tends to drop a bit when you enter the publisher sphere - like just a glancing look from anyone with money is enough to get you anxious enough to start compacting an original idea into it’s most palatable streamlined form and thinking about ‘replayability’, ‘juice’, etc

the only time the industry really seems to sway away from this is when it starts to leverage auteur reverance, like for notable figures like kojima - or - some cases like “this project has 3% of the ORIGINAL team behind Bioshock so its basically a hidden sequel” which is just such a poor-taste way of remembering games

8

this is what draws me to indie as well. most AAA products are created in such a way that they remove the soul of the artist in exchange for providing a technically good experience. most of the things I consider compelling are very abrasive (in various ways) but its because you can feel that communication between the artist and yourself in experiencing it

id much prefer something that showcases the inherent philosophies and interests of the artist, something like lost highway (directly based on lynch’s thoughts on meditation and the occult), the silver case: the 25th ward (written in response to fears around nationalization of the mail service and a bunch of other things I could write probably around 10 pages on), or even stuff like the godbeast that are clearly amalgamations of things that they have experienced before and enjoyed. art like this I feel humanizes the people behind the work (for example, I can say absolutely nothing about who yasunori ichinose is playing monster hunter freedom unite, but I feel that if I were to meet him in real life I would already understand who TADA is having played something like rance quest).

another reason I like indie is that indie I find to be often significantly more challenging than AAA. like you said there are obviously exceptions but generally larger stuff has a lot of deference towards mass market appeal. i feel like even within a AAA series as it becomes larger i feel like this gets worse. for example, bloodborne is a considerably more challenging narrative as a meditation on an almost feral femininity in comparison to elden ring which I feel is a nothing of a video game beyond being a good product. both of the milk games (inside and outside a bag of milk) are really dread inducing observations on mental illness but the only mainstream visual novel I can really think of would just be something like persona 5 where every character is nothing more than an anime trope lol…

in a way it’s all justs words though, I prefer indie but I quite like AAA as well. I brought up mhfu, bloodborne and persona 5 because theyre all games I really like despite being capcom, sony, and sega products ahahahaha

9

To be honest, I am too much of a grognard and too gameplay-focused to see myself as an artiste creating important and meaningful works. But there is still an art to what I do, both mechanically and personally, and I do it without Sony standing over my shoulder, telling me to make it more like God of War.

10

ah to be clear I only mentioned the ways this applies in terms of story and writing because thats generally what draws me to games as a whole, indie and AAA—I think you can just as easily apply my ramblings to particular gameplay styles (thinking of cruelty squad, killer7, lunacid, boyfriend dungeon) in that they also show you pieces of the developer’s soul and particular interests the same way that a game’s presentation and story do. often my favorite games do both

11

Yep, no callout intended. Just saying that this is part of what I mean about honesty: uncompromising, no-BS dedication to a specific gameplay experience. Many AAA games have homogenized into a slurry of similar bullet-point features; if you’ve played one, you’ve played half of them. Even Final Fantasy is just an open-world action game now, I guess. Of course as I mentioned before, the indie space still has cynics who will just clone whatever made money last week, but overall the scene is far more vast and diverse than what AAA offers.

I didn’t fully appreciate the artistry of designing game mechanics until I started making games myself. Getting jump physics just right or crafting the perfect stat progression formula is delicate and satisfying work.

12

i feel like i have pretty banal reasons for prefering indie over AAA imo,
for one, its a simple access problem, i do not have storage, processing power, or disposable income to be playing AAA games
secondly, adhd means im very susceptible for gameplay loops to trap me at a primal level until i burn out, in a sense, abrasiveness and lack of “inmersion” means i can enjoy the games on a pace thats healthier to me
thirdly, even before we had internet, i was already playing indie games, since those were the ones i could affordably get through secondhand markets, dubiously sourced cd-roms will forever have my heart \o/