How Indie Games Took On the World (and Won)
I am not sure if the article answers its proposed question, but it's an amusing read over at Games Radar:

"Guys like Dylan, like 2D Boy, Edmund McMillen and Vic Davis are changing gaming as we know it – evolving it into something new and endlessly diverse, made from love and wonder rather than commerce. And yet, at the same time we’re going backwards – this is a bigger, bolder return to the way games development once was, when tiny teams free of publisher interference were releasing some new slice of crazy wonder every week."

How Indie Games Took On the World (and Won) at Games Radar

I think the big take-away from this article is understanding just how impossible it is to categorize or characterize the indies, or define the One True Path to indie success. You have some claiming its a tight-knit community, obviously excluding all the other indies like Vic Davis who are completely separate from that "scene."

Indie is as indie does. Really, when we talk indie, we're talking about all the outliers from the traditional, mainstream, "one true way" of publishing and distributing games that has existed since the early / mid 80's - borrowed heavily from the music and print publishing industries. Trying to generalize a group that is defined as not being in a particular subset is gonna get tricky.

But it's cool to read about how many different approaches there are that have so far managed to work. The one troubling bit is the amount of dependence that seems to be growing on aggregators like Steam and Direct2Drive. Not that this is nearly as bad (so far) to developers as the physical media publication business, but it does give those channels a good deal of power to dictate terms.

Labels: Biz, Indie Evangelism

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 6:00 AM (Permalink)