Indie Games Versus Triple-A Titans
By: Tim Becker
Tags: Pop Culture, Gaming, Culture, Indie Game

Indie Games Versus Triple-A Titans

Why are indie games so popular?

Have you ever felt alone? Someone just wandering and searching for meaning in an industrial world? Do you crave grandma’s home cooking in a world with nothing but fast food? A world of copies of copies of copies.

In recent years the gaming industry has become very similar to that, Ubisoft can churn out the same game about assassins in a different setting year after and still make millions (though they have tried to do something different recently), Call of Duty can still make millions on the same gameplay that came out around 10 years ago, and somehow EA is still in business even with its scummy business tactics and disappointment after disappointment. Many games just feel like copies of copies of copies, with no love or passion ingrained in them, purely a business venture to some, especially with the rise and prominence of microtransactions in everything from Star Wars Battlefront (EA) to Overwatch (Blizzard) to even single player games like Assassin’s Creed Odyssey (Ubisoft) and Middle Earth Shadow of War (Warner Brothers). To counter that income indie games.

Until relatively recently indie games were incredibly hard to produce and distribute. There were hobbyist games that mostly found their way on flash-gaming sites and then there were huge triple-A titles. That was almost entirely true until a little game called Braid. Braid is a puzzle platformer, that came out in 2008, that had time-bending mechanics and a mind-bending twist at the end that I won’t spoil. Braid was one of the first indie games to make it big in the gaming world, thanks in part by the onset of the Xbox arcade marketplace and its self-publishing tools. With the rise of digital marketplaces after the Xbox arcade, like Valve’s Steam Marketplace, and even console digital marketplaces, the medium of sale for indie games only became easier.

Another one of the biggest roadblocks hindering indie games early on was money. Triple-A game studios have established bases and generally play it incredibly safe with the titles that they produce and have for a very long time. Other than a few interesting ideas from time to time, mechanics stay relatively similar and many franchises have at least five or six games to them. Indie games are a little more volatile. Without huge studio backings to handle some losses if a game flops indie developers have always walked a tightrope of sorts, if an indie developer fails, they fail, hard. But recently there has been a renaissance of sorts in the gaming world especially with the rise of crowdfunding campaigns and things like Steam Green Light. Crowdfunding platforms like GoFundMe offer a way for the overhead of creating a video game to be covered. Look at crowdfunding success stories like the turn-based RPG dungeon crawler, Darkest Dungeon, in order to see what a little bit of money can do to help bring an otherwise unfathomable game to life. Darkest Dungeon explores what would happen if throw a few damaged, but otherwise perfectly sane, individuals into actual deep, dark, decrepit dungeons full of monsters straight out of eldritch horror. Steam Greenlight is another way for indie developers to get their games the money that they need for development. The way Greenlight works is that it lets developers put unfinished games, usually in the beta testing phase, up for sale in order to help cover development costs. For success stories of Greenlight just look to tough-as-nails artsy survival game, Don’t Starve.

When indie games gained prominence major studios took notice, and instead of trying to drown them they actually offered some aid. Studios like EA and Ubisoft started their own indie game publishing divisions and started helping with the marketing and distribution of indie games, and even took to developing their own like Child of Light and Fe.