John Romero says indies are the future of game development: 'These people are the ones that make triple-A studios go, 'Wait a minute, we need to start doing this''
John Romero says indies are the future of game development: 'These people are the ones that make triple-A studios go, 'Wait a minute, we need to start doing this''
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John Romero says indies are the future of game development: 'These people are the ones that make triple-A studios go, 'Wait a minute, we need to start doing this''
I mean, by that definition he's not wrong.
It's just that the way that works is indie devs become big enough to either become whatever the hell triple A means or get bought by whatever the hell triple A is.
Magicka was an indie game, I really struggle to fit Helldivers 2, a Sony-published sequel to a Sony-published game, into that same bucket. Ditto for Larian. Divinity OS? Sure. Hasbro-backed multi-studio Baldur's Gate 3 with its hundreds of millions of budget? Myeaaaaah, I don't know.
I think the real question is how you keep the principles that make indie games interesting in play when the big money comes in. I'm all for an indie-driven industry, but I'm a touch more queasy about a world in which major publishers use tiny devs as a million monkeys with typewriters taking on all the risk and step in at the very end (sometimes post-release) to scoop up the few moneymakers.
It's simple
Game I like = Indy
Game I don't like = soulless committee designed AAA trash
And we can't even take self-published as a factor, because pre-MS Bethesda would publish their own titles too. Skyrim can hardly be counted as indie.
It often boils down to that, sadly, and it's gotten to the point where I just don't like using either term anymore.
i think the larger question about Indies is not how big they get its if they are private or public and i count private equity as public with a different name. the people making the game as in getting their hands dirty in the day to day of making games need to own 51% of the company's stock and the value of that stock is influenced by investment speculation.
they need to make their money by selling the product they make not the shell game of jucing books for investors.
I don't know if I agree. Size has some impact. Risking the livelihoods of you and your friends working for peanuts in your bedrooms is one thing, being at the helm of a billion dollar business is a bit of a different beast.
But yeah, it does matter whether you're public or private. A whole bunch of indie games are made by public companies, though. Definitely by corporate-owned companies and companies with big corporate investors.
By that bar a lot of the "indies" being touted here aren't really... that.
Indie is kind of a fraught term in whatever genre it's used I feel like. It has too many connotations and too few clear definitions. How much big label backed mass produced "indie rock/pop" did we not get back in the early 00s music scene, for example. Same with gaming: see the whole Dave the Diver being nominated for best Indie Game despite being backed by NEXON debacle.
Baldur's Gate 3 is tricky because while Hasbro was involved it was still self-published by Larian. It doesn't feel right to me to call it an indie game, but... how exactly should we define them then? Is there a budget cutoff where a game is no longer allowed to be called an indie? If Sandfall uses their huge budget from the success of Expedition 33 to make a blockbuster sequel but stayed with Kepler as publisher would we refuse to call it an indie game?
John Romero hasn't been relevant since Quake and arguably hasn't been any good since Hexen/Heretic. I'm not sure why we are subjected to his "hot takes" on an annual basis.
edit: oh, I think he's an asshole. I've met him, he was not fun.
Well, in this case I'd guess because his indie dev studio just got royally hosed by Microsoft, so he definitely has good reason to hot take the hell out of the relationship between major publishers and indie studios at the moment.
A lot of nice people aren't especially fun. I'm not sure it's a great metric.