Pixel art.
It’s kinda like indie music: you’ll probably be indifferent to it or actively hate it but there will be someone else who loves it and talks about it all the time.
I’m old enough to have played EA games on the C-64 when they first came out. EA was a third party publisher but I’d consider all of those games ‘indie’. They were not games you’d find the big name publishers turning out. Moondust, M.U.L.E., Archon…stuff like that. So I think you can work with a publisher and still be indie, if that publisher is not concerned with selling a maximum amount of general appeal games but a maximum amount of auteur developed games. That’s because I think being an indie developer means making the games you want, not making games the publisher wants. If the publisher wants to work with you because they like what you bring to the table that’s one thing, if they only see you as the workhorse they need to crank out the next Halo game that’s another.
I’m sure that Brad considers Stardock’s games, indie titles.
Remember when Alternative Music was alternative… and then it wasn’t.
Seriously though, I don’t consider Indie games to be a genre so much as a process. There is nothing about Stardock, for example, that would make me say it’s indie in anyway. Small does not necessarily mean indie. I don’t consider everything that hits Kickstarter as an indie either. There must be a definition out there I agree with, but I’ve not seen it yet. Really i think the only definite thing about Indie games is there is no agreed upon definition, and they show up in nearly every genre.
This is what I consider the definition of “indy” to be. Who eventually publishes does not matter. What matters is the process by which a game is created in the first place.
My personal definition of an “Indy” company would be something like this:
A company in which the founders have direct, unassailable control over the creative process of the product/good/service.
As such, an Electronic Arts, Activision or even many smaller studios would not be considered indies because they are either publicly traded or they do not have creative control over the game they are making.
It’s not enough to be privately held. There are many studios that are exclusively WFH entities that simply produce “stuff” for an external publisher (for example, if a company is dependent on getting contracts from other companies to make expansion packs I would probably say that that company isn’t independent).
However, I do think that a studio can have a publisher and still be an indy as long as the studio is the one in control of the creative process.
As for Stardock, I obviously would consider it an indy game developer. Unless you cut off the definition as some arbitrary size/level of financial success I can’t see how a company who designs, develops and publishes its own games without external interference can’t be considered an indy. Of course, I also consider Valve to be an indy.
I consider Stardock Indy, and Valve, and possibly Blizzard as well. I am fairly sure Blizzard does what Blizzard wants to do, but I am not absolutely sure that is true. I do think most people consider “indy” to be a small developer, however I do not think that qualification is valid. There is also the problem of where to draw a line as to when a “small” developer is no longer “small”, so I do not even draw the distinction.
I think this is the best definition, though we have to define “small team”. 3, 4 devs? But Ubisoft could consider a 20 men team small. It’s relative.
The Empire does what the Empire wants to do. Therefore the Empire is indy!
They are games that feature Pavement on their soundtrack.
The reason I don’t like that definition is because it doesn’t address the entire issue of ‘interference’.
For instance, let’s say you have a small team(defined as you see fit). And your team is known for top notch hack ‘n’ slash games. You want to make an old school adventure game this time. The problem is you are going to get funding from a kickstarter and you know you can get funding in no time for another hack ‘n’ slash, while no one wants an adventure game from your team. So you go with the hack ‘n’ slash.
That’s not indie to me, even though a publisher or licensor is not involved, and even though it was your choice. You are making the game the money people want, not the game you want. In this case the money is coming from contributions from the public, but it’s the same result. You are a gun for hire, not an independent creator.
I suppose all is relative , not only the size of the team :P
I understand what you say. At first, the definition is clear: it’s when an author, a creator does what he wants, without a boss ordering around. Like a painter doing a picture from his own initiative.
But… even not using your Kickstarter example, maybe an author wants to do A, but knows his totally self funded game will have a better reception if he does B, which is somewhat close to A but it isn’t the same. Is he indie or not?
Mmm, I would say yes. Indie means doing your own decisions, but that decisions also include the economic side, not only the pure artistic ones. Indies also can be shrewd entrepreneurs, while being fully independent. “Indie” means independent… but not independent from everything (like society expectation or economic realisties or human phsychology). In the end, the author is still human. Let’s not go to extremes of pure, intangible art as the only “indie” thing.
Though the true answer is that maybe “indie” isn’t a yes/no thing, but as lots of things in this world, it’s a contiuum, a gradient.
Indie: I think, strictly speaking, people that make a game by themselves, without the financial support of a publishers.
But these days (in 2014) its also some aesthetics and some love for quirk graphics or quirk gameplay systems. So the people making jokes about pixel art are not far of, I think.
So is both a financial position, and a style/attitude (taking risk to try to do something cool).
Things that are not indie:
Anti-Indie movement: Zynga, King.com and to some level some stuff that Maxis create. Its like the indie games, but devoid of the quirkiness, everything is supersafe and supercute. Sometimes the whole game is a ripoff from other titles with the Clipart style of the company.
The Free Software Movement game development quarter: They make games, for free, just because. Often ugly and unusable, It may take 30 years for the game to reach version 1.0, and by that point it may have more configuration options than the space shuttle. They also make incredible roguelikes.
Valve, Blizzard: they make cool stuff, and they finance his own games, but thats because they can pay for it with other profit-generating thing. They are a One in the industry company thing.
It’s indie because the final decision, A or B, is solely the game developers, being self funded. The motivation to make more money doesn’t change that. It’s when the final decision is really made by others, whether it’s a random group of the public or an established game publisher, that you lose indie identity imo.
It was a rhetoric question, I reached the same conclusion ;)
When you start publishing other developer’s games, I think a company has left the indie sphere. I also think it’s more complex than just who is calling the shots.
A game is indie if it appears under the Indie section of Steam.
He discusses the question of size; why it is important (unless you believe Skyrim and Gears of War 3 qualify as Indie), and why it is hard to put a firm number on the definition of a “small team”. I like his focus on the intimacy of connection to the community and the game - fuzzy as the definition may be. Personally, I’d draw the line at 7-8 people rather than the two dozen he suggests.
I don’t see the problem with this. IMO, and I agree with your conclusion. In the sense that a Kickstarter simply replaces the old boss with a new boss, it clearly qualifies as interference.