Indie games are like indie games only.

Indie developer must be insane. Madness is very useful - it pushes for risks, increases motivation and, like morphine, reduces the painful sensations from failures.

Back to the past

Currently, the concept of indie developer has become much broader than it was 10 years ago. Roughly speaking, now indie is any developer who makes the game at his own expense without the influence of the publisher. And no matter what the budget of his project is $ 0 or $ 10 000 000. And the composition of the team can vary from one to several dozen people in a team.
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And once upon a time indie developers were called lonely people who made the whole game themselves, implementing almost all the content and code on their own. They were idealists, and, as a hungry artist, it didn’t matter to them how popular their game would be - it was important to express themselves and show the public their original views.

Now the concept of Indie fall and the first and second. I even have a theory of the origin of this word: from Individual (Indi) and Independent (Inde). As you can see, the abbreviations of these two concepts are quite similar, it remains only to use the last letters i and e at the same time, and we get the universal concept - Indie. There are many theories about the origin of this word on the Internet, and now you know another one.


Flappy Bird (The developer on this free game earned $ 50,000 a day )


Insomnia (Very stylish and atmospheric game from our developers from Samara)

Indie - it is fashionable

There are many rather large developer studios that call themselves Indies. What for?
It's simple - it increases the loyalty of the players. Adds points “rebelliousness” of the studio, creating a background, as if the game is at odds with the mainstream.

Hawken - Indie game . Did you know? And what about her budget of $ 20 million, too, knew?
And what did the professionals with ten years of experience in the largest studios do, they knew?


Hawken

But still technically they are Indies. However, how can we verify that they really do not depend on the opinions of those people who have invested money in them?

No

Then I would also call Halo Indie a game - at least, the first one for sure.

True indie

But there are many other Indies, such as Amnesia, Overgrowth, Dustforce, Meatboy and others.


Dustforce


Owergrowth

There are more art-house, and there are more popular projects, but one thing unites them - what I consider to be key in the concept of Indie developers. And this is not independence from the publisher and someone else's opinion, but independence from the mainstream. That is, the emphasis on a niche audience, fans of any genre, mechanics, visual style, etc.

As a rule, a niche audience for large investors / publishers looks too risky and not profitable. But this is the difference indie developer from a large company. They want to make an interesting game in the first place, and the funds raised for it are the result of audience interest and the opportunity to continue making interesting and original games further. Interests of the mainstream companies - to make a game that will hook the widest possible audience and bring the maximum profit.

Indies give birth to mainstream

Some indie games "shoot" and significantly affect the mainstream, for example, Minecraft.
This game has opened a whole genre, in which it would hardly have stuck with EA or Ubisoft.
And now we see Project Spark from Microsoft and Everquest Next Landmark from Sony, exploiting the idea of ​​"create the world yourself" to the fullest. And I must say, they succeed - it looks promising.


Project spark


Everquest Next Landmark

It is unlikely that Notch foresaw the future - he just did what he was interested in and did not stop when the evil haters watered him and his ideas with various unpleasant substances. That is, madness and faith defeated logic and rationalism. Unfortunately, such examples are units per thousands of indie projects.

Indie is not about money

The greatness of indie is their fault. Originality of ideas, innovative implementation, years of development quietly - all this does not guarantee that your game will bring you more than one or two thousand dollars. There can be no guarantees at all if you do not have a company name or title already promoted. For every success story there are a huge number of failed projects that you will never know about. The most interesting thing is that many of them fail, not because they are bad, but because "the stars did not converge." Few people write postmortems, and even less of them are written by gaming media, because it is much more interesting to write a story about a guy who created the game alone and became a millionaire, earning 50 thousand dollars a day.

And all those stories that made noises usually do not mention that the developer had done about a dozen unsuccessful games before that, he worked for 5-10 years in various unknown companies and, without losing interest, he continued to create what he was interested. And all because this indie is not about money.


Dear Esther (A magnificent contemplative walker made by one person. You can read about his ups and downs, hunger and success in this post )

Sometimes such stories are fired, but more often not. Do not think that your game will be another minecraft, but you should not stop.
The probability that something will turn out much higher if you do something than if you do nothing!

Kickstarters and Greenlights

We live in an interesting time. As Galenkin said, before people played but did not pay, now they pay but do not play.
However absurd it may sound, there is one key point. Now everyone will be able to have a hand in creating such a game of which the “jwa” of the year dreamed! It doesn’t matter whether you work as a dentist, seaman, or make dumplings, now you have the opportunity to get the game you have dreamed of since childhood. Enough to go to Kickstarter, and in a huge list of various projects, find what will make your heart beat faster.


FRONTIERS (The game is comparable in size to the world with Skyrim and makes it one person)

And thanks to Steam Early Access, it was possible not to wait several years before the end of the project, but to play it already “tomorrow”, leaving the comment personally to the developers and advising what could be improved in their project. This communion is the new magic that changed the world of indie games, and continues to do so today.

Most interesting is that some large companies are already looking at a similar distribution model for their games.

But not everything is as rosy as it may seem at first glance. Remember? There is always a negative side.

Sony + Microsoft + Indie

At the moment we can observe in a certain sense a victory, an ascent of indie. This is evidenced by their recognition of the mainstream market, as well as companies such as Sony and Microsoft. Having officially declared indie support, they actually show how serious this market has become. As I wrote above, indie is user loyalty and a new trend in one person.


The Witness Playstation Exclusive by Jonathan Blow (Braid Developer)

However, not everything is as clean as it seems at first glance. For example, some well-known indie developers in their interviews told more than once about very serious limitations in the selection of projects for XBox and Playstation. And we are talking not only about the quality of the game, but about its potential from the point of view of platform holders. For example, if you have a big name and / or your game has already been sold on a PC in a million copies, then this game has good potential on consoles.

Forward to the future

Looking at how and with what speed changes are taking place in the industry, it is difficult to call it a certain final stage - most likely, now we see a fast-moving train. And no one knows where his end station is. A year ago, one could say that self-financing by the players is the “depot” in which everything stops, but now the “kickstarters” are full of different games, and each new project has less chances.

Gabe believes that games have a future in the form of services where players themselves produce content, and they also earn money from it. More and more online gaming stores are announcing the opening of their Early Access counterparts.


As Valve says, some caps for TF2 make a lot of money.

On the other hand, every newbie now has a huge arsenal of engines, bundles with assets in virtual stores, a lot of video lessons on YouTube, so you can make a prototype of your game in a couple of evenings, and in a couple of months you can go Greenlight and continue to play players.

But is it all so simple? Obviously not. To find its popularity, a novice developer will have to put a lot of effort, however, the scheme described above certainly has prospects.


Starbound (The game from the developers of Terraria earned the first million dollars through pre-orders on its website even before the release of the first playable version. Now the figure of 4 million dollars is displayed on their website)

I wouldn’t be surprised if tomorrow players will “finance” individual features of the game, for example, the introduction of a character’s ability to see through the wall will collect their little kickstarter, and the game mode for a naked heroine can hit the jackpot at all or, conversely, attract the outrage of fans.

As a result, the game will look like a menu, and that “try” out of it, players will choose themselves and pay from their own pockets. I do not know how likely it is, and whether it will be good - but this development of events will not surprise me much.

I’m sure of one thing - now there are very interesting and unpredictable times for the indie scene, because in the depths of tons of slag sometimes really interesting ideas are born that guide the development of the entire industry to a new, unknown future. And each of us can make a hand to this, no matter from which side of the barricades he is.