The Heart & Soul – What Makes It Indie?

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October 16th, 2012 | By

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heart-and-soul

I have always been a fan of looking behind a product and deconstructing it. Actually finding out what makes something tick, why a product was created, the purpose behind it and of course the most important aspect. The people behind it, on both sides of the product (both developer and the consumer).

In this series it is going to be my goal to deconstruct areas related to video games and really dig down into them. All opinions in this will be my own and I am well aware many people may disagree with some of the content, which is fine I encourage debate just know this is my own opinion on the matter.

This week I am going to be looking at what actually makes a game indie. It is a very divisive issue, and one that seems to of come up a lot recent, with many developers and studios ascending the ranks of fame and fortune. Which makes us ask the question, when do they stop being indie?

There are numerous ways to quantify what actually makes a game indie, the metrics used to judge this can be almost infinitely varied. Many people consider a studio who is financially secure to no longer be indie, others claim a studio who is a global brand will no longer be recognised as indie but do these metrics really matter in the larger scheme of things?

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Everything can be measured with numbers and statistics, but this is not what the indie community is about. Being indie is so much more than just being an independent company, it is an identity, a badge, a label, that should be worn proud as an inspiration to be part of this community that has been forged. Being Indie is not about numbers… It is about people.

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About the author

(542 posts)

Full time gamer part time writer and a Graduate of King College London I have been playing computer games ever since the days of the much loved Amiga. Playing a broad spectrum of games over as many platforms as possible with a distinct obsession with RTS games even though lacking in much of the micro ability. Tweet me @alexwilkinson

  • Wuthrer

    I like and share this point of view. Interesting article thank you !

    But how long will survive this community ? What’s going next ? I think all the indie stuff is quite new.

  • Yukii Mal

    I think it will survive as long as it keep beeing real and authentic. I
    mean there are lot of huge developers and publisher who are selling
    games or promoting them as if they were indie. And if we start to call
    indie to any game in XBLA or to any game that last less than 2 hs, I
    think people will start devaluating the meaning of a truly indie game.

    Also I think that the entire indie movement became a big deal, because the big games company lost their innovation, or at least didn’t risk enough in that field, since they didn’t want to lose any money. That’s why we see games with a 5, 6 or and 8 at the end of every franchise nowaday.
    Maybe they are starting to notice that, and if they get innovative again there will be a lot of more interesting games. But that won’t mean the end to indie games, but a whole wide variety of games of both kinds (indies and AAA).

  • http://twitter.com/tomkillen Tom Killen

    I’m not totally convinced by this article. imo indie has its roots back in the 80s, when there was no formal discipline of game design, and all the designers were trying to figure out what a good game was. They weren’t necessarily trying to be explicitly experimental, it was more that no one really knew what a good game was yet.

    Then they discovered The Formula. Whilst at one point, FPS wasn’t even a genre (as then all FPS’s were Doom clones), it became a trope.

    This is great, game developers thought, we now know what makes a good game. And lo, everything was good, and modders began modding these FPS’s (I remember when I first hacked up Quake to use custom textures so that I could shoot pigs or ice cream cones, or whatever seemed funny).

    Then a sub-section of this modding community became explicitly interested in being experimental. It wasn’t about trying to work out what a good game was, it was about trying to do something weird, different, unexpected. It was explicitly trying to screw with The Formula.

    This is the real origin of “indies” imo. The idea of being “indie” isn’t about being self funded or self published, it’s about an independent mindset. Being indie is an aesthetic. thatgamecompany is totally indie, even though they get lots of money from sony, because they are trying to reinvent The Formula.

    On the otherhand, Zynga are not indie, and not because they make social games (social games can be indie). Zynga aren’t indie because they are trying to make The Formula, or find a New Formula – they aren’t trying to be “experimental” for the sake of pushing boundaries and exploring the medium. They don’t have the indie aesthetic.

  • Sheila Robinson

    Good article. You can see the creativity and passion that goes into the development of many indie games. Some of the current mainstream games seem to have lost their edge as far as originality is concerned. Collaborating and sharing in the joy of my partner’s development of his indie PC video game has been a very rewarding experience.

  • http://twitter.com/mdphillipsprod mark phillips

    Nice article, being an indie is in my mind a passport to creativity… we don’t have shareholders to report to, we don’t need to get buy in from the whole team before adding a feature. We do what feels right and iterate until it’s the best it can be.

    It’s an exciting time to be an indie developer, the barrier to entry has never been this low. I remember coding a simple 3D vector on the Amiga, the total intro had a little scroller, some music and a 3D vector and was 65000 lines of assembler… now imagine how much code would go into a game!!

    We also don’t have to deal with publishing houses and the suits behind them, we simply make something that we feel is fun and that hopefully has a market.

    So what can indie do, well they can change the “formula” because they aren’t (or shouldn’t be) afraid to experiment. I am personally amazed by the quality of the indie products out there and I hope it continues to grow and provide us with more fun products to play. ;)