Yes, that question is rearing its ugly head once again. What is indie? We all know there is no solid definition but Eurogamer have made it their task to question a number of developers as to what they think ‘indie’ means and if they are ‘indie developers’ themselves.
Constantly we’re asking ourselves with every game we come across “is it indie?” There’s a number of factors that will go into deciding upon the answer to that question, ones that were picked up on by the many developers question by Eurogamer. The question these developers faced is simple but the answer has never been nor will it likely ever be.
Here are some of the great quotes from the article:
- Robert Boyd (Cthulhu Saves The World)
“An indie developer is an individual or small group that is not owned by another company that makes games. An indie game is a game made by an indie developer, simple as that.”
- Jeremiah Slaczka (Scribblenauts)
“Is it an image thing? Is it an arthouse game, is that what indie is? Is it smaller teams? Simple gameplay, simple graphics, small teams – that seems to be the definition of indie right now. But I don’t know if that’s true. I don’t know if I agree with it, but I don’t have a better definition either.”
“It’s being able to tell if a game was ‘made with love’.”
- Kellee Santiago (Flower, Journey)
“It’s being able to tell if a game was ‘made with love’.”
Perhaps more interesting are the words of Mark Rein from Epic Games (Gears of War) and Greg Kasavin of Supergiant Games (Bastion) – both belonging to companies that have worked with corporations to publish their games but both claim that they are indie.
First up, Mark Rein who makes the case for Epic Games being “indie”:
“We’re big indie, I guess. We are an independent company. We make games and we publish them ourselves through iOS so, yeah, Epic still embodies the indie spirit. There’s no question.
“I don’t think anyone thinks of us as an indie because we make games for Microsoft. But we think of ourselves as an indie. We own the company, we make the decisions about what we’re going to do and we work very hard to please our consumers.”
Rein was also asked what he thought “indie spirit” meant to which he replied: “A little bit of gold rush mentality. Look! The grass is greener on the other side of the fence! That sort of thing.”
While we won’t be covering Epic Games on IGM any time soon, we have covered Bastion and claimed it to be an indie game. So with that said, Greg Kasavin is up next and he seems to say many of the same things as Rein in a way. It should be noted that Supergiant Games are a much smaller company – is that enough to make the difference between indie and non-indie?
“Speaking just for my own experience, Supergiant Games is an independent studio. This to me has a clear and inarguable definition, which is, we are a private company and do not have a parent company. Moreover, we have been able to self-fund our projects, which means we can make the games we want to make without pressure from publishers or other larger companies to steer our projects in different directions.”
“The story of how we made Bastion was important to us, and I think the stories of how independent games get made are often interesting.”
So, after all of these quotes, are we any closer to a definition of “indie”? Certainly not. Though it is easily said that many people have differing factors that play into their own definition of indie. Team size, budget, whether a parent company exists, innovation and it goes on. If you look to our About page you’ll find that we have put up what we look our for in games in order to make the distinction, it goes:
“Indie Games are video games which are made by passionate game developers who typically publish their game on their own via the internet. Indie Games are typically not funded nor published under major labels and therefore the developers are not limited in their scope of creativity. Indie Games will typically stretch the boundaries of what has been done already and sometimes even what is commonly accepted as normal practice. The one thing that they all have in common is the level of passion poured into the game by their developer, as these games are made out of a desire to make a game rather than making money.”
Let us know what you think defines an indie in the comment section below.
Via Eurogamer
