Wow. The thumbnail made me think this was going to be about Ozzy.

Neat article!

He then ran down a string of recent hits developed by independent devs and studios: Balatro, Baldur's Gate 3, Helldivers 2, Clair Obscur—even the venerable Minecraft, an archetypal indie superhit before Mojang was sold into the Microsoft stable.

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.

Indie is the future of all entertainment. The Ironmouse x Vshojo situation just proved it. And I mean, look at the shithole Hollywood and the music industry have been for the last century or so...

There are no entertainment industries that don't exploit the artists who make the actual product.

While I agree, listing successful games is just confirmation bias. For every indie darling, you’ve got hundreds of flops.

The reason triple a games are so mediocre is because it’s safe. You dont have to take a huge risk, and your chances of failing are smaller. Even if you do fail, the chances of recouping your investment are pretty decent.

Again, I think indie games are generally better than pretty much anything the triple a scene puts out. But that’s because they took a huge risk that happened to pay out.

This has been true for 15 years, but video game execs don't care about the game itself, they only care about the money it makes

Finding funding for those indies is another matter.

Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the show?

I will say, I know a guy with a ton of extra cash who could probably practice what he preaches.

But finding the next digital unicorn in a sea of mid-to-shit titles is no mean feat. For every Warcraft or Marathon there's a thousand flops.

That is, I think, what makes the AAA studios look worse than they have a right to be. They're Frankenstein companies, cobbled together from the bits of a dozen early stars. But that doesn't guarantee hits, it just guarantees brand recognition. The latest Blizzard title isn't going to have the secret sauce of StarCraft because they already made that game once. Merging with Activision doesn't mean making a game that's better than CoD and StarCraft combined.

I'll take indie games overflowing with heart/soul/purpose/ a story to be told any day over cookie cutter tripple A slop.

I mean, this has always been the case. Before, it was modding. Anyone remember how much the fps landscape changed after the Desert Combat mod got hugely popular in Battlefield 1942? Hell, that mod alone put BF on the map.

Game dev is an industry where labor can look at capital and ask, "What would you say you do, here?" There's no factory. There's no raw materials. It's just people and computers, and people have computers.

So what happened to Ion Storm, then? If Indies are the future, where are the Daikatana sequels that fans should obviously be clamoring for?

Compare that to the other IS office, which published through Eidos and created Deus Ex and Dominion: Storm Over Gift 3. They operated like a proper studio and worked professionally.

Small and efficient studios have always been the way. Hands-off publishing has always been the way. It's not indie vs. AAA. It's just professional development and support.

A couple of triple AAA studios are pretty good. But quality has dropped overall by a staggering amount. Indies are either the greatest or worst games ever made. It's not even just in games, it's in music, animation, everything. Capitalism trends culture towards mediocrity.