It’s like those two rad older brothers of your friends who always have some life advice or you catch working on their car and they stop you to say “Hey come check out this bullshit I found”
Reminds me of peanut butter. Crunchy peanut butter was seen as an outlandish, unfinished product inconceivable to be sold as it wasn't ground properly. Until it was put into a focus group, 100% of the subjects recoiled at the idea until it was tried now it's a staple.
closely related to "you don't know what you got until it's gone". why it's so important to protect this stuff. any why how other people spend their money DOES matter and IS my/our business.
1:47 Indie games are increasingly beholden to backers, which bring it's own problems of a creative project having to confine to the initially marketing pitch and player expectations, and making radical changes during development and the risky ideas that indie dev usually benefits from difficult to pull off without backlash from what are essentially investors. It's good the option is available for those who need it, but it often has the same effect of suppressing of that little spark of madness.
This isn't accurate, for every person crying about something there is another person telling them to shut up. I mean I would think this is obvious, have you seen the dumpster fire that is Disney movies/shows currently? The people who still play EA sports or the people who will defend unanimously their favorite game company or console. In the worst case scenario the dev might have their community split into factions, but the only thing that will truly kill a game in the crowdfunding scene is the dev disappearing, not updating or ignoring the communities questions.
@@setcheck67 You absolutely do not want to split your community in half. You don't want half of your community complaining and half of your community defending. That is a awful consequence they you are taking way too lightly
@@lifetake3103Maybe it's not that radical, I would think backers should expect at least some degree of flexibility knowing the project they're backing could change over time. And idealistically, a dev shouldn't put up a kickstarter if they don't have a solid plan for their project
That was a good one Frost. The idea that just smoothing out the edges and wrinkles will make the game better does rob the creativity and identity from a lot potentially really good games.
Sure, but it's also worth remembering that "creative talent free of so called restraints" is what produced the Star Wars prequel trilogy, whereas creative talent with some moderation produced the Original trilogy. Unrestricted personal creative "genius" is far from always going to produce good results
It's funny that Kojima got brought up though cause his game fell flat on it's face. It just felt confused and visionless and trying to do too many things and none of them particularly well.
@@Paveway-chan I don't think there's necessarily a "right way" to go. As you said, unrestricted personal creative genius can be... dumb. The genius can have difficulty seeing the whole picture sometimes and perhaps has a hard time seeing his project from someone else's perspective. However, too many restraints and we get bland, impersonal samey garbage all the time. Sometimes unrestrained genius works, sometimes it doesn't. But I know I'd rather have a bunch of creatives going around doing all sorts of weird crap which usually turns out terrible, than a bunch of efficient but unmemorable shovelware. That's the thing about creative freedom. You get peaks and valleys, highs and lows. No one is saying it's all going to be good - the whole point is that creative freedom also means a freedom to fail, so others can succeed. It means experimentation.
6:47 "The virtual gentrification of the medium means money will pour in to try to appeal to a wider audience which inevitably scrubs out the culture" YES! FROST! PREACH!!
Yeah, this is the sad reality of almost any kind of game (or media in general, really) that becomes very popular. Money will pour in, and creative integrity will always be lost in the process. There are exceptions however that can still succeed. Games like Death Stranding can still succeed in spite of being incredibly divisive by sticking to a creative vision. Developers like FROM SOFTWARE making games like Dark Souls stick to their creative visions, and while they might make their games more accessible over time they have continued to improve upon their formula over time and still provide what long-term fans want. Then there are indie developers which have also managed to keep their creative visions, like with Deep Rock Galactic (a game I enjoy somewhat, but respect even more) - which was made by a small team and manages to innovate and provide consistent updates in a co-op genre that has stagnated in recent years. For every developer that retains their creative vision though, there are countless sellouts. Not all of these sellouts end up leading to bad content though - some publishers or those investing money do allow for creative control to more or less remain in the original hands - but usually this leads to good content being lost. Blizzard was pretty much always a popular developer, but they basically sold out once they merged with Activision in the late 2000s or so and ever since then they have been chasing every single market trend with little care for the core fans or identity that got them to be popular in the first place. Such things are all too common.
An issue with the 'gentrification' of the indie-scene not mentioned here is just how hard it makes it to find the actual gems. Used to be you could say, with a straight face, that you 'preferred indie-games to triple-A.' Now, well... there's still lots of excellent and unique Indie-games, but finding them means spending a load of time digging through all the derivative, run-of-the-mill indie-titles that differ from the AAA ones only by having worse graphics and fewer microtransactions... not that *that* can't be a worthwhile bargain all by itself, mind. Point is, it can leave you in a situation where it's just *easier* to buy the latest heavily-advertised big-budget title whose reviews suggests that it hasn't been drowned in greed and games-as-a-service BS... *yet.*
Yup. I said years ago that if Steam didn't make sure to curate its storefront it would run into the issue of there being too much mediocrity for people to feel worth sorting through. Trying to find indie games there today, I feel that I was correct.
Hi there, I'm an indie developer. And I'd say indies WILL chase trends and clean up their image in hopes of making some money even if they don't have a big publisher pushing them to do so -- it doesn't just come down to corruption. Let's say you spend 50 thousand plus on a game, taking out loans or running up credit cards or draining your savings, because you have no publisher. If all of that money is going into this weird, inscrutable piece of passionate outsider art that doesn't look like anything familiar, well... you get a little nervous! Will an audience even find it in the absolute deluge of Steam releases? Will it connect with anyone? Would you have been better off setting fire to a small pile of Benjamin Franklins in your backyard? Even if an indie isn't seeking profit and riches, if they just want the art to pay for itself at most, you have to do the dance to SOME extent. Either that or cross your fingers and hope you go viral despite being a wonky and weird passion project.
This sounds like a problem of marketing... First of all, so long as you have a searchable presence there will always be someone looking for that particular thing. I wanted D&D D20 amulets and I found them and I paid a lot for them. No one told me about them or advertised them to me, I google searched it on a whim. Secondly, your early adopters are your life blood, the more extroverted or no life the better. They will spread the best marketing their is, word of mouth. In this case you want to make something so unique that they are only able to get that experience with your game or something providing the answer to a void filled by something else(ala the diablo clones when Diablo 2 was going on 10 years without a sequel), because that's what they are going to advertise. I found out about a Korean MMO I actually loved playing called Lunia when I was in school, because my friend played it and they kept having events and giving free stuff so he played it all the time and recruited me among 4 others, which led to me recruiting people and so on until we had a whole guild. Lastly, I have a VERY SMALL list of games I've purchased based on reviewers recommendations. I think it's something like 5 out of the 340 I own on Steam alone. Most of my purchases were based solely on the game providing something I really wanted that I wasn't finding elsewhere. In this list would be: Binding of Isaac, Broforce, Carrion, Control, Crusader Kings 3, Cult of The Lamb, Cuphead, Death Road To Canada, all of the soulsbornes, Darkest Dungeon, etc. ALL OF THEM I either heard about from someone, saw someone playing it in real life or on youtube or I seeked them out. I only saw ads for dark souls which isn't why I bought it, I think only a few of them actually got review recommended to me, and steam sale isn't why I bought them either. I bought all of them specifically because that was what I was interested in at the time, usually because I saw some other media which got me interested to roleplay what I saw. Like Game of Thrones for Crusader Kings or John Wick for Cyberpunk. Speaking of which I'll tell you right now there is not nearly enough John Wick-like games, the closest I could find to really fitting it was My Friend Pedro, Hotline Miami, and Cyberpunk.
As an indie developer myself... I dunno. When I started out I think I believed what this video is saying, because on some level it's what all your friends and the TH-cam essayists say. Indies must be unique, and make what truly speaks to them, market be damned. I made something that I thought was really unique for my first game, and it did okay. But, just okay. It does have its players who have played it to death, clocking in 4 digit hour counts, but in general I don't think there's a lot of people that have even heard of it. When you make something like that people at conventions will often remark, "I bet there would be some people who would be REALLY into this... but it's not my thing". And you'll hear it a whole lot. The next game I'm making is a roguelike, and there seems to be a lot more excitement about it. When I take it to conventions, I don't hear "I bet other people would really like this", instead I get "so when's this coming out? How much? Will there be more classes? Will there be modding?", the kind of questions asked by people who have already decided to buy the game. And maybe they'll tell their friends about it too. Sometimes you forget that "the market" is people. Then you meet people and are reminded of that.
Uniqueness isn't good. Good is good. When good is also unique, it's exciting. When it's just good, it's just good. There's genuinely no need to reinvent the wheel every time just because some douche expects you to. Reinventing the wheel is a passion, not a chore.
true but i think that there is a certain point where a game ceases to be an artistic creation and just becomes a product that the masses will like. Art is intrinsic to the artist, not the people looking at it
Yellow Taxi gives me Choro Q vibes and I've been wanting something like that for over a decade now, I'm so happy this video brought it to my attention!
6:39 Thank you for making that point. Video games being more and more mainstream driven like film and music scared me away from AAA titles. Indies are the last bastion of gaming for me at the moment.
There are older games too. Just this week, I got into Armored Core 1 and Morrowind and they are, like Frost put- without the stench of executive intrusion
The whole "indie mobsters" thing reminds me of what happened to ZA/UM, the developers of Disco Elysium. They basically had their entire company stolen from them by greedy corporate executives, who then subsequently kicked them out. They made their dream game, now the fun's over. There will never be another Disco Elysium.
Being knee deep in our first indie game (coming out in 8 weeks omg), I appreciate this video. I do feel that pressure to succeed and I do wonder if we shouldn't have leaned more into the weird and wild then we did. All marketing says we made the wrong choices if we wanted to grow ourselves, but maybe thats okay.
Yeah I definitely feel all this - particularly on the writing end - should have I asked myself "Is anyone going to get this?" Should I have stepped back and asked, "Will a story/character/setting like this be commercially viable?" It's so easy to fall into The Trap, so to speak.
If you can, why not share the name of your game? Good luck with the launch regardless! I'm definitely here for the weird and wild, the more memorable a game for me the better. As long as the gameplay is fun enough and tightly programmed , then the rest of the elements can go bonkers. Much like Yahtzee often says ( super paraphrasing: ) "I'd rather a game be bad but trying than be bland. Because bland isn't memorable, it isn't interesting, it isn't fun." Growth isn't everything, maybe just stability is OK too. I hope you guys make a profit, enough to justify your time and efforts, and enough to incentivise you to keep creating ;)
You rarely ever know what the future brings. I personally prefer to pour my heart into what I'm doing and then face the consequences. Whatever they may be. I understand that this isn't for everyone, there is good reason to act more safely and conservatively, I will not dismiss that because I know that pouring my heart into things doesn't protect me from devastating faliure. But I prefer to live with the shards of my failure to pick up, knowing that I've given all that I've got and that this is just what it is, rather than going in healf-heartedly and maybe even succeed but then ever going to wonder what more it could have been. Then again, I don't have kids to feed.
Frost, you son of a motherless goat.... I just cancelled my Patreon membership for you guys yesterday. My health has deteriorated and I'm experiencing what is basically early-onset dementia. But getting back to checking out new videos on the channel after a while, I saw this video, and I have to go fix my membership. You guys need all the support we can give to make sure you keep doing what you do.
I think it quickly got filed away as a "It's Goat Simulator but with a squirrel" and people moved on or didn't prick up their ears enough in the first place.
because its just being sold as a quirky game that is actually very shallow, like goat simulator. what is sad, because it does seem to have some neat platforming mechanics.
I've seen interesting games and interesting people have all the personality sanded off them after a bare six months trying to fit in on the average storefront working alongside the average publisher. It's always a shame when it happens, sometimes I come back to a game I playtested and am shocked to discover how different it's become, and too often how something interesting has been smoothed down or pared away to better suit an existing tag in a storefront.
I agree, this IS a pretty cold take. Isn't this cycle of innovation - replication - stagnation - innovation something that's happened to the game world several times already? Every time a world-beating videogame comes along, DOOM, Half-life, WoW, Halo, CoD: MW, Amnesia, Skyrim, Fortnite or DOOM (2016), it spawns a million imitators both from AAA and indie devs. And is it really that big of a deal that the big publishers are trying to scoop up indie talent? You never should buy a game "just because it's indie" anyway, and it's not like other small developers are going to stop innovating just because others are being pulled onto the bandwagon - as long as there are channels that promote smaller devs of any kind we'll still get innovation.
I wonder why we call them "AAA" publishers. In baseball, AAA is below the big leagues, when obviously in this context we're talking about the biggest fish in the sea.
different acronyms. Triple-A in baseball literally stands for three A's, because it is derived from an alphabetical class system. Class A used to be the highest level, but as the sport progressed, then that became Class AA, then Class AAA, and then you had the big leagues. AAA in games comes from credit bonds, where a AAA bond is the safest, surest bet.
That's why I believe there are actually 3 industries in media: AAA, single A, and indie. And so far, the categories hold up. AAA means big budgets, big business and long histories. That would be your Bethesdas, Nintendos, Sonys and Activisions. Single A means a smaller studio, usually with an industry veteran at the helm, with a bigger budget due to the namesake. You could consider Kojima and Igarashi as good examples. Another would be Hellblade, where the polish is practically AAA, but comes from a much smaller studio team. Finally there's the Indie scene, where an individual or small group, usually with little to no budget, has to go out of their way to make a game just for the passion of wanting to make it. Practical nobodies in the industry can become indie, as long as you want to make games because of your passion for them, not necessarily fame and fortune. Studio MDHR is a good example of this.
I also don't like when indie devs try to make their games exactly like the bigger more popular titles. I've recently played bug fables, because people told me it was like older paper marios, and it was like paper mario, but somewhat too much. I think what all indies I especially like have is uniqueness, so they all feel like their own titles, not "just like the other game I liked"
I agree. What this also causes is the occasional release that is so damn similar to its inspirations that it actually carries over all of the bad things they had as well, like classic survival horror games with fixed camera angles that won't let you see enemies.
as someone who plays indie games almost exclusively (plus an occasional soulslike), I see Frost's point here, but I just don't think we're there yet. Sure, we did get a massive wave of bullet heavens after Vampire Survivors and yeah, there are a lot of action roguelikes trying to imitate Hades - but overall, there is still a lot of diversity and creativity in the indie scene, quite possibly the most there ever was
There are lot of diverse games and way easier ways to get them now that Steam is opened up and Itch is a thing. But AAA/AA is also diverse. Altho not as much. However, I swear if I see one more Deckbuilder, survivor-like, rogue-like deckbuilder or "Crafting Survival Open-world Early access"..
The indie scene has enough games out there that there will always be examples of games that don't have such issues, but even "AAA" developers have rare examples of not being sellouts (he mentioned Death Stranding specifically which is a good example). But the majority of the ones that get any kind of traction or funding tend to be very obviously chasing trends. I don't think this is necessarily a problem though. It just means that we need to support the more niche content - the "indies" among "indies" so to speak.
@@Fachewachewa I'd rather up front product placement so I know what/where they sold out to, than knowing it was being hampered by pressure from above to conform to some invisible criteria , that aren't immediately apparent but feel lacking.
"Beholden to no one" is probably the best description I've ever heard for what "indie" gaming really means. Also, so long as people with programming skills are making the games they themselves enjoy playing, the indie scene will never, truly die. :)
So many indie studios are chasing the rogue-like procedural infinite replayability or Stardew Valley clones. I've just set Steam to ignore those tags so I don't see them. Luckily there are so many indie developers there's still a lot of creativity out there. Same can't be said about AAA, they are doomed.
I think procedural gen is good but needs to be designed better. Playing with all sorts of builds is all fun and games until you realize you are always fighting the same enemies
I would argue there are still just as many good innovative indie games now if not more than before. The difference is there are way more mediocre indies than before, and because of game pass you actually see them.
What is that Choro Q looking game at around 6:45? Nevermind - Yellow Taxi Go Vroom. Im now officially interested in that and Squirrel With a Gun thanks to this video. Quirky indie games are what i like most about the indie scene.
Ultimately I think the problem is that consistent money and creativity don't get along, and sadly that's a problem that can only be fixed so far in the scene. What we need, for this reason and too many others to count, is for people to be able to make a living in little enough time that they don't have to choose between passion projects and paying the bills, and that requires heavy modification to how politics and economics work in almost every modern developed country (some more than others).
I think part of the issue is just the "indie" name. We should have stopped differentiating games 10 years ago. When the indies that are covered nowadays are 99% of the time the ones published by the publicly traded "indie" publishers, or when the $20m+ small studio games that would have been considered AA games two generations ago are presented as "small indie games you haven't heard about", it's difficult for creators to not try to emulate that. Seems like the only way to go if you want to actually survive making games.
What year was it that Polygon called Braid "the first indie game"? That's a pretty good marker for when Indie had crystalized as a marketing term rather than a meaningful designation. (not to say Braid wasn't legitimately indie)
All of the indie games that truly meant something to me were games that either weren't normally my thing but added a wild twist that made it my thing, or were so inherently wild that I had no idea it was even allowed, let alone just what I had actually wanted.
Something I notice more and more frequently, indie developers pull the exact same stunts we hate AAA for and expect to get off scot-free. Which they do, because 'they are indie, so it's not so bad'. Rushed release, buggy game, DLC flood? It's okay, they are indie and we can't expect perfection.
To be fair i am absolutely looking forward to a wizard with a gun. I think what makes the indie scene enjoyable is there's a greater than average chance that the game is actually going to be fun. What triple a studio would have thought for a second that factorio would thrive, or that simulating rockets faithfully if not accurately, kerbal space program, would be interesting and fun. They wouldnt. Triple a studios are still pushing out hack and slash games, or leveled shooters, with loot boxes and tiered drops like borderlands did almost 20 years ago. It works, dont get me wrong, in terms of story telling a tried and true game experience is okay if the story is absolutely solid. But moat of the time it just isnt.
You're falling into the old music trap. People saying "Music was so much better back then" and listing the top hits of the day, forgetting there are 3000 other songs made during that period that didn't stand the test of time. Indie games being better isn't "greater than average". For every top indie game, there are 200 asset flips on Steam.
I like to watch SplaterCatGaming to keep up with what's up and coming but the amount of survival, crafting, roguelike, grim dark games are out there just grinds my interest down into nothing. My favorite words to hear in his videos are "I can't really compare this to anything else I've played"
@@kveller555 Sort of. Indie games have been doing it even before Demon's Souls. The "The world is miserable when you arrived, it will probably be worse when you leave, and nothing you do can change it" atmosphere.
@@ryanchase9332 Ah, I see. Thanks for taking the time to reply! I'm getting into gamedev and I'm trying to be careful not to fall into tropes too much, be it in terms of gameplay or aesthetic.
When indie games can range from no-budget passion projects like Yahtzee's own Starstruck Vagabond, to AAA-lite stuff like Hades or No Man's Sky, it's clear the label doesn't mean what it used to mean anymore. Nowadays anything that would have been named AA, or mid-budget games in the PS2 is an indie game.
There's this game called Tiny and Big: Grandpa's leftovers. It's a small game but the unique mechanics, weird soundtrack and hilarious main plot regarding heirloom underpants really sticks with me to this day. Let the freaks come out to play!
AAA obviously follows trends, but in the indie space is it really a trend chase, or do most people simply not have much of a creative spark and instead make something familiar to them that they liked? I'm not convinced there's as much creativity being stifled out there as there is lack of creativity being given a platform regardless. Which isn't to say these indie developers are stupid, they're clearly capable and motivated to make anything at all. It's just true creativity is hard. True creativity that actually hits a mark that no one knew was there is incredibly exceptional.
I wonder if the impression of "so many clones of this and that popular title" (like Vampire survivors, Slay the spire or Stardew valley to name a few) comes from the fact that there is a metric ton of indie games released each and every day compared to a handful of AAA each month
A video game has two areas of identities, the presentation and the gameplay. Under presentation, there is theme and graphics. Theme is not an identity, it is only a facade of an identity. Graphics is the core of presentation identity, whether the elements look coherent. Gameplay has a much bigger impact on the identity of the experience. Despite its impact, most games don't deviate much from the trends of the period. The core limitation of gameplay identity is 2D vs 3D. 2D is more limited than 3D. 3D's main limitation is the camera, along with the controls. Under both 2D and 3D, you have timing, real time and turn based being the two main categories. Each has its own nuances of game states and action timing.
This is a tough one, and I think Frost handled it well. But I feel like I've been hearing "you don't want new experiences" a lot on Escapist coverage lately. I'm not surprised they would draw that conclusion, a lot of time new concepts sell poorly. However, that isn't proof people don't want it. It's very much a causation fallacy, there's a thousand and one reasons why something will or won't sell: * Maybe the experience offered is so commonplace that it over-saturated the market, and you can't figure out how to make it stand out. Even when it is, it can succeed when you attract an audience that hasn't had the chance to bore of it yet. (Brand recognition can do that.) * Maybe you just happened to release at the wrong time and got overshadowed. All experiences, old and new, succeed or fail solely on the basis of whether they're in the right place at the right time. Even objective technical merit is inexplicably ignored at times. * Maybe it was hard to communicate the merit of what you're selling to a potential audience because it was a new idea. Even games using old experiences struggle to explain why to choose the implementation over the competition. * Maybe it was leaked before release. Following the trend of showing the opposite might apply, maybe it became so embroiled in a DRM or privacy controversy that it ended up getting review bombed. So the presence of new or old ideas isn't enough to govern if a game will succeed or fail. In any entertainment medium, you can put your best work out there, but it's a shot in the dark if anyone's going to pick it up. But we, the audience, nevertheless need new ideas. Admittedly, it's easier to sell the tried and true. It's also much easier to make. But if everyone did the same thing, why bother playing games? Been there, done that, played it to death. The entire market becomes saturated with redundant experiences. And, just like that, we've got ourselves another Video Game crash. Indies innovate because small budgets lead to smaller scope projects and less accountability when it doesn't work. (Kojima Productions is a valid exception, but it doesn't hurt their odds of success to be a famous auteur who is also very competent.) When I'm looking for innovation, I know it's more likely to show up in the indie sphere first because of the practical reasons. However, there's many ways to innovate. If an indie wants to be on the talented side of "talent imitates, genius steals," more power to them. Granted, I probably won't play more than one or two imitations. I want new experiences. The "genius steals" isn't telling you it's okay to copy their homework, it's saying geniuses know how to make an idea their own.
There might be a region/western bias in it too. There's all sorts of weird and niche (dare I say innovative) stuff popular in Eastern Europe, South America, Asia that barely anyone's heard of in the West. Massive word of mouth, massive player numbers, maybe not as much cash but is that less of a success?
Here's the thing. He's not saying "you don't want new experiences" he's saying "you don't THINK you want new experiences". That's a huge difference. People if left to their own devices will gravitate towards more of what they know. Henry Ford is quoted as "If I asked people what they wanted they would have said 'faster horses'".
This is a really compelling video essay but man does this feel like it ignores the devs that aren't and have never been about making their work as an art piece. It just feels disingenuous to split the entire market as weird indie games and big budget games, its like it's ignoring the entire history of devs in between those two extremes in order to make a point.
The thing is - there is now money to be made, when Undertale and Issac were made there was no actual money in it. Sure some indie guys and gals got lucky, some landed jobs or got their game featured somewhere, but mostly it was passion projects for late evening to tinker around with or to add to their portfolio when looking for a job. Now you can make serious money out of it, so indie is becoming more serious. People see it as a legitimate career and therefore they make "serious" games or adhere to the Nintendos, Xbox, or other services' rules and needs. That's the same why online gaming is so bad these days - everyone wants to be a professional esports star or a streamer and that is why they make gaming their job. It's sad, but I don't think there is a solution.
Thank frick for Unreal -and Unity- (fuck Unity) engine with their tools to help anyone make whatever they want, if they're willing to put in the time...
@@kveller555 Absolutely, godot is perfect for making small to medium indie games (2d and 3d) in a down to earth and easy to learn program. It gives the tools to everyone to experiment with their ideas without being bloated, keeping it relatively minimalistic and a great starting point to build in top of. With unreal/unity and godot you keep the benefits from both the extremes of the spectrum
Indie is not directly about capital but its relation to it. It influences the scale, the creative control, the games direction which have knock on effects to other aspects of a games design. It seems that many people only see games as being Indie or triple A, but there is much more depth to the issue. Mid tier A games do exist; they are just much less common with the consolidation of studios by large publishers.
I miss the Vita. There, I said it. The Vita was truly a place where Indy games came into their own: Hotline Miami, Mutant blobs, Velocity 2X, Guacamelee, Spelunky, Steamworld Dig, Bastion, Risk of Rain, Limbo, Stardew Valley, Rogue Legacy, Darkest Dungeon, Shovel Knight. I experienced so many great smaller games I would never have touched on the PC.
I’m a AA lover since most $40 single-player campaigns + nothing else games are in the AA budget and I can also describe AA as “indie without the weirdness or designing around lack of money” and “AAA without too much money pulling the strings”. My favourite AA games have “Sniper” in their titles and past AAA games can be reclassified as AA today.
This is why I will mourn Flash for the rest of my life. It was the midnight release premiere for gaming, it was the garage band hardcore scene. You got primary gameplay loop-focused greats, sometimes with a layer of viscera and afterbirth still attached; you got juvenile, senseless romps of violence, memes and crudity, but they had so much soul in every breakout. Its not news to me that many indie devs are chasing success by mimicking games they already love or enjoyed, but my artistic naivete assumed that was just people making what they wanted. To an extent, that should be celebrated: not every game wants to be the next Stardew, sometimes people just want to be LIKE Stardew. But I take your point: that willingness to be just like the rest is starting to fuse Indie with AAA. (Can't convince me Game Pass and ID@Xbox aren't amazing opportunities for smaller devs, though.)
Some of my most enjoyed games were some indie games I took chances on because their general ideas were interesting. I laughed, smiled, and sadly cried to them.
Something keeps going wrong with your recent videos' subtitles. They are frontloaded onto the first second of screen and then none show up for the rest of the episode. Obligatory thank you to the unsung heroes of subtitling videos!
You briefly touched on the quintessential, razor’s-edge difference between indie and non-indie developers... it’s a question of who owns the IP pie. If you created the IP, but some megalomaniacal CEO lords ownership over you, like an insurance company lords the power to pay for your latest medical emergency, you're not an indie developer. But if you have the McMillian-level authority to poop and fart-joke your way into tear-jerking hours of fun and excrement, if you can tell others to shove their game-suggestions to where the sun fears to tread, if the thought of relinquishing IP ownership of your creation compels a Golem-meets-a-Seagull style reaction, then you, my verbose friend, are an indie.
The baffling thing about "AAA" titles, really, is that a lot of them are mere number changes away from being *good.* An early example is Doom 3, which could've had a tighter shotgun choke and damage falloff. Overwatch wouldn't have suffered so much in Brigitte's wake if shields were simply nerfed. Or it's Aliens: Colonial Marines and a typo was also responsible; 'tether' was misspelled to 'teather.'
Mr. McMillin is a very cool person! It's really cool that you brought him up for the topic. Leave it to capitalism to try to gobble up great artists for profit and shift the scene
A games total feel is such a fleeting and vague thing. One of my favorite Indie Games I've ever played is "Hob". Really, I think it's the totality of the experience. Every part of it fits together so well to make such a pleasant experience. But then you look at tunic, it's on paper I should like and is very similar to Hob, but I loathe the experience. And for the life of me, I can't tell you why I love one and don't like the other. I just know what my heart is telling me.
This same core theme could also be mirrored in much of other media. TH-cam videos for example. You don't *have* to do what ad-papa-disney wants, but...
Indy isn't about standing out or fitting in. It isn't about the normies or the freaks. Indy game development is a job. It might be an artistic job, but it is still a job first and foremost. While humans want novelty, workers need stability. No one cares how unique and weird their product is when they can't afford ramen. So long as it remains a job and not a hobby, trend chasing will always be a part of the identity of video game development. At all levels.
As long as they can be their own thing with it. It can be a tiring chore having to roam a big open world for useless collectables, or another half-hearted platformer.
I feel like using Kojima as an 'indie but rich' comparison is a bit unfair. He's only able to go as big and bombastic as he is because he was in the triple A space for a good long while. Though that isn't to say the man himself isn't creative, because he is. It's quite a bit different from someone who starts from what they can out of pocket (even if that pocket would be a couple million) and builds themselves up from there. It's especially important if you want to distinquish the madness of indies from the clean 'general audience' appeal of AAA. Because while games like Death Stranding are _weird_ I wouldn't consider it not 'general audience' apealing. Mostly because it's so high budget to the poin that it would work better as a movie. And well, that's kinda Kojima's forte, isn't it?
This was probably your best video yet. XF is looking like a REALLY promising spiritual successor to F Zero GX and the crazy thing is that it's an indie game. When you hear indie, you think budget, but some developers are clever and can still make amazing looking games even withing said budget. But yes, what indie means to me is no corporate hands tainting the art.
I think there is definitely a trend toward a norm in current indie dev... But I think that's because it's a bigger scene than ever before. There are more cookie cutter indie games, because there are vastly more indie devs... Many of which would never have risked indie dev in the past. (And maybe many of them would have been right to not risk it?) That said... There are also vastly more amazing indie games than ever before. Even if the percentage of great indie games releasing had gone down, the total number has skyrocketed. From a consumer standpoint... If you only ever wanted to play awesome indie games for the rest of your life, you absolutely could do so without ever having to touch a AAA game to find something awesome.
Some people are indie by nature of having nowhere else to go but still want to make money doing something they enjoy....so they bend to make the common, easily sold and most likely to be successful. Many indie games simply look like many others in terms of mechanics and appeal because as it turns out even when you give people free reign many start and perhaps even stay in the deeply familiar. Every single creative environment ends up with Mario 1-1 being replicated, it's like a rite of passage to get it out of your system. If that's what they want to do, so be it. Some people really do wanna just make something they've seen before but move a few ideas around, shuffle up the aesthetic. As with anything most of what is created doesn't turn out to be good but I'm happy they've the freedom to do what they want more often than not, even if what they want is what I was tired of already.
Not only a cold take but largely sentimental nonsense. People never consider that clones are made because the developers love the original product. Minecraft itself was initially a clone of Infiniminer, but achieved far more than that game ever could (even if it was successful, eat it Zack). If I could erase 'Passion' from then English language I would, I despise the simple minded ideal that all """Art""" (I consider that if a video game wishes to be art it requires certain aspects, and the removal or other aspects, that would in many cases be undesirable hough it can and has been done and done well. Fine art is one thing and entertainment is another, it lessens both to try and erase the barrier) needs to be powered soley by emotional pilgrimage and turmoil. For all the undeniable quality of his work Van Goth has unintentionally done a good deal of damage to our civilisations perception of why someone would be driven to create art or entertainment with the many tragedies of his life, later to be romanticised and gospelised.
Awesome and terrifying video, man! Now about that, if there any indie game developers or AA game developers out there watching this, don't make a MMO rpg, or a Stardew Valley like game, or a open world game, or a vampire Survivors like game as your first game. Instead, try remaking games or make a knock-off version of a game like pac man, snake, angry birds, or better, make a fan game of fnaf or sonic the hedgehog. Then, build your way up for your creativity skills and developing for your dream game like a 3-d platform game or a genre that gamers that never heard or played.
Indy to me, is a smaller team run with direction of one person's hands on vision mostly. In major studio, they are beholden to corporate suite's who demand certain things, the creative vision gets lost, and sometimes its because the team is too big, and too many idea's that are not connected in a meaningful way are thrown in. The good triple-A games are run by a tight crew that is overseen by one persons creative vision, take Nintendo, most of the major stuff is supervised by Shigeru Miyamoto, games can do well in a collective but the style and aesthetic can get more muddy.
What was the game shown near the beginning that looked like Diablo ate Vampire Survivors? I suspect it was put in at that point as an example of the copy-cat indies trying to capture AAA audiences with indie trends, but it actually looked kind of neat from the few frames I saw.
Halls of torment. Early Access game. My friend who plays these things (I don't) says it has wonky balance in a number of places but he generally seems to enjoy it. Do with that information what you will.
this makes me wonder how companies like devolver digital fit into what you're talking about. are they helping to lift up the weird and promote creativity, or are they doing the smoothing of the edges?
I strongly recommend Iron Tower Studios' work, with cRPGs such as The Age of Decadence and Colony Ship. Tiny, broke team with uncompromising ideals and principles. They've been putting out fantastic games I'd never played before.
The problem I think is the fact that it has become nearly impossible to find the truly good and unique indie games out there. They are all buried under trash clone and trendy games frankly. Like it's so awkward that a game like Crosscode had some success yet there are still so many people who haven't even heard of it. And that's just one example. I honestly don't know of many others because whenever I look for new games, it's either a vampire survivors clone or a stardew valley clone.
To whom ever is the video editor of these videos: Please oh please put the name of the source for the b roll being used somewhere in the video so that we can know what we are looking at. I would really like to know what the game is that is being shown between 1:12 and the next section.
This was caused by a one problem, the death of double and single A games. How many indi games today would have been A or AA twenty years ago? When the big companies gobbled up the small then only started making big budget triple A monstrosities. Indi came in a filled the void they left. the issue here is when is a big indi studio no longer indi? Well, when does a hill become a mountain, when does a rock become a boulder, when does a "its just a cold I'll be fine" became "oh god I need a doctor I'm dying"?
I think it all boils down to how big of a risk are you willing to take. You being a single dev, small team, entire company studio, whatever the scale. This is entrepreneurship at its core. Higher the risk, higher the reward, but also higher the losses if you don't win. Different people have different tolerances for risk and the losses scale with ambition. Triple AAA games are so creatively safe because they know how much they stand to lose if they take a genuine risk. Sure it could be much more profitable, but it also could cost you a lot more money. People hate losing more than they like winning, especially when they've already got something to lose. For the indie dev scene you'd think since they don't really have anything to lose but only stand to gain, taking risks should be easy and encouraged right? But that's exactly the problem, you don't gain as much by playing it safe but you still gain something. Something beats nothing, so again risks aren't as appealing. Why be creative and take a bold shot in the dark when you can just do what everyone else is doing and get a decent size of the pie? You don't the entire pie to keep starvation away, a slice is enough. The point is, at the end of the day risks are called risks for a reason. And they'll never be encouraged because you've got safer options that offer you a portion of your desires, regardless of the scale of your resources available. The only way to break away from risks is passion. Because true works of art are a labor of love, the work is itself the goal and the reward. Whether people like it or not, whether you earn money off of it or not, whether you starve or not, those things are secondary. When you fulfill your own desires, that's when you will come closest to sparking a resonance with your audience and creating something that will stand out from the mamufactured masses. The only problem is, you have to become unreasonable, to forget the risks and shut yourself off from the monetary machine. Which is why it's rarer and rarer to see these days. As fulfilling as creative passion can be, it doesn't make the hunger go away.
I first thought this will be about how indie games way too often copy each other, but no, it's another "cold take" about money corrupting everything. Feels a bit too predictable at this point.
I appreciate the point that Frost is making but I also think you can’t lump all Indie developers together. Some aren’t in it for artistic expression (or the same type of artistic expression) and don’t mind chasing trends. If that puts food on the table, or helps them get experience under their belt for later passion projects, it isn’t an inherently bad thing to do. At the same time, we can’t blame artists for trying to appeal to a wider audience given how saturated the market is. Not everyone has the fame or resources of Kojima
Speaking of the music and movie industries, watch out: once AAA game execs figure out how to best apply the unquestioning consumer ethic of poptimism to the gaming industry, this video will become evidence of how backwards some people are for believing in the persistence of some semblance of "authenticity" against the tides of Letting People Enjoy Things. Dont you know that selling out is good, actually?
Frost's sultry voice and Yahtzee's frantic profanity are the Ying and Yang that keep the balance on my TH-cam recommendations.
Yin not Ying
It’s like those two rad older brothers of your friends who always have some life advice or you catch working on their car and they stop you to say “Hey come check out this bullshit I found”
"No one knows what they want til they have it" is a quote I'm going to wear off to the ground
Reminds me of peanut butter. Crunchy peanut butter was seen as an outlandish, unfinished product inconceivable to be sold as it wasn't ground properly. Until it was put into a focus group, 100% of the subjects recoiled at the idea until it was tried now it's a staple.
I remember thinking of a quote,"..We can't choose what we want. We must discover it.." His may uses different words but it has the same meaning.
closely related to "you don't know what you got until it's gone".
why it's so important to protect this stuff.
any why how other people spend their money DOES matter and IS my/our business.
Henry Ford has once said “if I had asked people what they wanted, they would have asked for a faster horse”
@@FO18L this.
1:47 Indie games are increasingly beholden to backers, which bring it's own problems of a creative project having to confine to the initially marketing pitch and player expectations, and making radical changes during development and the risky ideas that indie dev usually benefits from difficult to pull off without backlash from what are essentially investors. It's good the option is available for those who need it, but it often has the same effect of suppressing of that little spark of madness.
This is a really good point.
This isn't accurate, for every person crying about something there is another person telling them to shut up. I mean I would think this is obvious, have you seen the dumpster fire that is Disney movies/shows currently? The people who still play EA sports or the people who will defend unanimously their favorite game company or console. In the worst case scenario the dev might have their community split into factions, but the only thing that will truly kill a game in the crowdfunding scene is the dev disappearing, not updating or ignoring the communities questions.
@@setcheck67 You absolutely do not want to split your community in half. You don't want half of your community complaining and half of your community defending. That is a awful consequence they you are taking way too lightly
@@lifetake3103Maybe it's not that radical, I would think backers should expect at least some degree of flexibility knowing the project they're backing could change over time. And idealistically, a dev shouldn't put up a kickstarter if they don't have a solid plan for their project
@@lifetake3103 It worked just fine for the Last of Us 2.
That was a good one Frost. The idea that just smoothing out the edges and wrinkles will make the game better does rob the creativity and identity from a lot potentially really good games.
Sure, but it's also worth remembering that "creative talent free of so called restraints" is what produced the Star Wars prequel trilogy, whereas creative talent with some moderation produced the Original trilogy. Unrestricted personal creative "genius" is far from always going to produce good results
@@Paveway-chan lack of restrictions = lack of guarantee?
@@PeterDanielBerg
I’d call lack of restriction an all-or-nothing gamble
It's funny that Kojima got brought up though cause his game fell flat on it's face. It just felt confused and visionless and trying to do too many things and none of them particularly well.
@@Paveway-chan I don't think there's necessarily a "right way" to go. As you said, unrestricted personal creative genius can be... dumb. The genius can have difficulty seeing the whole picture sometimes and perhaps has a hard time seeing his project from someone else's perspective. However, too many restraints and we get bland, impersonal samey garbage all the time. Sometimes unrestrained genius works, sometimes it doesn't. But I know I'd rather have a bunch of creatives going around doing all sorts of weird crap which usually turns out terrible, than a bunch of efficient but unmemorable shovelware.
That's the thing about creative freedom. You get peaks and valleys, highs and lows. No one is saying it's all going to be good - the whole point is that creative freedom also means a freedom to fail, so others can succeed. It means experimentation.
6:47 "The virtual gentrification of the medium means money will pour in to try to appeal to a wider audience which inevitably scrubs out the culture"
YES! FROST! PREACH!!
Hear Hear!
My favorite line in the video. One of those things that, once spoken, instantly resonates and strikes at the heart of the problem.
And by scrubbing out the original culture it becomes a part of the larger culture more and more
Yeah, this is the sad reality of almost any kind of game (or media in general, really) that becomes very popular.
Money will pour in, and creative integrity will always be lost in the process. There are exceptions however that can still succeed.
Games like Death Stranding can still succeed in spite of being incredibly divisive by sticking to a creative vision. Developers like FROM SOFTWARE making games like Dark Souls stick to their creative visions, and while they might make their games more accessible over time they have continued to improve upon their formula over time and still provide what long-term fans want. Then there are indie developers which have also managed to keep their creative visions, like with Deep Rock Galactic (a game I enjoy somewhat, but respect even more) - which was made by a small team and manages to innovate and provide consistent updates in a co-op genre that has stagnated in recent years.
For every developer that retains their creative vision though, there are countless sellouts. Not all of these sellouts end up leading to bad content though - some publishers or those investing money do allow for creative control to more or less remain in the original hands - but usually this leads to good content being lost.
Blizzard was pretty much always a popular developer, but they basically sold out once they merged with Activision in the late 2000s or so and ever since then they have been chasing every single market trend with little care for the core fans or identity that got them to be popular in the first place. Such things are all too common.
An issue with the 'gentrification' of the indie-scene not mentioned here is just how hard it makes it to find the actual gems. Used to be you could say, with a straight face, that you 'preferred indie-games to triple-A.' Now, well... there's still lots of excellent and unique Indie-games, but finding them means spending a load of time digging through all the derivative, run-of-the-mill indie-titles that differ from the AAA ones only by having worse graphics and fewer microtransactions... not that *that* can't be a worthwhile bargain all by itself, mind. Point is, it can leave you in a situation where it's just *easier* to buy the latest heavily-advertised big-budget title whose reviews suggests that it hasn't been drowned in greed and games-as-a-service BS... *yet.*
Yup. I said years ago that if Steam didn't make sure to curate its storefront it would run into the issue of there being too much mediocrity for people to feel worth sorting through. Trying to find indie games there today, I feel that I was correct.
Hi there, I'm an indie developer. And I'd say indies WILL chase trends and clean up their image in hopes of making some money even if they don't have a big publisher pushing them to do so -- it doesn't just come down to corruption.
Let's say you spend 50 thousand plus on a game, taking out loans or running up credit cards or draining your savings, because you have no publisher. If all of that money is going into this weird, inscrutable piece of passionate outsider art that doesn't look like anything familiar, well... you get a little nervous! Will an audience even find it in the absolute deluge of Steam releases? Will it connect with anyone? Would you have been better off setting fire to a small pile of Benjamin Franklins in your backyard?
Even if an indie isn't seeking profit and riches, if they just want the art to pay for itself at most, you have to do the dance to SOME extent. Either that or cross your fingers and hope you go viral despite being a wonky and weird passion project.
This sounds like a problem of marketing... First of all, so long as you have a searchable presence there will always be someone looking for that particular thing. I wanted D&D D20 amulets and I found them and I paid a lot for them. No one told me about them or advertised them to me, I google searched it on a whim. Secondly, your early adopters are your life blood, the more extroverted or no life the better. They will spread the best marketing their is, word of mouth. In this case you want to make something so unique that they are only able to get that experience with your game or something providing the answer to a void filled by something else(ala the diablo clones when Diablo 2 was going on 10 years without a sequel), because that's what they are going to advertise. I found out about a Korean MMO I actually loved playing called Lunia when I was in school, because my friend played it and they kept having events and giving free stuff so he played it all the time and recruited me among 4 others, which led to me recruiting people and so on until we had a whole guild.
Lastly, I have a VERY SMALL list of games I've purchased based on reviewers recommendations. I think it's something like 5 out of the 340 I own on Steam alone. Most of my purchases were based solely on the game providing something I really wanted that I wasn't finding elsewhere. In this list would be: Binding of Isaac, Broforce, Carrion, Control, Crusader Kings 3, Cult of The Lamb, Cuphead, Death Road To Canada, all of the soulsbornes, Darkest Dungeon, etc. ALL OF THEM I either heard about from someone, saw someone playing it in real life or on youtube or I seeked them out. I only saw ads for dark souls which isn't why I bought it, I think only a few of them actually got review recommended to me, and steam sale isn't why I bought them either. I bought all of them specifically because that was what I was interested in at the time, usually because I saw some other media which got me interested to roleplay what I saw. Like Game of Thrones for Crusader Kings or John Wick for Cyberpunk. Speaking of which I'll tell you right now there is not nearly enough John Wick-like games, the closest I could find to really fitting it was My Friend Pedro, Hotline Miami, and Cyberpunk.
As an indie developer myself... I dunno. When I started out I think I believed what this video is saying, because on some level it's what all your friends and the TH-cam essayists say. Indies must be unique, and make what truly speaks to them, market be damned.
I made something that I thought was really unique for my first game, and it did okay. But, just okay. It does have its players who have played it to death, clocking in 4 digit hour counts, but in general I don't think there's a lot of people that have even heard of it. When you make something like that people at conventions will often remark, "I bet there would be some people who would be REALLY into this... but it's not my thing". And you'll hear it a whole lot.
The next game I'm making is a roguelike, and there seems to be a lot more excitement about it. When I take it to conventions, I don't hear "I bet other people would really like this", instead I get "so when's this coming out? How much? Will there be more classes? Will there be modding?", the kind of questions asked by people who have already decided to buy the game. And maybe they'll tell their friends about it too.
Sometimes you forget that "the market" is people. Then you meet people and are reminded of that.
Loved Rabbit & Steel :)
Uniqueness isn't good. Good is good. When good is also unique, it's exciting. When it's just good, it's just good. There's genuinely no need to reinvent the wheel every time just because some douche expects you to. Reinventing the wheel is a passion, not a chore.
true but i think that there is a certain point where a game ceases to be an artistic creation and just becomes a product that the masses will like.
Art is intrinsic to the artist, not the people looking at it
Little aside, this series has been great for tuning me into interesting indie projects like Yellow Taxi Goes Vroom and Genokids.
Yellow Taxi gives me Choro Q vibes and I've been wanting something like that for over a decade now, I'm so happy this video brought it to my attention!
6:39
Thank you for making that point. Video games being more and more mainstream driven like film and music scared me away from AAA titles.
Indies are the last bastion of gaming for me at the moment.
There are older games too. Just this week, I got into Armored Core 1 and Morrowind and they are, like Frost put- without the stench of executive intrusion
AAA is valuable as a place to educate future indies on why big teams driven by capital and marketing are a problem
The whole "indie mobsters" thing reminds me of what happened to ZA/UM, the developers of Disco Elysium. They basically had their entire company stolen from them by greedy corporate executives, who then subsequently kicked them out. They made their dream game, now the fun's over. There will never be another Disco Elysium.
Nah its just a meta layer of gameplay, forcing the user to pick between capitalsm and communism when buying the game.
Being knee deep in our first indie game (coming out in 8 weeks omg), I appreciate this video. I do feel that pressure to succeed and I do wonder if we shouldn't have leaned more into the weird and wild then we did. All marketing says we made the wrong choices if we wanted to grow ourselves, but maybe thats okay.
good luck!
Yeah I definitely feel all this - particularly on the writing end - should have I asked myself "Is anyone going to get this?" Should I have stepped back and asked, "Will a story/character/setting like this be commercially viable?"
It's so easy to fall into The Trap, so to speak.
Good luck with the launch!
If you can, why not share the name of your game? Good luck with the launch regardless!
I'm definitely here for the weird and wild, the more memorable a game for me the better. As long as the gameplay is fun enough and tightly programmed , then the rest of the elements can go bonkers.
Much like Yahtzee often says ( super paraphrasing: ) "I'd rather a game be bad but trying than be bland. Because bland isn't memorable, it isn't interesting, it isn't fun."
Growth isn't everything, maybe just stability is OK too. I hope you guys make a profit, enough to justify your time and efforts, and enough to incentivise you to keep creating ;)
You rarely ever know what the future brings. I personally prefer to pour my heart into what I'm doing and then face the consequences. Whatever they may be. I understand that this isn't for everyone, there is good reason to act more safely and conservatively, I will not dismiss that because I know that pouring my heart into things doesn't protect me from devastating faliure.
But I prefer to live with the shards of my failure to pick up, knowing that I've given all that I've got and that this is just what it is, rather than going in healf-heartedly and maybe even succeed but then ever going to wonder what more it could have been. Then again, I don't have kids to feed.
Frost, you son of a motherless goat.... I just cancelled my Patreon membership for you guys yesterday. My health has deteriorated and I'm experiencing what is basically early-onset dementia. But getting back to checking out new videos on the channel after a while, I saw this video, and I have to go fix my membership. You guys need all the support we can give to make sure you keep doing what you do.
This isn’t the point but why is this the first I’ve seen of Squirrel with a Gun? The 3 seconds of clips looked awesome
I think it quickly got filed away as a "It's Goat Simulator but with a squirrel" and people moved on or didn't prick up their ears enough in the first place.
You were unfortunately in the wrong part of Twitter!😅 The development videos were hilarious!
because its just being sold as a quirky game that is actually very shallow, like goat simulator. what is sad, because it does seem to have some neat platforming mechanics.
It's in development with no release window listed yet. Not much to see.
I've seen interesting games and interesting people have all the personality sanded off them after a bare six months trying to fit in on the average storefront working alongside the average publisher. It's always a shame when it happens, sometimes I come back to a game I playtested and am shocked to discover how different it's become, and too often how something interesting has been smoothed down or pared away to better suit an existing tag in a storefront.
I agree, this IS a pretty cold take. Isn't this cycle of innovation - replication - stagnation - innovation something that's happened to the game world several times already? Every time a world-beating videogame comes along, DOOM, Half-life, WoW, Halo, CoD: MW, Amnesia, Skyrim, Fortnite or DOOM (2016), it spawns a million imitators both from AAA and indie devs. And is it really that big of a deal that the big publishers are trying to scoop up indie talent? You never should buy a game "just because it's indie" anyway, and it's not like other small developers are going to stop innovating just because others are being pulled onto the bandwagon - as long as there are channels that promote smaller devs of any kind we'll still get innovation.
"it's the intoxicating scent of uncompromised passion"
There it is, plain and simple
I wonder why we call them "AAA" publishers. In baseball, AAA is below the big leagues, when obviously in this context we're talking about the biggest fish in the sea.
different acronyms. Triple-A in baseball literally stands for three A's, because it is derived from an alphabetical class system. Class A used to be the highest level, but as the sport progressed, then that became Class AA, then Class AAA, and then you had the big leagues.
AAA in games comes from credit bonds, where a AAA bond is the safest, surest bet.
@@MelMelodyWernertells you everything you need to know about the games industry! 😂
@bird3713 meat grading. They took their grading from meat quality.
I prefer to call them Big B- cause that's what their games are. Big, but B-.
I think instead of Indie vs Big budget we could call them: Vision centric vs Profit centric game design.
That's why I believe there are actually 3 industries in media: AAA, single A, and indie. And so far, the categories hold up.
AAA means big budgets, big business and long histories. That would be your Bethesdas, Nintendos, Sonys and Activisions.
Single A means a smaller studio, usually with an industry veteran at the helm, with a bigger budget due to the namesake. You could consider Kojima and Igarashi as good examples. Another would be Hellblade, where the polish is practically AAA, but comes from a much smaller studio team.
Finally there's the Indie scene, where an individual or small group, usually with little to no budget, has to go out of their way to make a game just for the passion of wanting to make it. Practical nobodies in the industry can become indie, as long as you want to make games because of your passion for them, not necessarily fame and fortune. Studio MDHR is a good example of this.
I also don't like when indie devs try to make their games exactly like the bigger more popular titles. I've recently played bug fables, because people told me it was like older paper marios, and it was like paper mario, but somewhat too much. I think what all indies I especially like have is uniqueness, so they all feel like their own titles, not "just like the other game I liked"
I agree. What this also causes is the occasional release that is so damn similar to its inspirations that it actually carries over all of the bad things they had as well, like classic survival horror games with fixed camera angles that won't let you see enemies.
I’ve started watching your videos while sipping bourbon on the rocks and it feels like I’m at a jazz bar that is only inhabited by gamers
I'll be hangin out in the back sippin my double IPA
@@PlayMoGame a man of refined tastes you are
as someone who plays indie games almost exclusively (plus an occasional soulslike), I see Frost's point here, but I just don't think we're there yet. Sure, we did get a massive wave of bullet heavens after Vampire Survivors and yeah, there are a lot of action roguelikes trying to imitate Hades - but overall, there is still a lot of diversity and creativity in the indie scene, quite possibly the most there ever was
Yeah, definitely for that last part. But what's being surfaced by media though, it's far from being as varied as it could be.
There are lot of diverse games and way easier ways to get them now that Steam is opened up and Itch is a thing. But AAA/AA is also diverse. Altho not as much. However, I swear if I see one more Deckbuilder, survivor-like, rogue-like deckbuilder or "Crafting Survival Open-world Early access"..
The indie scene has enough games out there that there will always be examples of games that don't have such issues, but even "AAA" developers have rare examples of not being sellouts (he mentioned Death Stranding specifically which is a good example).
But the majority of the ones that get any kind of traction or funding tend to be very obviously chasing trends.
I don't think this is necessarily a problem though. It just means that we need to support the more niche content - the "indies" among "indies" so to speak.
@@echomjp Death Stranding, the game with the Monster product placements and the AMC ads? 😏 Guess "sellout" means different things.
@@Fachewachewa I'd rather up front product placement so I know what/where they sold out to, than knowing it was being hampered by pressure from above to conform to some invisible criteria , that aren't immediately apparent but feel lacking.
"Beholden to no one" is probably the best description I've ever heard for what "indie" gaming really means. Also, so long as people with programming skills are making the games they themselves enjoy playing, the indie scene will never, truly die. :)
So many indie studios are chasing the rogue-like procedural infinite replayability or Stardew Valley clones. I've just set Steam to ignore those tags so I don't see them. Luckily there are so many indie developers there's still a lot of creativity out there. Same can't be said about AAA, they are doomed.
I think procedural gen is good but needs to be designed better.
Playing with all sorts of builds is all fun and games until you realize you are always fighting the same enemies
@@jex-the-notebook-guy1002 Agreed, even Edmund fell into that trap with The Legend of Bum-Bo.
I would argue there are still just as many good innovative indie games now if not more than before. The difference is there are way more mediocre indies than before, and because of game pass you actually see them.
I mean shovelware has been a thing since the dawn of level editers. Visibility is definitely what changed, not volume
good luck finding any
What is that Choro Q looking game at around 6:45?
Nevermind - Yellow Taxi Go Vroom. Im now officially interested in that and Squirrel With a Gun thanks to this video.
Quirky indie games are what i like most about the indie scene.
Ultimately I think the problem is that consistent money and creativity don't get along, and sadly that's a problem that can only be fixed so far in the scene. What we need, for this reason and too many others to count, is for people to be able to make a living in little enough time that they don't have to choose between passion projects and paying the bills, and that requires heavy modification to how politics and economics work in almost every modern developed country (some more than others).
I think part of the issue is just the "indie" name. We should have stopped differentiating games 10 years ago.
When the indies that are covered nowadays are 99% of the time the ones published by the publicly traded "indie" publishers, or when the $20m+ small studio games that would have been considered AA games two generations ago are presented as "small indie games you haven't heard about", it's difficult for creators to not try to emulate that.
Seems like the only way to go if you want to actually survive making games.
What year was it that Polygon called Braid "the first indie game"? That's a pretty good marker for when Indie had crystalized as a marketing term rather than a meaningful designation. (not to say Braid wasn't legitimately indie)
All of the indie games that truly meant something to me were games that either weren't normally my thing but added a wild twist that made it my thing, or were so inherently wild that I had no idea it was even allowed, let alone just what I had actually wanted.
Something I notice more and more frequently, indie developers pull the exact same stunts we hate AAA for and expect to get off scot-free.
Which they do, because 'they are indie, so it's not so bad'.
Rushed release, buggy game, DLC flood? It's okay, they are indie and we can't expect perfection.
To be fair i am absolutely looking forward to a wizard with a gun.
I think what makes the indie scene enjoyable is there's a greater than average chance that the game is actually going to be fun.
What triple a studio would have thought for a second that factorio would thrive, or that simulating rockets faithfully if not accurately, kerbal space program, would be interesting and fun. They wouldnt. Triple a studios are still pushing out hack and slash games, or leveled shooters, with loot boxes and tiered drops like borderlands did almost 20 years ago.
It works, dont get me wrong, in terms of story telling a tried and true game experience is okay if the story is absolutely solid. But moat of the time it just isnt.
You're falling into the old music trap. People saying "Music was so much better back then" and listing the top hits of the day, forgetting there are 3000 other songs made during that period that didn't stand the test of time. Indie games being better isn't "greater than average". For every top indie game, there are 200 asset flips on Steam.
I like to watch SplaterCatGaming to keep up with what's up and coming but the amount of survival, crafting, roguelike, grim dark games are out there just grinds my interest down into nothing. My favorite words to hear in his videos are "I can't really compare this to anything else I've played"
What would be considered "grim dark"? The Dark Souls kind?
@@kveller555 Sort of. Indie games have been doing it even before Demon's Souls. The "The world is miserable when you arrived, it will probably be worse when you leave, and nothing you do can change it" atmosphere.
@@ryanchase9332 Ah, I see. Thanks for taking the time to reply! I'm getting into gamedev and I'm trying to be careful not to fall into tropes too much, be it in terms of gameplay or aesthetic.
When indie games can range from no-budget passion projects like Yahtzee's own Starstruck Vagabond, to AAA-lite stuff like Hades or No Man's Sky, it's clear the label doesn't mean what it used to mean anymore. Nowadays anything that would have been named AA, or mid-budget games in the PS2 is an indie game.
There's this game called Tiny and Big: Grandpa's leftovers. It's a small game but the unique mechanics, weird soundtrack and hilarious main plot regarding heirloom underpants really sticks with me to this day. Let the freaks come out to play!
AAA obviously follows trends, but in the indie space is it really a trend chase, or do most people simply not have much of a creative spark and instead make something familiar to them that they liked? I'm not convinced there's as much creativity being stifled out there as there is lack of creativity being given a platform regardless.
Which isn't to say these indie developers are stupid, they're clearly capable and motivated to make anything at all. It's just true creativity is hard. True creativity that actually hits a mark that no one knew was there is incredibly exceptional.
I wonder if the impression of "so many clones of this and that popular title" (like Vampire survivors, Slay the spire or Stardew valley to name a few) comes from the fact that there is a metric ton of indie games released each and every day compared to a handful of AAA each month
The idea that " people don't know what they want until you give it to them" is true for all products.
I love these, Frost and Yahtzee are my favorites.
Can somebody tell me which game is shown at 5:54?
A video game has two areas of identities, the presentation and the gameplay. Under presentation, there is theme and graphics. Theme is not an identity, it is only a facade of an identity. Graphics is the core of presentation identity, whether the elements look coherent. Gameplay has a much bigger impact on the identity of the experience. Despite its impact, most games don't deviate much from the trends of the period. The core limitation of gameplay identity is 2D vs 3D. 2D is more limited than 3D. 3D's main limitation is the camera, along with the controls. Under both 2D and 3D, you have timing, real time and turn based being the two main categories. Each has its own nuances of game states and action timing.
This is a tough one, and I think Frost handled it well. But I feel like I've been hearing "you don't want new experiences" a lot on Escapist coverage lately. I'm not surprised they would draw that conclusion, a lot of time new concepts sell poorly. However, that isn't proof people don't want it. It's very much a causation fallacy, there's a thousand and one reasons why something will or won't sell:
* Maybe the experience offered is so commonplace that it over-saturated the market, and you can't figure out how to make it stand out. Even when it is, it can succeed when you attract an audience that hasn't had the chance to bore of it yet. (Brand recognition can do that.)
* Maybe you just happened to release at the wrong time and got overshadowed. All experiences, old and new, succeed or fail solely on the basis of whether they're in the right place at the right time. Even objective technical merit is inexplicably ignored at times.
* Maybe it was hard to communicate the merit of what you're selling to a potential audience because it was a new idea. Even games using old experiences struggle to explain why to choose the implementation over the competition.
* Maybe it was leaked before release. Following the trend of showing the opposite might apply, maybe it became so embroiled in a DRM or privacy controversy that it ended up getting review bombed.
So the presence of new or old ideas isn't enough to govern if a game will succeed or fail. In any entertainment medium, you can put your best work out there, but it's a shot in the dark if anyone's going to pick it up.
But we, the audience, nevertheless need new ideas. Admittedly, it's easier to sell the tried and true. It's also much easier to make. But if everyone did the same thing, why bother playing games? Been there, done that, played it to death. The entire market becomes saturated with redundant experiences. And, just like that, we've got ourselves another Video Game crash.
Indies innovate because small budgets lead to smaller scope projects and less accountability when it doesn't work. (Kojima Productions is a valid exception, but it doesn't hurt their odds of success to be a famous auteur who is also very competent.) When I'm looking for innovation, I know it's more likely to show up in the indie sphere first because of the practical reasons.
However, there's many ways to innovate. If an indie wants to be on the talented side of "talent imitates, genius steals," more power to them. Granted, I probably won't play more than one or two imitations. I want new experiences. The "genius steals" isn't telling you it's okay to copy their homework, it's saying geniuses know how to make an idea their own.
There might be a region/western bias in it too. There's all sorts of weird and niche (dare I say innovative) stuff popular in Eastern Europe, South America, Asia that barely anyone's heard of in the West. Massive word of mouth, massive player numbers, maybe not as much cash but is that less of a success?
Here's the thing. He's not saying "you don't want new experiences" he's saying "you don't THINK you want new experiences". That's a huge difference. People if left to their own devices will gravitate towards more of what they know. Henry Ford is quoted as "If I asked people what they wanted they would have said 'faster horses'".
This is a really compelling video essay but man does this feel like it ignores the devs that aren't and have never been about making their work as an art piece. It just feels disingenuous to split the entire market as weird indie games and big budget games, its like it's ignoring the entire history of devs in between those two extremes in order to make a point.
Could someone please identify every game in this video ever? I feel like there are a lot of gems here I haven't seen before.
The thing is - there is now money to be made, when Undertale and Issac were made there was no actual money in it. Sure some indie guys and gals got lucky, some landed jobs or got their game featured somewhere, but mostly it was passion projects for late evening to tinker around with or to add to their portfolio when looking for a job. Now you can make serious money out of it, so indie is becoming more serious. People see it as a legitimate career and therefore they make "serious" games or adhere to the Nintendos, Xbox, or other services' rules and needs.
That's the same why online gaming is so bad these days - everyone wants to be a professional esports star or a streamer and that is why they make gaming their job.
It's sad, but I don't think there is a solution.
Thank frick for Unreal -and Unity- (fuck Unity) engine with their tools to help anyone make whatever they want, if they're willing to put in the time...
And digital distribution. Distribution costs falling almost to zero is a big enabler
Add Godot to that list of engines. Easy to use and open source! (Not sponsored).
@@kveller555 Absolutely, godot is perfect for making small to medium indie games (2d and 3d) in a down to earth and easy to learn program. It gives the tools to everyone to experiment with their ideas without being bloated, keeping it relatively minimalistic and a great starting point to build in top of. With unreal/unity and godot you keep the benefits from both the extremes of the spectrum
@kveller555 that's what I want to use
Unity endorsement out here aging like fouled milk with all the bullshit Riccitiello is trying to pull
Indie is not directly about capital but its relation to it. It influences the scale, the creative control, the games direction which have knock on effects to other aspects of a games design.
It seems that many people only see games as being Indie or triple A, but there is much more depth to the issue. Mid tier A games do exist; they are just much less common with the consolidation of studios by large publishers.
Great video. Hot editing tip though, don't put a quote on the screen and have the VO saying something different, like at 5:12. Makes my head hurt.
Could anyone please tell me what the game at 5:36 is?
It is called "Wizard with a Gun" and it is an online cooperative sandbox survival game.
I miss the Vita. There, I said it. The Vita was truly a place where Indy games came into their own: Hotline Miami, Mutant blobs, Velocity 2X, Guacamelee, Spelunky, Steamworld Dig, Bastion, Risk of Rain, Limbo, Stardew Valley, Rogue Legacy, Darkest Dungeon, Shovel Knight. I experienced so many great smaller games I would never have touched on the PC.
I’m a AA lover since most $40 single-player campaigns + nothing else games are in the AA budget and I can also describe AA as “indie without the weirdness or designing around lack of money” and “AAA without too much money pulling the strings”.
My favourite AA games have “Sniper” in their titles and past AAA games can be reclassified as AA today.
This is why I will mourn Flash for the rest of my life. It was the midnight release premiere for gaming, it was the garage band hardcore scene. You got primary gameplay loop-focused greats, sometimes with a layer of viscera and afterbirth still attached; you got juvenile, senseless romps of violence, memes and crudity, but they had so much soul in every breakout. Its not news to me that many indie devs are chasing success by mimicking games they already love or enjoyed, but my artistic naivete assumed that was just people making what they wanted. To an extent, that should be celebrated: not every game wants to be the next Stardew, sometimes people just want to be LIKE Stardew. But I take your point: that willingness to be just like the rest is starting to fuse Indie with AAA. (Can't convince me Game Pass and ID@Xbox aren't amazing opportunities for smaller devs, though.)
Some of my most enjoyed games were some indie games I took chances on because their general ideas were interesting. I laughed, smiled, and sadly cried to them.
Something keeps going wrong with your recent videos' subtitles. They are frontloaded onto the first second of screen and then none show up for the rest of the episode. Obligatory thank you to the unsung heroes of subtitling videos!
You briefly touched on the quintessential, razor’s-edge difference between indie and non-indie developers... it’s a question of who owns the IP pie.
If you created the IP, but some megalomaniacal CEO lords ownership over you, like an insurance company lords the power to pay for your latest medical emergency, you're not an indie developer.
But if you have the McMillian-level authority to poop and fart-joke your way into tear-jerking hours of fun and excrement, if you can tell others to shove their game-suggestions to where the sun fears to tread, if the thought of relinquishing IP ownership of your creation compels a Golem-meets-a-Seagull style reaction, then you, my verbose friend, are an indie.
The baffling thing about "AAA" titles, really, is that a lot of them are mere number changes away from being *good.*
An early example is Doom 3, which could've had a tighter shotgun choke and damage falloff.
Overwatch wouldn't have suffered so much in Brigitte's wake if shields were simply nerfed.
Or it's Aliens: Colonial Marines and a typo was also responsible; 'tether' was misspelled to 'teather.'
Mr. McMillin is a very cool person! It's really cool that you brought him up for the topic. Leave it to capitalism to try to gobble up great artists for profit and shift the scene
What was the game featured at the very start of this with the little red dragon? Looked like a 3D platformer?
Sometimes it's a dog-eat-dog world, sometimes it's a world-eat-world dog. Sometimes galactus needs a companion, ya know
A games total feel is such a fleeting and vague thing. One of my favorite Indie Games I've ever played is "Hob". Really, I think it's the totality of the experience. Every part of it fits together so well to make such a pleasant experience. But then you look at tunic, it's on paper I should like and is very similar to Hob, but I loathe the experience. And for the life of me, I can't tell you why I love one and don't like the other. I just know what my heart is telling me.
This same core theme could also be mirrored in much of other media.
TH-cam videos for example. You don't *have* to do what ad-papa-disney wants, but...
Love the Robin Williams nod at the end. I still hold to it, that is one of his best moments. Such a short and simple, yet poignant little bit.
Indy isn't about standing out or fitting in. It isn't about the normies or the freaks. Indy game development is a job. It might be an artistic job, but it is still a job first and foremost. While humans want novelty, workers need stability. No one cares how unique and weird their product is when they can't afford ramen. So long as it remains a job and not a hobby, trend chasing will always be a part of the identity of video game development. At all levels.
This is why I have a job
As long as they can be their own thing with it. It can be a tiring chore having to roam a big open world for useless collectables, or another half-hearted platformer.
The conclusions here remind me of two classic Jimquisitions: Perfect Pasta Sauce and Damn Fine Coffee
I feel like using Kojima as an 'indie but rich' comparison is a bit unfair. He's only able to go as big and bombastic as he is because he was in the triple A space for a good long while. Though that isn't to say the man himself isn't creative, because he is. It's quite a bit different from someone who starts from what they can out of pocket (even if that pocket would be a couple million) and builds themselves up from there.
It's especially important if you want to distinquish the madness of indies from the clean 'general audience' appeal of AAA. Because while games like Death Stranding are _weird_ I wouldn't consider it not 'general audience' apealing. Mostly because it's so high budget to the poin that it would work better as a movie. And well, that's kinda Kojima's forte, isn't it?
Please start labling each game you show, some of them look really cool but without a name it's impossible to find them.
This was probably your best video yet.
XF is looking like a REALLY promising spiritual successor to F Zero GX and the crazy thing is that it's an indie game. When you hear indie, you think budget, but some developers are clever and can still make amazing looking games even withing said budget. But yes, what indie means to me is no corporate hands tainting the art.
I think there is definitely a trend toward a norm in current indie dev... But I think that's because it's a bigger scene than ever before.
There are more cookie cutter indie games, because there are vastly more indie devs... Many of which would never have risked indie dev in the past. (And maybe many of them would have been right to not risk it?) That said... There are also vastly more amazing indie games than ever before. Even if the percentage of great indie games releasing had gone down, the total number has skyrocketed. From a consumer standpoint... If you only ever wanted to play awesome indie games for the rest of your life, you absolutely could do so without ever having to touch a AAA game to find something awesome.
Great video. Indie trends are very much a thing, and I feel like 'Indie' alone doesn't guarantee a unique, transformative game.
4:48 anyone know the game name?
Believe it's space for the unbound
@@Levi-gh1sq Thanks!
Some people are indie by nature of having nowhere else to go but still want to make money doing something they enjoy....so they bend to make the common, easily sold and most likely to be successful. Many indie games simply look like many others in terms of mechanics and appeal because as it turns out even when you give people free reign many start and perhaps even stay in the deeply familiar. Every single creative environment ends up with Mario 1-1 being replicated, it's like a rite of passage to get it out of your system.
If that's what they want to do, so be it. Some people really do wanna just make something they've seen before but move a few ideas around, shuffle up the aesthetic. As with anything most of what is created doesn't turn out to be good but I'm happy they've the freedom to do what they want more often than not, even if what they want is what I was tired of already.
Not only a cold take but largely sentimental nonsense. People never consider that clones are made because the developers love the original product. Minecraft itself was initially a clone of Infiniminer, but achieved far more than that game ever could (even if it was successful, eat it Zack). If I could erase 'Passion' from then English language I would, I despise the simple minded ideal that all """Art""" (I consider that if a video game wishes to be art it requires certain aspects, and the removal or other aspects, that would in many cases be undesirable hough it can and has been done and done well. Fine art is one thing and entertainment is another, it lessens both to try and erase the barrier) needs to be powered soley by emotional pilgrimage and turmoil. For all the undeniable quality of his work Van Goth has unintentionally done a good deal of damage to our civilisations perception of why someone would be driven to create art or entertainment with the many tragedies of his life, later to be romanticised and gospelised.
What was the game at 6:05? looks cool
What's the name of the game that shows up at 6 min? I'm working on something similar.
sandblasting cleans everything off, personality included
Awesome and terrifying video, man!
Now about that, if there any indie game developers or AA game developers out there watching this, don't make a MMO rpg, or a Stardew Valley like game, or a open world game, or a vampire Survivors like game as your first game.
Instead, try remaking games or make a knock-off version of a game like pac man, snake, angry birds, or better, make a fan game of fnaf or sonic the hedgehog.
Then, build your way up for your creativity skills and developing for your dream game like a 3-d platform game or a genre that gamers that never heard or played.
Quoting Block. Really on brand for you haha. Love these videos!
Indy to me, is a smaller team run with direction of one person's hands on vision mostly. In major studio, they are beholden to corporate suite's who demand certain things, the creative vision gets lost, and sometimes its because the team is too big, and too many idea's that are not connected in a meaningful way are thrown in.
The good triple-A games are run by a tight crew that is overseen by one persons creative vision, take Nintendo, most of the major stuff is supervised by Shigeru Miyamoto, games can do well in a collective but the style and aesthetic can get more muddy.
What was the game shown near the beginning that looked like Diablo ate Vampire Survivors? I suspect it was put in at that point as an example of the copy-cat indies trying to capture AAA audiences with indie trends, but it actually looked kind of neat from the few frames I saw.
Halls of torment. Early Access game.
My friend who plays these things (I don't) says it has wonky balance in a number of places but he generally seems to enjoy it.
Do with that information what you will.
@@jon9828 thanks very much for the info!
this makes me wonder how companies like devolver digital fit into what you're talking about. are they helping to lift up the weird and promote creativity, or are they doing the smoothing of the edges?
I strongly recommend Iron Tower Studios' work, with cRPGs such as The Age of Decadence and Colony Ship. Tiny, broke team with uncompromising ideals and principles. They've been putting out fantastic games I'd never played before.
The problem I think is the fact that it has become nearly impossible to find the truly good and unique indie games out there. They are all buried under trash clone and trendy games frankly.
Like it's so awkward that a game like Crosscode had some success yet there are still so many people who haven't even heard of it. And that's just one example. I honestly don't know of many others because whenever I look for new games, it's either a vampire survivors clone or a stardew valley clone.
To whom ever is the video editor of these videos: Please oh please put the name of the source for the b roll being used somewhere in the video so that we can know what we are looking at. I would really like to know what the game is that is being shown between 1:12 and the next section.
The depicted game is called "I NEED SPACE" and it is developed by Khayalan Arts. It is scheduled for release sometime during 2024.
This was caused by a one problem, the death of double and single A games. How many indi games today would have been A or AA twenty years ago? When the big companies gobbled up the small then only started making big budget triple A monstrosities. Indi came in a filled the void they left. the issue here is when is a big indi studio no longer indi? Well, when does a hill become a mountain, when does a rock become a boulder, when does a "its just a cold I'll be fine" became "oh god I need a doctor I'm dying"?
Thank you for voicing something I was feeling but not fully understanding.
Yeah that's wild. Play Age of Decadence, amazing indie game.
Started watching this series for a couple months now. Gotta say:
Came in for the buttery voice, stayed for the script.
I think it all boils down to how big of a risk are you willing to take. You being a single dev, small team, entire company studio, whatever the scale. This is entrepreneurship at its core. Higher the risk, higher the reward, but also higher the losses if you don't win.
Different people have different tolerances for risk and the losses scale with ambition. Triple AAA games are so creatively safe because they know how much they stand to lose if they take a genuine risk. Sure it could be much more profitable, but it also could cost you a lot more money. People hate losing more than they like winning, especially when they've already got something to lose. For the indie dev scene you'd think since they don't really have anything to lose but only stand to gain, taking risks should be easy and encouraged right? But that's exactly the problem, you don't gain as much by playing it safe but you still gain something. Something beats nothing, so again risks aren't as appealing. Why be creative and take a bold shot in the dark when you can just do what everyone else is doing and get a decent size of the pie? You don't the entire pie to keep starvation away, a slice is enough.
The point is, at the end of the day risks are called risks for a reason. And they'll never be encouraged because you've got safer options that offer you a portion of your desires, regardless of the scale of your resources available. The only way to break away from risks is passion. Because true works of art are a labor of love, the work is itself the goal and the reward. Whether people like it or not, whether you earn money off of it or not, whether you starve or not, those things are secondary. When you fulfill your own desires, that's when you will come closest to sparking a resonance with your audience and creating something that will stand out from the mamufactured masses. The only problem is, you have to become unreasonable, to forget the risks and shut yourself off from the monetary machine. Which is why it's rarer and rarer to see these days. As fulfilling as creative passion can be, it doesn't make the hunger go away.
Many lessons to be learned here for writing books as well.
Great video! What's the game featured on 5:20 called, the one with old seadog looking fella? It looks like something I'd enjoy.
Your vids/talking points are always great, and this one is no exception!
"The indie scene was never about fitting in. It was about Standing out"
Damn...
And now I want to watch Robin Williams clips.
I first thought this will be about how indie games way too often copy each other, but no, it's another "cold take" about money corrupting everything. Feels a bit too predictable at this point.
What is the name of the game with the little mushroom guy on the thumbnail?
I appreciate the point that Frost is making but I also think you can’t lump all Indie developers together. Some aren’t in it for artistic expression (or the same type of artistic expression) and don’t mind chasing trends. If that puts food on the table, or helps them get experience under their belt for later passion projects, it isn’t an inherently bad thing to do. At the same time, we can’t blame artists for trying to appeal to a wider audience given how saturated the market is. Not everyone has the fame or resources of Kojima
Speaking of the music and movie industries, watch out: once AAA game execs figure out how to best apply the unquestioning consumer ethic of poptimism to the gaming industry, this video will become evidence of how backwards some people are for believing in the persistence of some semblance of "authenticity" against the tides of Letting People Enjoy Things. Dont you know that selling out is good, actually?
Brillant video. God knows we dont need another roguelike. We need another Yellow taxi goes vroom.