The main reason that I'm so busy is that I've wormed my way into the ranks of several projects, 2 of which are indie games, although I've ended the work I needed to do with one (Cogs translated into Spanish) and the other, well, I haven't really gotten past "checkout working copy, download IDE". However, all this indie-ness has gotten me thinking about what it means to be "Indie". I mean, even though you start a company with your own money and have a staff and junk making awesome games, if you're getting good publishing deals to distribute and market your work, it's not exactly an "Indie" endeavor. Meanwhile, pretty much all of the bootlegging efforts are self-funded start to finish, but they're also terrible and evil and basically how the British game development scene got started. Team size is a big determinant, because several publishers are doing in-house development (i.e. self-funded, i.e. "Indie") with huge teams and yet somehow are not qualifying for the moniker. Meanwhile, < 5 person team games, or games that are small enough that we imagine that they wouldn't require more than 5 people to develop basically end up counting as "Indie" in our minds even though they're obviously undeserving of that pedestal on account of having publisher support (Plants Vs. Zombies comes to mind...).
"Indie" implies a combination of small business pluck and the original meaning of "hacker"; these are the brave men and women who start their own businesses and coax the bits into doing their bidding. Thus, whenever an Indie game is good, knowledge of its existence is spread by word of mouth, and maybe they're able to land an awesome publishing deal. However, when such a game is anything less than awesome and not catching the eye of the right people, the vast majority of game enthusiasts simply don't hear about it. For example, I spent a solid amount of time playing Mount and Blade, and it's an amazing game that got pretty good digital distribution deals, but few video game news sources bothered to give it more that 1 or 2 posts. Maybe that's a special case: maybe the devs simply couldn't come to an agreement with a publisher, or maybe they don't have the marketing inspiration that 2D Boy is using to make all the San Francisco postmortem guys envious, but I'm of the theory that they simply didn't get the kind of press that Q Games, 5th Cell, and The Behemoth are receiving and thus publishers didn't even bother to approach Armagan of TaleWorlds and try and get his amazing medieval combat simulator into GameStops nationwide. It's probably 'cause they're Turkish, though.
VP A: Heh. Turkey. That's not a country, that's food.
VP B: I know, right?
Then I can get back to presuming to know what people are saying instead of having to listen about how hard it is to market your indie game in this economy. I do so love to hear myself speak.
:SñrC
Image credit: Lansdowne Photography (UK)
less than five person, less than three Jane
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