Is "indie game developer" still the same thing?
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- Опубликовано: 21 сен 2024
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I'm Pascal a Dutch independent game developer since 2004 known as Orangepixel. I created various games including Residual, the Gunslugs series, Heroes of Loot series, Space Grunts series, Stardash and the Meganoid series released on PC, mobile and various consoles.
My go to definition is "if you have a stock market ticker you're probably not very indie"
😂
I no longer have an idea how to define indie game since last few years.
For example, some of famous "indie" games like Hades, dave the diver and Sea of Stars have massive amount of people working on it. It could be easily over 100 if we count major staffs.
Budge wise, content wise. are just not something an indie studio (4 - 5 people) could do given 1-2 years.
I heard the term "Triple Indie" for those games like Hades etc, I think it checks out. Awesome listen, thanks for the video as always!
Also seen that new marketing term pop-up .. don't think it's really sticking 😅
@@orangepixelgames 😅 Whatever you're doing is working and that's what matters!
Keep the videos coming, this was great. It's real and honest, we don't get enough of that on youtube. Best of luck on GoP
Thanks! 👍
It's crazy to me that people call supergiant indie. When bastion came out I feel like people just considered them another studio. People who came up making flash games or doing stuff on their own were indie. Now it's anyone not working for MS/Sony/nintendo/ubisoft.
Think the "problem" was that a lot of them started as indie, but then had hit games, and grew - although that's just about what the term "indie" is about. Real problem is that players just expect all games to be of a certain quality and polish and content and size and playtime... which all require budgets! 😆
"anyone not working for MS/Sony/nintendo/ubisoft." Even then! Dave the Diver was Nexon, Sea of Thieves is Microsoft. Larian had a multi-hundred-million dollar budget for BG3, and like 7-8 substudios. Yet was hailed by many as an "indie darling". Have even seen some Atlus-published games held up as "indie" - maybe they need to play the classic Sonic 🎶Sega 🎶 stinger 🙃 It's a near-meaningless term, basically.
@@mandisawNexon ruined my life frrrr, I don’t remember if this was actually what I saw or not, but I remember Dave the Diver being called indie and going ???? All of my friends whose lives were also ruined by Nexon felt similarly lol
keep up the great work Mr Pixel, its refreshing to be able to buy a game stuffed with stylish pixels, playability and fun. Rather than in game purchases and adverts.
Indie just means not AAA at this point. Gamers don't really care, they just want fun games to play.
That's my video in one sentence 😂
"Gamers" might not care but developers do, since we are compared to bank-rolled "indie" studios all the time. You get sick of hearing "Mega Indie X can produce Y in Z amount of time and they are indie so why can't you?"
Game development is hard enough without a bunch of uninformed consumers on your back review bombing your (real) indie game because it doesn't have the features of such and such (fake) indie game when they had a team of 50 people and a budget of $25 million.
If you want to help the game industry change and you are a gamer but not a developer, paying attention to where the money is going versus what the marketing spin is saying really goes a long way. If a company is lying about their actual resources and development team, what makes you think they have the "gamers" best interests at the core of their game?
Part of the corruption and gas lighting in the game development industry starts with the consumers (gamers).
Hiya. I just want to say I understand your observations. I’m an independent/solo game dev myself. I’m more of the traditional hobbyist indie developer. I liked and subscribed. I’ve seen your videos before but I didn’t know you were independent. I believe in your game and I wish you all the best success in your launch and I hope to someday be where you’re at. My problem is how much dev time I have: I’m juggling wife and 2 pre-teens that still demand attention and supervision and a full time IT director job that is more than a 40 hr work week.
With the pre-teens and full time job I can imagine time is very limited! 😅
Interesting topic. It definitely feels like there is a greater range for indie games. My first reaction is to try and come up with a new name for it, but since most companies grow from small places they still feel they're the same.
Rumble videos are my favorites. Thanks. I can work while listening while getting a realistic view on things (uncut and unscripted)
Glad you like it!
It's funny how indie games are the new 90s games. Smaller teams, shorter, more simple but often clever or charming (the successful ones at least)
Thanks for the new video and have a great weekend!
Thanks for watching 🫡
Made it to the end! I am a huge fan and fellow developer. Keep up the great work!
Yay at least one person finished the video 😁
Indie has really become a very large marketing term, big studios with 10+ employees label themselves as such because it helps sell games to a certain audience.
I am on the other hand a single guy working on assets, games and videos, like yourself...this is what indie really is.
BTW...which ps2 games do you have there behind you?
Apart from the term, it has just become really hard to make your game "good enough" as it's always compared to these much bigger-budget projects! And here we are, with no budget and no man-power to spare - but still making kick-ass games!!
@@orangepixelgames Well said!
On one side to distinguish hihr budget indies with publishers I've heard Ttriple Indie" or "III (Triple I)", I've also heard "AA" games. None have been to be sticking yet.
Though from the other side the I have heard the term "Underground Game", to separate themselves from "Indie" (in a way trying to grab the original meaning from like one-to-two decades ago). Not sure if it will stick, but I think a distinction is needed and warranted again, not just for "gamer" ( I don't think they care anyway, or if they do is maybe just to disparage the other tribe) but at the very least for the publishers, developers and for smaller teams and budgets to be able to carve a place, money, marketing and dev time wise... again :P.
Oh well, hopefully the disctinction comes back up again. I think its needed for many to exists.
Distinction might actually be mostly needed for gamers.. so the know what to expect from "lower budget" games! 😉
Nice video orange, I’ve finally subscribed after continuously watching the videos you share. You talk about really interesting things, and in an understandable way, thank you!
I have some nitpicks (?) about things regarding a lot of solo developers. It feels very awkward when these people or groups of people say “I’m making an indie game”. I understand that indie is supposed to mean something akin to individual, but with how the term is used these days, it feels… awkward. I think “I’m making a game” works perfectly fine, but I think that seems less appealing or interesting to people. I feel even more like this when developers say “I’m making a good/cozy game”, or more recently, “I’m making a game that will scare you.” These things all feel very subjective to me. In the case of AAA games, when these things are said it’s usually (said to be) from reviewers.
Anyway, I think I’m being a bit unreasonable here perhaps? From what I’ve heard, being super honest or not taking advantage of keywords is seen as silly.
Edit: Oops, forgot to say I think saying “I’m an indie developer” sounds okay! I think labeling your (not you specifically) game as indie just feels similar to labeling your game as the other keywords I mentioned before. Merely a personal opinion.
Edit 2: Okay I realise now my issue with saying “I’m making an indie game”. It’s because they prioritize saying that they’re game is indie rather than the genre of the game, lol.
I agree, just describing your game as "an indie game" doesn't make much sense at all. But using the tags on Steam or other stores, and using it in some marketing form, can still help to make clear to the "audience" that this game might have a tiny budget! (or at least, that's what it used to be 😁)
Very good talk.
Long time ago there was XNA for indies for exemple... we're far from it now. Solodev, indies, triple i, double A... don't means anything anymore imo.
It's all just one big shop full of games, and small games have to compete with the bigger titles!
first indie game was Spacewar! which goes back to 1962 then came the Home computers scene (late 1970s-1980s) and in the 90's we had the Shareware and the attempts to release consoles best examples were Wolfenstein 3D in 1992 and Doom in 1993 , in 2007 we saw the rise and the visibility of the indie games , now we have a market saturation
Which is great for gamers...
I have a dozen small games that I have made along with a game engine. When I read the terms for Google Translate it used to require a commercial license for publishing which was around 30k a year so I did not have translation versions for 2 decades as a result.
Not sure how they would know GT translated it or another service or human. Possibly those terms were for plugins? or tools? Also - ChatGPT seems to be a bit better at translations!
@@orangepixelgames No it was for commercial use of Google translate. Not plugins or tools. The translate API would be cheaper, but you must call it every time you need the translation. I don't know about commercial use for ChatGPT. I will look into the ChatGPT commercial usage of results. That may actually work.
I think most localization svcs passing off machine-translation don't care about license compliance 🤷♀That said, the issue I've seen is more that the machine (or ChatGPT/genAI) doesn't understand politics or nuance. To take French for instance, every francophone country doesn't necessarily adhere to the Académie. If you try to use "Standard French" in say, Quebec or Morocco, it can vary from being "too posh/stilted" to just nonsensical and wrong, esp for tech-related words (which tend to be more US/UK English-influenced).
Similar deal happens with Spanish & Portuguese in Latin America vs Europe, and between Simplified & Traditional Chinese. Which of the latter a Chinese-diaspora audience uses is more related to how close their country is politically to Mainland China than geography or culture/preference 😅
Better to just budget for real localization, even if it has to rollout post-launch. You can do some basic market research to see which countries+languages are most critical for your genre/setting, and add others later if desired.
Indie's are artist's, i love games which can tell an interactive story , AAA now this days only shiny graphics and nothing more , the stories of AAA games most times not interesting and not engaging and even borring.
Great video and posing interesting thoughts. I do think the term "indie" had an original meaning that has been diluted. If you think about it, independent game developers always existed, going right back. But as you said, the term "indie" only came about when we had those games from small developers around the time of "Super Meat Boy" suddenly hit it big. So, the term "indie" was intended to refer specifically to these smaller teams making games on their own.
"Indie" is a deliberately shortened version of "independent" to make it sound like a small developer.
I remember study mates talking about larger companies like EA who are technically independent, but certainly not "indie". For me, I think the term "indie" should be reserved for that original meaning, of game developers under a certain size, both in terms of team size, and in terms of money and funding. Once you grow to a certain point, I think you can use the term "independent ", but I don't think you should use the term "indie", or it just loses all meaning of what people intend, in my opinion.
Where you draw that line might vary, but I assume a lot of people tend to expect indie as teams of 1-6, maybe up to 10. Once you get past 10, and even that sounds quite a reasonable size, is it really indie anymore? Probably not, depending on their level of success and funding, ie, a bunch of 10-12 students making their first game together with only their pocket money for funding, then yeah that's indie. If they're making games and profitable (in $AUD, it's generally assumed you should be making around $100k AUD per employee to be a profitable business, which is enough to cover their wage plus business profit), then that would mean they're making over $1 million with 10 or more people, so no I wouldn't think of that as indie.
But should it be based on financial success and reputation too? Perhaps. Once you get to a certain point not just of making money, but of clout and reputation, when you're at the sort of point where you know you can just say, "Hey... new game incoming" and the internet goes crazy because you just have that much clout, perhaps it's time to consider using the term "independent"? It's something worth thinking about.
I think it's more important to some how make a distinction based on what type of budget a game is made on. But how to do that, I have no idea! 🙃
@@orangepixelgames Budget is probably a very good way to look at it, which I suppose comes back to the $100k AUD a head figure I was quoting. But that's not implying that every member gets paid $100K, rather, that $100k should cover all their wages and related costs, plus enough extra for business profit. As a small team that's probably a reasonable way to start a costing - put a value on each team members time, then add up fixed costs for the year, then try and estimate potential vairable costs (ie, some sort of marketing budget), and add on anything like new equipment purchases, etc, so maybe add a variable float to give you wiggle room. That's how I would probably approach it as a starting point
Thank you for making this video and sharing your experience
Every week!
i would love to see you finish all those cool looking prototypes you shared awhile back
The "old" prototypes I had on my harddrive? Doubtful! 😅 got too many new ideas!
As for localization, I did my first mobile game in US-English & CA-French, since I knew those languages. But the advice I've seen is to provide & request a sample from any bidders (incl their rates), and then pass that around to people you otherwise know/trust who are fluent enough with the target language to assess basic quality. This isn't "asking your friends to localize", but even a beginner/rusty person should be able to tell poor-quality machine translation of a couple lines of dialogue or prose from mid-level human translation. So you'd know if a company is total BS.
Admittedly, it's an approach that kind of requires having a network of bilingual friends/acquaintances, preferably with coverage of multiple languages. So folks in "global cities" have an edge.
My exp of Dutch people (and that of Europe-living family & friends) is that a reasonable friend group could do a quick-glance sanity check for at least EN/FR/DE, and maybe IT/SP/PT at a stretch. But indie-dev online communities are plenty global these days, so never know til you ask 😄
Working on my first game and can definitely feel the lack of interest from people, like yeah, there are so many good games made by bigger, more experienced teams with way more budget, even if the stuff you make is good you still have little chance to compete it seems.
I kinda recall a discussion about a specific indie game which would have cost over half a million to make and I was like "wow it cost that much ?" and they were like "it's not that much for an indie game" lol.
And also when the press occasionally praises an indie game made by a "solo dev" and it often looks so suspiciously good you wonder if it's actually a AAA studio masquerading as a "solo dev"
Uwaa, I’m sorry to hear that :< I’m very curious, what is your first game about? And would you say you’re a programmer first, artist first, or musician first?
Exactly. And experience will grow, and that takes time and is kinda expected to become good at anything. But being in the same competition with huge budgets is really a hard one to overcome. (Not impossible.. just very, VERY difficult)
@@Kuso_Ouji it's "zombaliens" on steam, a wacky retro fps / imsim. I'm a programmer first
You have just pointed all the issues out there, and how people expect and try to force some stuff onto you. Like, the translation case you said...how people say it's imporant and bla, bla, bla. We know that, but we cannot pay and if we pay, how would us validate that was a good work? Yeah, indie is most cases is a term that is not representing the small. Here we are, trying to shine! lol Super nice content you have here...Thanks!
Yup!, sadly, at the end of the day, the gamer doesn't care how many people worked on a game, just if it has the quality and gameplay they see from all the other games (with bigger budgets)
@@orangepixelgames Yes, it's kinda unfair, I just hope that people try our game see the value and spread the word.
Hello, I am a big fan of your work and videos and have a question, (perhaps you have a video on it somewhere so you can direct me there if needed.)
I looked at your steam portfolio and noticed you have very few reviews, which is usually a metric on profits. However you have obviously been doing this a long time on your own so are there other platforms you are generating sales on other than steam?
PS. Ill be playing Gauntlet of power in June
All the bests!
Look up my "year in review" videos, posted in December every year.. they pretty much cover how my revenue and income is generated 😉
corporations with 20+ employees are calling themselves indie game studios these days.
Chat GPT or llama 2 is a good resource for double-checking any language translation
I just enjoy watching your videos man. Don’t really have anything to say.
Thanks for not saying anything !
I think the definition of Indie is quite complex and in some cases it is probably also misused
If we strictly go by the term indipendent, so no external fundin and no bigger publisher, I would also consider GTA VI to be an Indie game, so this is not the only criteria.
I also think a lot of "Indie" titles are not really indipendent, they have small publisher, but they still some how fit the "indie game" feel
I would think and Indie game is alsways something experimental, made by a small group, and usually in a big need of some funding, so a lot of the games the come to early access, to adjust their game to player feedback are probably indie, I think the term doesn't really fit its original meaning anymore
And even then their is a lot more to it
I like "sologamedev" more then "Indie", but it implies that developer isn't just coding, but also hiring strategic people to do for instance music or porting, as it's impossible to be good at everything. That could also mean that a "producer" that hires a 300 man team to do 3d models is a sologamedev. Maybe it's better to describe the product instead of the process, but descriptions like "artistic", "stylistic" or "cult" seem to narrow. The "literature" description seems to do the same distinguishing for books from "reading matter", so how about LUDUCATURE? Ludus is game in latin, so it should have enough gravitas. (A quick check on popular search engines seems to indicate that I just invented the word "Luducature", so ....welcome to a new phase in gaming ;)
That's the problem I have with "solo gamedev" .. because I honestly think I am... BUT I do hire someone for music. Still, that's like 1% of my game, so where do we draw the line.
I'd like to just call it a "low budget" game. But perhaps that devalues the game from the start 😂
Players don't care about indie vs AA vs AAA - that's the problem, but it's also our salvation! They dgaf if you had a $5K budget or $500M, but they expect good games, incl modern must-haves like "polish", minimal-bugs, usable, customizable UI, basic accessibility features, and yes, localizations. Influencers/press follow the views, so if players take a shine to your game, then they'll amplify.
What I've seen change over 15 or so years is that the low-bar of what players will accept has gone up. Partly it's because they have a lot more choices now, but partly this is because players are also older (US, EUR, E. Asia). Older consumers value their cash/time, but also need a little more quality-of-life/accessibility stuff than when younger. You're already tapping that pixel-era nostalgia vein, so just lean-in :) Check out the [US] AARP's GDC talk, _Age-Friendly Game Design_ and maybe reach out to streamers & bloggers who focus more on that market.
and younger audience is expecting free games or very cheaply discounted games.. we are in a no-win situation here! 😂
@@orangepixelgames Young ppl have no money - nothing new to see there :) But yeah, needs to be some balance in attitude - some stuff can be free, but we just have to figure out how people still get paid.
Great video as always 💯
👍
What's a good hashtag for one man team's that's being used? #sologamedev ???
if there is one, it's probably only used by #sologamedev's 😁 so not sure it has much use in terms of reaching an audience.
#true
I think indie no longer means anything.
Nowadays indie games can have more budget than AAA or even AAAA games. For example, Star Citizen despite being indie, has more than 600 million dollars, it is bigger than GTA, Witcher, and most AAA games.
Exactly, and that's why the video isn't really about defining the term indie, but more the expectations we now have - no matter what we call ourselves, or what our budgets are!
Hey there. I'm searching for the awesome top down open world MAD MAX style pixel game. Can't find it cause I forgot the name.
Please help me
Ashworld is what you are looking for!
Yeah a team of 5+ isn’t indie.
AA probably.
Don't think that matters :)
20y 🤯 Living the dream.
And you not indie after 20y, Im sure you know more than most AAA employes.
There should really be a term like AA for what you doing.
From what I see on these videos, your games are at the top of what AAA was back on the Amiga/Atari. Nothing indie about it.
Really question what indie even means nowerdays. Is it the size of a game? Is it the size of the studio? Quallity of game? Or just not being 100+ employees?
Generally people define it by one (or both) of the following:
1) How many people were involved in its development,
2) How much backing / funding it has. Its hard to call a game "indie" if its got $10 million funding, even if the team is small.
"Indie" is short for "Independent" so it definitely has nothing to do with how experienced the developer(s) are, the size of the game, or how good the game is.
He's a solo developer, he's about as independent as it comes - regardless of his experience...
I think the term for what I'm doing is "crazy" 😂
"Lone Shepherd Indie" ;)
Or don't comment at all lol you made my day
And still you commented 🤣😜👍
chatgpt is better for translation I think
yeah, that's what people kept telling me, so I started trying it out ;)