4 ms·

Games like World of Goo, Braid and Super Meat Boy really paved the way for indie games. They showed that small teams can product quality entertainment, and that

Games like World of Goo, Braid and Super Meat Boy really paved the way for indie games. They showed that small teams can product quality entertainment, and that there's a real demand for it.

LoSboccacc 8y ago
back then the indie scene was super interesting. https://experimentalgameplay.com/ https://experimentalgameplay.com/ was full of gems and igf had plenty interesting concepts too with lot less focus on trying to make them marketable.
- yani 8y ago
  Do you know why the sector did not boom?
  - LoSboccacc 8y ago
    it did boom! edit: rewrote the whole paragraph to be more clear and remove unnecessary negative connotation against mainstream indie which I do not share thanks to early experiment success and profitability indie games managed to get a lot of visibility and the genre exploded. whole business revolve now around making indies meet buyers (kickstarter, indiegogo, steam greenlight); as a compromise they lost some of the original experimental nature and gained in term of polishing and content quality. I'd say the sector transformed; it lost some innovation, gained some marketability. there's less explorative projects now and they are harder to find, but you can still find them; currently itch.io seems to be a trove of these kind of content, but the lack of curation makes hard to find anything among the pile of crap (no offence intended, it's just Sturgeon's law)
    - SketchySeaBeast 8y ago
      It also got absolutely flooded - Steam is chock-full of indie stuff, but as everything always is, 99% of it is crap, and by making it easier for a developer to get visibility, it's now virtually impossible to sift through to find the promising stuff.
      - glitcher 8y ago
        Another issue the mobile games market suffered greatly from was all of the copy-cat idea stealing. Any original idea that showed a little promise seemed to be quickly cloned by several shady studios, further complicating the issue of discovery others have mentioned.
      - ehsankia 8y ago
        It's worth pointing that there still is amazing gems in there, just last year we had games such as Into The Breach, Celeste, Obra Dinn, Gris, and many many more. But yeah, since the bar has been lowered, there's also far more crap too.
  - PhasmaFelis 8y ago
    It did! It boomed beyond anyone's expectations, and still is. The problem now is that there's so many indie games out there that it's a lot harder to get discovered.
theandrewbailey 8y ago
For me, that happened a bit earlier with Introversion's games. Theirs were some of the first third party games on Steam.
- MrMember 8y ago
  Introversion's story is pretty interesting. Early success with Uplink, then Darwinia didn't do so well, DEFCON sold amazingly well on Steam, then I'm pretty sure they were almost financially ruined by porting Darwinia to Xbox which sold extremely poorly, followed by announcing Subversion which they worked on for years but was eventually canceled, to finally the enormous critical and financial success of Prison Architect.
  - theandrewbailey 8y ago
    Their Wikipedia page has collected the story pretty well from news releases over the years. It seems that they've had a lot of "that saved the company" moments. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introversion_games https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introversion_games
mikewhy 8y ago
Can't forget Limbo. That game had a huge reach.

Games like World of Goo, Braid and Super Meat Boy really paved the way for indie games. They showed that small teams can product quality entertainment, and that there's a real demand for it.

LoSboccacc 8y ago

back then the indie scene was super interesting. https://experimentalgameplay.com/ https://experimentalgameplay.com/ was full of gems and igf had plenty interesting concepts too with lot less focus on trying to make them marketable.

yani 8y ago
Do you know why the sector did not boom?
- LoSboccacc 8y ago
  it did boom! edit: rewrote the whole paragraph to be more clear and remove unnecessary negative connotation against mainstream indie which I do not share thanks to early experiment success and profitability indie games managed to get a lot of visibility and the genre exploded. whole business revolve now around making indies meet buyers (kickstarter, indiegogo, steam greenlight); as a compromise they lost some of the original experimental nature and gained in term of polishing and content quality. I'd say the sector transformed; it lost some innovation, gained some marketability. there's less explorative projects now and they are harder to find, but you can still find them; currently itch.io seems to be a trove of these kind of content, but the lack of curation makes hard to find anything among the pile of crap (no offence intended, it's just Sturgeon's law)
  - SketchySeaBeast 8y ago
    It also got absolutely flooded - Steam is chock-full of indie stuff, but as everything always is, 99% of it is crap, and by making it easier for a developer to get visibility, it's now virtually impossible to sift through to find the promising stuff.
    - glitcher 8y ago
      Another issue the mobile games market suffered greatly from was all of the copy-cat idea stealing. Any original idea that showed a little promise seemed to be quickly cloned by several shady studios, further complicating the issue of discovery others have mentioned.
    - ehsankia 8y ago
      It's worth pointing that there still is amazing gems in there, just last year we had games such as Into The Breach, Celeste, Obra Dinn, Gris, and many many more. But yeah, since the bar has been lowered, there's also far more crap too.
- PhasmaFelis 8y ago
  It did! It boomed beyond anyone's expectations, and still is. The problem now is that there's so many indie games out there that it's a lot harder to get discovered.

theandrewbailey 8y ago

For me, that happened a bit earlier with Introversion's games. Theirs were some of the first third party games on Steam.

MrMember 8y ago
Introversion's story is pretty interesting. Early success with Uplink, then Darwinia didn't do so well, DEFCON sold amazingly well on Steam, then I'm pretty sure they were almost financially ruined by porting Darwinia to Xbox which sold extremely poorly, followed by announcing Subversion which they worked on for years but was eventually canceled, to finally the enormous critical and financial success of Prison Architect.
- theandrewbailey 8y ago
  Their Wikipedia page has collected the story pretty well from news releases over the years. It seems that they've had a lot of "that saved the company" moments. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introversion_games https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introversion_games

mikewhy 8y ago

Can't forget Limbo. That game had a huge reach.