Forget Innovation From The Indies

spidweb writes "RPGVault has an article from a long-time indie game author about how people who want innovation in games shouldn't look to the small developers. It is his view that innovation in games will come from big companies, if at all. From the article: 'Indie developers have a real purpose in this world. They make little niche products for markets too small for Activision. They make many new puzzle games for the casual audience. Or, at least, the same old puzzle game again and again. They rewrite Asteroids... because someone has to.'"

Comments

what?

[PixelThis]

Because some indie game developers don't innovate, nobody does? What a bizarre notion... historically most innovation has come from the little guys who've been in turn bought out by (or turned into) some larger company.

Re:"The Indies" ?

[AKAImBatman]

Don't worry, I thought the same thing. My first reaction was, "I wasn't aware that Game Development had been outsourced to India in the first place!"

I think we need to make the terms "Indie Developers" and "Indie Studios" the standard to prevent confusion with terms like "The East Indies." Then again, with the current state of common geographical knowledge in the US today, perhaps it doesn't matter. :-P

this can't be reconciled with the facts

[Zork the Almighty]

This guy is out to lunch. He mentions Gish, but how about games like Darwinia ? The reason people look to indie developers is that there are so many of them, and 90% of of everything is crap. So if I had to choose between looking at five big companies and 1000's of small ones, where would I look ? Well I guess it depends on how many games the big companies crank out, which is not many, because they cost so much money. So even though there are 100 tetris clones the indie scene is the place to look to find quirky, original games. Very much like open source and it's thousands of text editors. There's got to be one good program in there, right ?

A note from the author.

[spidweb]

The responses to my article weren't surprising. People have a lot emotionally invested in the whole "Indie idea."

I appreciate the examples of innovative games from Indies. Even if many of them came from the days when dinosaurs ruled the Earth. SimCity and Doom are not relevant to a discussion about the world Today.

But I'm still right. A huge chunk of the really innovative stuff is coming from the big studios. I'm thinking of The Sims/Sims 2/Sims Online. (EA) The Movies. (Activision) Spore, if it works. (EA) Guild Wars. (NCSoft) And I didn't even mention any console games. (I should get 2 bonus points for not bringing up Katamari Damacy.)

Because of space limitations, I regret I couldn't mention Darwinia. (Incremental innovation in quality visuals.) Or Tale In the Desert. (Which is one valid argument against my point of view. I hope one day to see another.)

I'm not saying Indies suck. Obviously. I am one. But I am saying that people shouldn't fetishize them. They're people with small budgets and bills to pay. And that's why they write 50 retro-arcade games and puzzle clones for every one game with any claim to creativity. Because they have to.

- Jeff Vogel
http://www.spiderwebsoftware.com/