Defining an Indie Game Developer

NinjaBee Games writes "A continual debate rages about the nature of making independent games. 'What is Indie game development?' This argument endures throughout the year, but it's almost never heard louder than right after the announcement of finalists or winners of an Indie game development contest. The debate currently is in full swing after Microsoft's recent announcement that they will be changing the name of the Xbox Live Community Games section to Xbox Live Indie Games. In light of this important debate, Brent Fox of Indie developer NinjaBee has written a blog post in which he claims he has finally found the 'clear and undeniable' definition of Indie."

Comments

Its like music

[FTWinston]

Indie music is music published independently. Indie games are games published independently. If an indie game is taken up by a big publisher, its no longer indie.

Re:Its like music

[Canazza]

Should an indepentendly produced and published game, released in January, that then gets picked up by a publisher in July, be exempt from any Indie awards for that year given in December?

Re:Its like music

[Anonymous Coward]

If an indie developer falls in the forest, and there's no one there to hear them, are they still indie?

Re:Its like music

[bsDaemon]

If an emo kid slits is wrists, and no one is around to cover My Chemical Romance at his funeral, did the world win or lose?

Re:Its like music

[Chabo]

He was listing a bunch of reasons that people use to say that a game "isn't indie enough". Deciding whether those reasons are any good is left as an exercise for the reader.

You didn't define independently or big

[tepples]

Indie music is music published independently.

Independently of what?

If an indie game is taken up by a big publisher, its no longer indie.

For one thing, define "publisher". If Valve accepts a given developer's game for Steam, does that make Valve the "publisher"? If Microsoft accepts a given developer's game for Xbox Live Commu^W Indie Games, does that make Microsoft the "publisher"? Now define "big".

Re:You didn't define independently or big

[FTWinston]

Independently of a 3rd-party publisher. A publisher being an entity that provides money up front in exchange for rights related to the game (sales money, IP ownership, etc).
big.
Big is probably irrelevant, I used this to distinguish between the dev's grandma giving them £10 for a pizza during one night of development and EA giving them £500'000 for the rights to the game. But its a needless distinction.

Re:You didn't define independently or big

[crossmr]

a publisher also publishers the game..pays for distribution, packages the game, ships it, etc.

Re:You didn't define independently or big

[PyroMosh]

I would argue that Steam is both. Just because Valve is a publisher that allows for direct purchases, doesn't make it not a publisher.

Anyone can write an application, and put the compiled binary up on their website, and "self-publish". Steam gives exactly what a publisher does: direct access to a large distribution network. In this case, that comes in the form of a desktop client app that serves as a storefront. In the case of EA, it comes in the form of relationships with brick and mortars like Game Stop, Wal-Mart, Best Buy, and others.

Either way, I'd say it's still publishing.

What's curious is that in the indie music world, "indie" just tends to mean independent of the "major" record labels (There are four, right? I'm not a big music person). It can still be published by a record company though. Epitaph Records has been cited as an example of that. But they publish for Bad Religion, NOFX Rancid, The Offspring, Pennywise, and other relatively well known artists. That doesn't seem to stop peoplr from claling them "indie".

The problem is that there is no direct analogy to the "Big Four" in gaming. The biggest publishers would probably be the three console makers(Nintendo, Microsoft, and Sony), then a few dozen or so companies like EA, Sega, Konomi, Activision, Capcom, etc.

Oh, and throw a wrench into the works with Valve, and Steam competitors like Direct-To-Drive, etc.

I think the answer is to have different levels for these indie game competitions.

It could be by number of team members, or by dollar amount, or size of the publisher.

As for scenarios like the one someone else posited where a game is developed by a small studio in January, picked up by a major publisher like EA in June, and entered into an Indie Game Festival in October, I think what's important is what the level of support was when the game was in development. If EA funded the game, no way. But if EA only got involved after the team had a finished product, why not?

Re:You didn't define independently or big

[sammyF70]

Someone please mod parent up.

If you're develop a game (or, for that matter, create a music track/make a movie) without being paid up-front by a 3rd party for the rights to publish the final product, you're independent. As soon as you get money for the rights to publish the final product before it is even in a releasable state, you're not independent anymore, as this kind of money generally comes with its own set of limitations and set by the publisher. You are now owing a finished product for the delivered money, and it generally should conform to conditions set by the publisher ("look ... you can't show boobs! And could you please add some gore when you use a grenade?")

I would rant longer, but power outage, and my UPS is going to die soon.

Independent, not "indie"

[DNS-and-BIND]

If you're an independent game producer, then call yourself that. Calling yourself an "indie" has little actual meaning and tons of cultural meaning. It's a word like "hyper" or "nexus" that, in some people's [small] minds, makes words next to it look better. It's like how menus in China always have English on them: it's not for native speakers to read, it's so the locals will look at the English and say, "ah, English - this restaurant is international and therefore better." The quality of the product is irrelevant.

And now, you're upset because a big corp came in and sat on your made-up word. Ha-ha! What, they changed its meaning? It didn't have any meaning in the first place, other than to make words next to it look better to easily-impressed insular twits. That's what the brouhaha is all about here - not that MS is going to have a new game channel, but "they stole my cool saying! All the other hipsters at Starbucks won't think I'm cool any more!"

Re:Independent, not "indie"

[Chris Burke]

And now, you're upset because a big corp came in and sat on your made-up word. Ha-ha! What, they changed its meaning? It didn't have any meaning in the first place, other than to make words next to it look better to easily-impressed insular twits.

They're called "instwits", and I was one back when it meant something. You kids today don't know anything about self-congratulatory myopia, you think you can just blindly state that yours is the only pure form of artistic expression unsullied by corporate soul-sucking and that makes you a real instwit. Please. I was bouncing the idea of how unique and on the pulse of the times I was around an echo-chamber of like-minded pretentious blowhards while you were still battling with Suzie Stinkypants over who got the "special" blue carpet square to sit on for story time. But it wasn't special, you only thought that because a cadre of corpdroids* at the carpet factory calculated it to be "daring" and "edgy" while also not violating your burgeoning sense of conformity. That and all the others were either red or yellowish-beige.

* Now there's a word that used to mean something, too. Nowadays anyone thinks they can show a little slavish devotion to a soulless entity at the expense of their integrity and respect for their fellow man and it makes them a corpdroid. Why in my day...

Re:Noun

[cliffski]

Really?
I must have somehow been paying my rent all these years with pixie dust then. Me and the other indie devs who do game development full time all manage to pay our rents and our food bills.
Explain to me how we are not economically viable, but companies like EA who often make a net loss somehow are?

BTW, most fulltime indies do it because they have seen how badly most 'proper' companies are run. By your definition I do not have a job, nor will I ever have one again, having seen how much more efficient it is to work for yourself.

Indie Developer Definition

[Anonymous Coward]

An indie developer is the guy that says "Hey, I can code. I like video games. I should make my own video game! I have no visual or musical artistic sense, but that's just filler toward the end of the project!"

500 hours of coding later, the indie developer comes to realize that their game will fail miserably due to the fact that they underestimated how hard it would be to come across free graphic, music, and sound effect assets that reflect what the game is supposed to be.

That same indie developer then spends another handful of hours learning Blender to realize that the best they can come up with artistically is a sphere that's had its centre punched in that they euphemistically call a "bean bag chair" and try to completely retool their gameplay around that. Grand Theft Auto 5 becomes Beanbag Jumping World.

1,000 hours, many Blender exports, recording sessions in the bathroom bashing a plank of wood with a hammer to re-create the sound of wood cracking without buying some $100+ sound library and a crappy public domain tune later, they release their game on their webpage and over the next five years, approximately 3 people not related to the author check it out.

Small labels distributed by the majors

[tepples]

Anyone can write an application, and put the compiled binary up on their website, and "self-publish".

Not without a jailbreak, if your game's genre is one best displayed on the living room TV. As of 2009, video gaming on home theater PCs is still commercially insignificant, in part because most of indie game developers' potential customers aren't aware that PCs can be connected to TVs.

What's curious is that in the indie music world, "indie" just tends to mean independent of the "major" record labels (There are four, right? I'm not a big music person).

Even the smaller record labels tend to be distributed by the big labels in North America.

The problem is that there is no direct analogy to the "Big Four" in gaming.

There's a Big Three of Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft. Without their digital signature, your game is confined to the desk.

Re:Does it matter?

[tepples]

Seriously, what's the big fuss?

It has to do with the console makers' qualifications for developers. Nintendo, for one, states on its web page that it requires developers to have a leased office and previous published titles on some other platform. This means a smaller studio might not be able to port even a finished PC game to a Sony or Nintendo console or a Sony or Nintendo handheld. So I'd almost venture to define "indie" as "not qualifying for a PS2, Wii, PSP, or DS SDK".

Why do you always call him "junior"?

[Tetsujin]

Pah! Everybody knows that Indy was the dog's name!

In other news...

[denzacar]

"A continual debate rages about the nature of color blue. 'What is blue?'
Thanks to RGB and CMYK and other color models and scales we know what exactly means Cyan or 0.0.255 or 0000FF, but the common "blue" remains elusive."

Re:The definition is not rocket science

[Chabo]

I disagree. "Day job" vs "on the side" is professional vs amateur, not whether you're indie.

Indie just means you're independent; take that as you will, but to me it means that you answer to yourself. Both amateur and professional developers can be independent, depending on how much control they have over their own project(s).

Re:The definition is not rocket science

[Chabo]

with your definition most professional game developers are NOT indie either!

Well, I think that's kinda true... as someone above said, if you're paid for your work before you have a finished product, then whoever paid for the product likely has a decent amount of control over it.

I agree it's not a perfect definition, as I'm sure there will be a counterexample somewhere. Think of Valve though; despite their success and relatively large size (for a "small" game company), they are a fully independent game company. Gabe Newell and Mike Harrington founded the company with their own money, and they're still privately owned. They essentially self-publish their games through Steam, so even though EA handles their retail publication and distribution, EA doesn't really have any veto power for their content like they might for other developers.

Under many other metrics, Valve may not be an "indie" company, but in terms of control over what content goes into their games, I don't think they can be beat.