Slashdot Mirror
Indies the Biggest Stars At Game Developers Conference
RougeFemme writes "Indies beat out mainstream studios for most of the Game Developers Choice Awards. FTL: Faster Than Light, an independent game financed by a Kickstarter campaign, won the award for Best Debut. Because of the growing success of the indies, Eric Zimmerman, game designer and instructor at the NYU Game Center, is canceling the Game Design Challenge that he's held at the conference for the last 10 years. 'The idea of doing strange, bizarre, experimental games is no longer strange, bizarre or experimental.'"
Or children of Indiana Jones? :-)
One of the early tests of this RFID b.s. is where a student protested in wearing an RFID 'badge'. If I recall, in the end the student was forced to wear it. These small steps in mandatory RFID and the love of using smartphones for payments and more will drive us to the MARK OF THE BEAST WHICH YOU MUST NOT TAKE!
IMO Google Glass will be the first step in techie peer pressure. If everyone has one, why don't you? How many people will look at you every day as they have the devices and you don't and upload your photo to a Facebook like data base.
Just like in the episode of Star Trek TNG : "The Game", I believe there will be a market for 'fake' Google Glasses to blend in without participating. But Google could be ready for that and it could eventually lead to mesh computing and auto verification/pings between Google Glass users to ensure they are all 'in the machine'.
...to the death of indie games. I've released an indie game on xbl and was pretty proud of it. I didn't get rich, I didn't win awards, I did it to make something fun. Indie games now are a rebirth of the games industry and really are no longer "indie" but rather small game development shops. The idea of being indie for me was to be against the regular establishment of publishing, development houses, big budget games. It seems the evolution of indie games will eventually prove that they are, by definition, no longer indie.
I wonder if it had to do with all the big dev's firing CEOs due to idiotic plans to make a product that they can milk for money, rather than a game they can sell to people for that same money
Defender of Microsoft and Communism!!!
Hmm, interesting concept for FTL. Sounds awfully like Psi 5 Trading for the C64.
... is there something subtle I'm missing? Did samzenpus forget something? Maybe it wasn't really samzenpus posting.
wrong thread
I was actually lucky enough to have been there on Friday for the expo portion with a student pass, and I have to say the big companies didn't really show up for that portion. Sony and Microsoft had very light presence at the expo, despite having larger booths. Intel and AMD, along with various smaller vendors for something cloud based or app marketing based (that's about all there was in the small business area, apart from marmalade and corona). However, aside from there not being a big large business presence, the indie games were pretty awesome. I'm definitely going to buy Starforge this week because it was a mix of Halo and Minecraft, and I loved it.
Sometimes I want something bigger. Sometimes I want to have a lot of voice acting and a story arc that takes a trilogy to iron out. At some point I want to see someone "do Skyrim right" where the stories all intertwine and actually matter wrt each other.
Indies are great, but not everything needs to be like indies. Comics are great but I'd still like to read books. Harry Potter books are great but not every story needs to read and flow like Harry Potter. Games like Journey are great, but that doesn't mean everything needs to be like Journey etc. etc.
Where is my April Fool's? Huh? Huh!?!? *cries*
So, aside from this being a likely April Fools' article...
The best dissertation on the "indie" phenomon I've yet seen:
http://www.homestarrunner.com/sbemail203.html
I do like a fair number of indie games, of course...but there's something to be said for the established mores of "professionalism."
Indy in the context of computer games just means done outside of the publishing industry. Most games, particularly big budget games, are financed and controlled through publishers. A company like EA, MS, 2K, etc puts up the money, either to a studio they own or another studio, to make a game. They then own all the rights and distribution for it.
Indy games are when a company, or maybe just a programmer, goes and makes their own game, no publishers involved. The size and budget can really vary. For example one of the games, listed, FTL, was written by two dudes in China, and they hired another guy to do the music. On the flip side there is a game like Wasteland (not yet released) that has a sizable studio behind it, but is entirely financed through Kickstarter and thus is independent of any publishers.
It's not so much a question of professional vs not, but a question of funding and development models. You can see professional and unprofessional results in both cases. You probably see more unprofessional results with indy games since, well, anyone can release an indy game you just need to write one and stick it on the net.
The main difference though is assets and homogeneity. Games from publishers with big budgets have more assets than indy games, like full voice acting, higher detail art, all that kind of thing. They can afford more of it so they have more of it. They also tend to be more homogeneous. There's a big outlay of money, thus a big risk, so publishers want to stick with formulas proven to work. They are unlikely to take too many risks, do too much different.
I would say sexism is the biggest star of GDC 2013. It was the hottest topic that never went away, the entire GDC. It culminated in the fantastic moment, recorded int he following youtube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4t_0sTq1hIo
In it, the poem "John Romero's Wives" (a reference to how journalists have occasionally written about Brenda Brathwaite merely as Romero's wife, despite being a respected and accomplished game designer of thirty years), written by gaming blogger Cara Ellison about how hard the video game industry is on women, and how hard gamers are on women, and how games are only about breasts, and about how women are about to be raped at every turn at game and developer conferences is read before an audience at GDC, by indie game developer "Anna Anthropy" (a pre-op, I believe, man).
I have been a constant supporter of getting more women into games (if they want to be) and into the tech and gaming industry (if they want to be) and against them being mistreated as anything other than any other human being would be in the same situations. However, I have kind of lost it after that video. I have given money to causes, spoken up for charities, and held the line in discussions with pig-nosed sexist stubborn morons. That was where I had to draw the line, though. . . . and hearing a tranny give an impassioned poetry reading about how hard it is for him and all the other women in this sexist and misogynist industry and hobby. Not that I have anything against trannies. I understand that gender is a serious issue for a lot of people and who am I to say what gender you really feel like inside? (And there have been documented occurrences where hermaphrodites have one set of genitals removed as children, but as they grow up they discover that they really feel internally like a gender other than those of the genitals that were kept, so I can see how varieties of this could exist without the hermaphroditic aspect). I mean, seriously, that is quite LITERALLY a man complaining about sexism as a woman being cheered on by an audience full of men and women for standing up for women by sharing his experiences of being mistreated and judged because he is a . . . woman (with comments like how dare people sometimes say he isn't a woman, just because he has man-parts).
It's baffling and kind of.. fuck it, I don't even know. I sympathize with the sexism thing. I sympathize with the mistreatment of transgendered persons thing. But those are separate things. How the fuck is it misogyny when you're not even a woman?!
Background:
http://www.auntiepixelante.com/?p=1985&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=romeros-wives
The poem:
There comes a time when you’re more angry than tired
There comes a point where sitting in silence is more terrifying than standing and speaking
The games industry is a man in love with his libido
I have a libido
Had to be joked away at conferences
Had to be scrolled past on internet forums
Had to be hissed under your breath
Had to be leant over a keyboard at 3am
Had to be seen in the statistics
Had to be segregated in schools
Had to be guided away from the sciences
Had to be a self-taught programmer
Our apathy and the games industry are in cahoots
Had to be Jenn Frank’s endless patience
Had to be Leigh Alexander on a Bombcast
Had to be Mattie Brice making a game so she could finally be the main character
Had to be Mattie’s game misattributed to Merritt Kopas
Had to be Merritt’s game misattributed to me
Had to be unable to make room for more than one trans game designer
Had to be Lara Croft shipwrecked on an island of rapists
Had to be David Cage’s sex bot begging for her life
Had to be protected by a man
Had to be marooned on Makeb
Had to be games where women moan w
The biggest thing there was Oculus Rift by a longshot. 2.5 hour wait to try it for a few minutes. Granted, GDC is not a consumer focused show, but I've never seen a crowd like that for something at GDC before.
ralphbarbagallo.com
But I do thing stupid using the same terminology to refer to companies/studios that self publish and people who just develop/publish games as a hobby.
After CronoCloud pointed out this confusion to me several months ago, I have started using two different words for these groups: "startups" and "amateurs"/"hobbyists" respectively. Amateurs develop games as a hobby; startups develop games with the aim of recouping the budget. In fact, one could make an argument that there's a huge divide between a startup of people who have worked game industry for years and a startup of developers switching from some other field to games (like Stardock). This makes three identifiable groups: amateurs, inexperienced startups, and industry alumni startups. Console makers have traditionally catered only to experienced startups.
I don't know what grandparent is opposed to, but I'm opposed to the fact that every platform that ships with a gamepad appears to require a digital signature before a game will run, and qualifying to get your game signed requires experience in the commercial video game industry. The indie-friendly stationary gaming platform (PC) ships with a mouse and keyboard, and the indie-friendly handheld platform (mobile phones) ships with a flat sheet of glass. These stock controllers work well for some genres but not for others, and Slashdot users have told me that people aren't willing to buy what's needed to play an indie game in a gamepad genre (a second PC for the TV room, or a clip-on Bluetooth gamepad for a phone).
You didn't need a big budget to program for your computer. Problem has been the cost of programming on consoles was high
Ideally, indies would just program for PCs and phones and leave the consoles and their restrictions behind. But it appears that console owners are the only market of people who actually buy games in some genres. I gather that apart from the geek demographic that frequents Reddit, Slashdot, and AVS Forum, not very many people are willing to connect a PC to a big enough monitor for two to four people to fit around. I haven't even seen anybody using a Bluetooth gamepad to play a game on a phone.
I thought "homebrew" referred to "freeware executed through a jailbreak". Wii homebrew, for example, has used any of several jailbreaks to execute, such as Twilight Hack (LoZ:TP savegame exploit), Bannerbomb/LetterBomb (Wii Menu exploit), and Smash Stack (Brawl savegame exploit). Given the ease of patching the exploits that enable jailbreaks (remember PSP cat and mouse?) and of suing sellers of products that rely on jailbreaks (remember Lik Sang?), I don't see how any game developed with the expectation of recouping its budget can be confidently released through the jailbreak route to market.
The main difference though is assets and homogeneity.
That and the fact that consoles have traditionally been the only hardware on which people expect to play certain genres, such as fighting games and other genres that rely on same-screen multiplayer.
a second PC for the TV room, or a clip-on Bluetooth gamepad for a phone
A bluetooth gamepad makes sense for the PC too, rather than buying a whole new PC.
Not if the PC and TV are in separate rooms. To quote adolf: "I'm not lugging my desktop between rooms or stringing destructive ground-loop-ridden HDMI cables around the house so I can play a game on my PC on my [big TV] in my living room."
- IF YOU'RE NOT INDIE...
- Indie Man
...so this has been going on for some years.
... are crap. While I enjoyed FTL and thought it was one of the few indie games worth anything. Most indie games are worse then NES/SNES/PC games from 20 years ago.
The reality is the middle market for game development is coming back via kickstarter and indie games were really mostly smaller developers attempt to push mostly crapware on a gullible consumer base that will eat garbage if they propagandize properly via popular gaming sites.
The internet is a bizarre echochamber of gullible morons when it comes to gaming and you especially see this with how games have become homogenized as they've gotten more popular with the masses. For us expert gamers, gaming has really gone to shit everything has become lowest common denominator. Oldsters like myself hope to see a bit of a renewal of more complex games via kickstarter but most of us older geeks are taking a wait and see approach to see how it will all pan out given the limited funds for projects like PA.
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/659943965/planetary-annihilation-a-next-generation-rts
Thnaks. Soccer Team Uniforms