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.'"

Comments

Expo

[Niris]

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.

Re:Welcome...

[Jesus_666]

Well, "indie" comes from "independent" (as far as I know). Yes, it does have a number of more or less vaguely defined additional connotations depending on who you ask but the most basic definition is "a game released by a person or company not affiliated with a traditional publisher". Currently, self-publishing is a rather popular thing and we will see a number of new game development companies arise from this (cf. Mojang), some of which will subsequently be acquired by big publishers. Later, the current indie wave will come to an end.

That doesn't mean that independent game development will come to a screeching halt, possession of a 3D engine will be outlawed for noncorporate entities and someone will burn all copies of "The C++ Programming Language" out of fear of the language being used for unsanctioned game development. It just means that starting your own video game company will be less attractive for a while until the next indie wave starts. There will always be hobbyist game developers. There will always be people writing and selling their own games. There just won't be a big deluge of them for a while.


I think, however, that you're conflating indie games with freeware games and are critical of anyone who sells their games and dares call them "indie", similar to how a music band is either "underground" or "a sellout" according to some people. However, not everyone agrees that "indie" automatically implies "freeware"; to many it just means "without a traditional publisher" - or "independent", if you will.