- Explain and showcase examples of key concepts of the indie game concept
The key concept of indie games are:
- Independent
- Low budget
- Intellectual
‘Independent/Indie’ means the team doesn’t belong to any company such as Sony, Nintendo or Ubisoft, and they publish their digital products onto certain websites, for example, Steam and Xbox game store (Indie game, Wikipedia).
However, independent means that the team rarely have any strong background to support their products, and no publisher. This will be a tough circumstance for them, because of low recognition and user credibility. ‘Super meat boy’ is a good example of showing these cases (Super meat boy, Development and Marketing).
Another major problem of being independent, is low budget (It can be as low as $5000) (How low can an indie game’s budget be? Responded by rilpas). It means that the team doesn’t have enough money to produce a product which has the same standard as GTA 5. Games like ‘Super meat boy’, ‘Shank’ and ‘Don’t Starve’ are mainly 2D because according to the budget, the 2D cartoony style is the best method for Indie game development to produce and present.
So how can the Indie games become out of the ordinary? It is because of the intellectual ideas that brought out from the games, ‘Braid’ is a typical example. In Braid, players have to complete levels by going backward the time which gives the game more ways to complete (Braid (video game), Wikipedia).
In conclusion, Indie games are now becoming more and more popular and start turning to a terminology to describe quirky game development teams who prefer to not work for a major company.
References:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indie_game
http://buy.indiegamethemovie.com/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Meat_Boy
https://www.gamespot.com/forums/system-wars-314159282/how-low-can-an-indie-games-budget-be-29373768/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braid_(video_game)
- Has the term indie become meaningless?
Yes, it has.
The term ‘Indie’ used to be a description of a small independent pop group (Oxford dictionaries), but nowadays people start to use the term to describe an independent team/group/person of creating games.
However, a prominent game publisher, EA released an ‘EA indie bundle’ on steam to cater to a niche market (EA Indie Bundle released on Steam. Wait, what? By Henry Winchester).
So what does this mean for the game industry? The answer was given from an article: ‘To be an independent game developer and to be an indie game developer are two different things now.’ (Opinion: Why ‘Indie’ Has Become A Bad Word’ by Nathan Grayson) As it quickly becomes a genre, indie brings out thoughts of ‘intellectual’, ‘creative’, ‘experimental’ and ‘pretentious’, but so does the independent developer who has a publisher behind, for example, ‘Minecraft’ was created by a one man studio, and the developer (Minecraft, Wikipedia), Notch, created a company called Mojang because he wants to make sure he can develop Minecraft independently rather than work for a major game studio, but in 2014 Mojang was acquired by Microsoft (Notch, Wikipedia), so all the add-ons on Minecraft after acquisition still counts as updates from indie developers or it becomes something from the independent developers?
The first picture is from Minecraft App store, the second picture is from Minecraft Official website
In my opinion, indie could be a description of the situation of a studio but not as a genre, for example, an indie group could make a 2D ACT game but so does EA, even though the term indie brings the essence of a niche and intelligent production, it still functions as any other game.
References:
https://minecraft.net/zh-hans/
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/minecraft-apple-tv-edition/id1164598841?mt=8
http://www.pcgamer.com/ea-indie-bundle-released-on-steam-wait-what/
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/05/03/why-indie-has-become-a-bad-word/
https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/indie