Successful indies helping out the indie industry is the only way it'll grow, a big award show that gets people's eyes is the kind of marketing most developers could only dream of. But they a really going to have to treat each nomination as a commercial, people need to be sold on these games

Assuming they don't just pick the devs that were already thinking of. If it's just that then it's probably pointless

[–] [email protected] 35 points 8 months ago (2 children)

The only way it will grow? Man, the indie scene was pretty much non existent 20 years ago and now it rivals major studios in number of concurrent players

[–] echo64 10 points 8 months ago

Yeah, and it's pretty much hit a wall. Both because of massive oversaturation causing people to not be able to find new interesting things amongst the 100 new titles released daily, ans because indy studios can't find any funding at all anymore.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

Oh, it's always been around. Before the Internet even... It's always been there, hell as a kid I jailbroke my PSP and loaded it up homebrew games, some of them were quite good.

And before that, there were no AAA studios, there was only indie. Doom was made by an indie studio, Minecraft was indie, flash games were indie, even the original text mmorpgs played over arpanet were indie

They've always been there, often pushing the boundaries and trailblazing. It may not have been mainstream, but it's always been at the forefront of gaming, trying new things and trailblazing

Three things are different now - it's far easier to advertise and sell indie games, powerful tools are more available to the common person than ever, and modern gaming is getting worse by the day

Which is great, but also a double edged sword. Games (even fairly simple games) take a long time to make - like years if you do it consistently in your free time, or months going full time.

Early Access was great for this - you could put up the prototype, then raise the money and support to quit your job and hire an artist to flesh it out. But if everything is early access, nothing is.

Conversely, if you go into game dev communities (haven't found any great ones since I left that site), you hear all about people dropping $1500 for marketing that does nothing, because indie gamers tend to like indie style social media, and mainstream gamers you can easily pay to reach don't really like indie games

Skill with social media is key to a successful indie game, but there's not a lot of crossover between that and making a good game

So this kind of thing is huge - if piratesoftware recommends a game I'll at least look at it, because I respect his opinion on game design. If I see an ad, store page, or random clip of a game, I'm unlikely to look at it

Indie gaming doesn't need this because indie games are rare, it needs it because it's so difficult to find the hidden gems buried in mountains of mediocre games

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

I nominate Daniel Mullins for III god award!