Has "Indie" ruined gaming?

[Guts]

Indie games are like a bag of revels, but a bag of revels 95% made up of those vomit inducing coffee ones. It's always a relief when you get the chocolate one instead, but it doesn't happen often enough. Or something.

I'd say it's the same for the "AAA" titles. 95% crap/boring/mediocre/Assassin's Creed with the occasional, truly tasty treat there.

As for topic, indies have certainly done more good than bad for the industry as a whole. Without indies we'd only get the Assassin's Creed, Call of Duty and FIFA every year.

[Pikate]

I'd say it's the same for the "AAA" titles. 95% crap/boring/mediocre/Assassin's Creed with the occasional, truly tasty treat there.

As for topic, indies have certainly done more good than bad for the industry as a whole. Without indies we'd only get the Assassin's Creed, Call of Duty and FIFA every year.

Yeah but most of the 95% of publisher stuff being "crap" is that we're not the market for it or we just don't like Just Dance/Cooking Mama/Assassins Creed/Call of Duty/Need for Speed (delete as applicable) and their clones or we have a preferred franchise/developer when we do like the genre...

Indie games are pretty much 95% 2D Platformers and I love those, in the beginning I bought and enjoyed a lot of indie ones yet increasingly they are/appear to be pants.

Also I think Super Meat Boy, Castle Crashers, Braid, Limbo and Fez were all funded/published by Microsoft to some degree which according to what I read, the "Indie" model has moved away from in favour of just universally reducing the barriers for indies to launch games on the stores, which is why I wonder if Indie hasn't delivered. It is easy to point to "No Man's Sky" or The Astronauts as a developer but neither of those have actually released yet, we've seen so many even publisher backed games with overly ambitious devs or that end up stuck in development for generations and then release broken (look at Fez and that's nowhere near as complex as these games).

Not that I'm saying Indie is bad/broken, I just don't see anything to show that the scene has delivered on the promise of that first wave of Braid/Limbo/Fez and maybe that market is stopping people like "The Astronauts" (and others who don't want to risk the indie model gamble) finding a traditional publisher in the way Media Molecule or Clover Studios/Platinum Games did before Microsoft started their Indie courtship. Again, I'm not pretending I know enough to make judgements, I just think the discussion is interesting.

[Guts]

Indie games are pretty much 95% 2D Platformers and I love those, in the beginning I bought and enjoyed a lot of indie ones yet increasingly they are/appear to be pants.

Oh I agree, but that happens when something gets "big" like indie gaming has now. There'll be a lot more people trying to make money and because of that, there'll be a lot of **** released because of the volume and because not everyone is going to be the next Jonathan Blow.

It's the same with everything. When Nintendo first released the Wii people were fascinated by the simple, yet fun Wii Sports, which brought motion gaming to the masses, but my god what an amount of crappy, motion-controlled games that spawned and quickly almost killed whole motion control gaming thing.

Btw. there are quite a few indie RPGs and point-and-click adventure games but they're mostly on the PC.

[nakamura]

all i want is just get rid of those pixel sprite games i just find a lot of them really lazy and do not have there own aesthetic and not really true to the retro spirit (many games look worse then games i have seen in 16 bit 8 bit era) i did like shovel knight though as i felt that had the spirit of a nes game

Ugh. Most of them are horrible and flat looking.

[Neon Ignition]

Toffee Revels are the king. It was the introduction of raisen Revels that killed my interest in them, literally won't buy a packet anymore. Indi is very much just another area of gaming at this point. As with the main arena of big publisher titles, many have spotted what's been popular and ape it so the experimentation has dropped somewhat. There's still 6-7 really interesting games per year from it though on one format or another though which is really all you need.

[Shozuki]

interesting topic of discussion. I personally hadn't gotten into a single indie game until Shovel Knight. That was class. Generally speaking though I don't care for indie games, and miss the indie/B tier games of yesteryear i.e Godhand, Gungrave and Extermination. Granted all those are PS2 games, but that was the B tier console/generation. imo of course!

Don't me started on f****** mobile games!?! That is the frigging scourge of the recent gaming scene or the coffee Revel lol. Yuck!

[Sam The Man]

The 2 things Indie's need to stop being as much of are 2D and 2 short. I feel there are 2 much of these 2 types of Indies. Thats my 2nd short rant over!

[fishbowlhead]

interesting topic of discussion. I personally hadn't gotten into a single indie game until Shovel Knight. That was class. Generally speaking though I don't care for indie games, and miss the indie/B tier games of yesteryear i.e Godhand, Gungrave and Extermination. Granted all those are PS2 games, but that was the B tier console/generation. imo of course!

Don't me started on f****** mobile games!?! That is the frigging scourge of the recent gaming scene or the coffee Revel lol. Yuck!

Unfortunately those types of b tier games you mentions, that im also a huge fan of especially godhand, cost quite a bit to produce for very little return, companies just aren't interested in loosing money on games like that anymore, they want blockbuster returns or cheap and cheerful. Of course it doesn't always work out like that for them but you get my point.

Mobile gaming can go die in a small hole.

[VR46]

Not read all posts here, I find I would dither more over an eight quid PSN Indie game than a retail AAA release for example - mainly due to the non-trade in factor if I don't enjoy it.
Don't think I will ever buy an Indie game on release day again, will always wait for a few reviews to appear. Just taking a stab in the dark otherwise.

[Duncan James Waugh]

As budgets have increase on triple A titles in the last generation personally I feel we've seen a high amount of dumbing down to cater to larger demographics.

Indie games, by having a smaller budget, can successfully cater to more niche markets. I think the core gamers, of which I'd say a lot of people on this site are, are rapidly becoming one of those niche groups.

Kids today were brought up on this dumbed down, no gamer left behind mentality and they are fast becoming the major target group for the big publishers.

[BaronSqwelch]

Indies haven't ruined gaming for me.
However...PS+ has ruined me for indie games.

Won't buy another again as they all turn up free....or massively discounted in no time.

[nakamura]

No different to Steam really.

[eastyy]

dunno if this is just me but when i see a game like super time force on xbox one or hotline miami on ps4 there is a part in my mind that thinks why would i get a powerful next gen console for that ?

[BaronSqwelch]

No different to Steam really.

Steam doesn't give you them free the week they come out tho.

[Lebowski]

indie games are one of the most innovative and interesting areas in gaming at the moment, its not all retro for the sake of retro, off the top of my head i can think of a ton of games that have had interesting new mechanics and artstyles

Gone home, Dear Ester, The Stanley Parable, Walking Mars, hell even portal started out as a indie game made by a small team before Valve took them under there wing, then there's all the excellent stuff like Fez, Journey, Flower, Braid, and Limbo, to name but a small handful of excellent small budget indie games.

I think your confusing b tier stuff with indies though Godhand Okami ect had big budgets and where supposed to be big sellers, to say we don't still get stuff like that still isn't true either, upcoming big budget games like Ryme and The Witness look like they are gonna bridge this gap.