The Rise Of The Indie Generation

I’m sitting, mouth agape, watching the credits of The Fall roll by. It’s a rare occasion when a game makes me stop and just stare at the screen – especially following 2014, the Chinese year of the disappointed gamer.

It got me thinking: so many AAA games disappointed last year and some were simply steaming piles of rubbish. It got me riled up enough that I lobbied to have the notion of pre-ordering stopped forever. I couldn’t, however, name an indie game that I had played that year that I hadn’t enjoyed thoroughly.

Granted, the flawed nature of Steam’s Early Access often lets abominations labelled “games” through its filter. So many, though, more were gems that I enjoyed far more than most of the AAA titles I bought. NidHogg, Mount Your Friends, Broken Age, Never Alone, This War of Mine, Tomb of the Necrodancer, The Fall; the list is much longer than enjoyable major titles I can mention.

Is it perhaps a case of too many developers spoil the game? Indie games are the labour of small teams – often just one person – and they’re labours of love. Indie devs are (well, apart from notable exceptions) people who have part-time jobs squeezing a few hours in here and there because they love games and want nothing more than their creation to be recognised and played.

On the other hand we have up to 10 teams at a time, full time, working on separate aspects of a game for months on end. Is it really a surprise that when they slam these parts together they don’t gel properly?

Alex, I can hear you thinking, AAA games are massive projects, much larger than tiny indie games! You’re right, of course, the amount of development, research, marketing and man hours that go into the creation of a major title dwarf that of a 2-3 hour indie game. In that respect of course there is more to get wrong. I put to you, though, that with such resources at their disposal, surely they should be able to carry out at least a hint of a bug-check on their titles?

Game studios like Ubisoft have emerged to apologise, in their case for the mess that was Assassin’s Creed Unity, for the awful products they pump out on release days. Ubisoft in particular promised that it would perform a post-mortem on AC:U to work out what went wrong. It baffles, though, that one person didn’t notice that the game (to carry the corpse metaphor) smelled particularly rotten before they shipped it.

There was a time, when I was younger, that I turned my nose up at indie games in favour of larger titles. Perhaps it’s a sign of my maturity that I now scour Steam for the next gem I can find, or perhaps it’s down to the sheer fact that a working week leaves me with little time to get involved in a 10-15 hour game. Either way, smaller titles are an excellent way for me to get half an hour’s sheer enjoyment here or there.

It remains that indie games have seen an inexorable rise in popularity and coverage, and long may that continue. As long as developers have the confidence that their brainchild will have a chance in the market, instead of being casually dismissed, we will continue to see fantastic games appear out of nowhere and shoot straight into our hearts.

These games have reduced my gaming experience back to what it was supposed to be – fun. Instead of sighing at bugs or facepalming at dialogue, messy half-finished textures or day one DLC, I’m sat at my computer grinning like an idiot – isn’t that what gaming should be about?