We’re Celebrating the Wrong Indie Games

Look, there's a comment section! Hmm... writing comments under videos is said to boost the video in the algorithm. I wonder if that's somehow relevant here? Let's write a comment! Perhaps I can use this keyboard to type my comment? I typed a comment using this keyboard! If I press 'enter' now, it will appear underneath the video in the comment section. Let's try that! My comment appeared under the video in its comment section! Now I have to wait for others to read it. Hmm, should I go watch the rest of the video in the meantime? Let's go watch the rest of the video while I wait! Wow! The video is playing again and I'm watching it!

"You're not fully in control of the cat." So, they went for realism.

I just want to add the small counterpoint that indie games have no specific onus upon them to explore new mechanics, ideas, or themes. Stardew Valley is a ideal refinement of decades-old mechanics, and it's great! The entire boomer-shooter genre is profoundly deriviative, and that's the whole point of them! Just because a game is unoriginal doesn't mean it's bad, and furthermore, it's still very possible to tell deep personal stories with well-worn genres. I love inventive and genre-breaking games too, but it feels inappropriate to measure all games (indie and otherwise) by that yardstick.

Ive never taken the game awards too seriously because it doesn't reward the best games it just rewards the most popular.

"They're rough when Triple-A is polished" Ah yes, what I most associate with Triple-A game development, polish and definitely not rushing a game to meet a deadline under crunch.

got to "the opening scene of stray is exactly my shit", and said out loud, "you should play rain world!!!". got to "it's the exact opening sequence of rain world!" and said "oh!". got to "because of that one annoying friend that rants at you about it constantly" and said "oh..." edit, now that i've actually finished the video: you're never gonna guess what that "favorite underrated indie gem" is...

I don't think I agree that indie games "should" be arbitrarily counter to AAA trends. Subversiveness, newness, surprise, these aren't the only value of art. Indie games can be anything; that's part of how they create such variety of mechanics and style. But I think it's wrong to say that's the only thing they can do. Refining, replicating, practicing, elaborating, expanding-- these are all things art, be it games or stories or any other medium, can do, and they all have value, and exist as part of an ecosystem that feeds itself. If no one ever wanted to ruminate on existing trends, mechanics, and story beats, we would all be much worse off, no matter what kind of game we prefer playing. It's actually a bit maddening, because you yourself talked about wanting replication! You wanted Stray to give you the experience and atmosphere of Rain World! Is replication somehow more valid because it's replicating indie? Is it just because the 'original'-- in the form you recognize-- is newer and thus isn't "overdone" yet? Or, is it simply because that's the experience you like most, and you were disappointed to end up with something you like less? Actually, that also rubbed me wrong on the reviewer section. You criticized these game journalists... for disclosing their biases and personal favoritism toward the content of what they were reviewing. I'm sure it did taint the rest of their reviews, as did the fact that they're for-profit reviewers under publications with editors and format requirements, probably writing on shit deadlines. Do you really expect and want reviewers to cut their voice out of their reviews entirely? Or do you just find their enthusiasm on this subject embarrassing, because you don't understand "cat people" and you don't share that enthusiasm? Would you react the same if reviewers for an otome game said "I'm a sucker for cheesy romance, so as soon as I saw the first encounter with Romance Candidate 1 I was like, 'sign me up!'"? Some of these questions may seem like passive-aggressive rhetorical devices intended to make you seem or feel stupid. I mean these questions sincerely. I feel like there's things worth interrogating further in your complaints and arguments here. I don't have to agree with the conclusions you come to; the questions are, I think, still worth asking. I'll also say, game awards an entirely different kettle of fish. It's reasonable to ask them to find and hold consistent standards, if they want to be taken seriously as an industry and consumer metric. I also don't think we should ever take an industry award show as a sincere metric for any measure of quality. That may be a controversial take, and I'm not saying that I see no value in award shows at all, but invariably, these awards-- Oscars, Hugos, Pulitzer, GotY-- bend to outside pressures, profit motives, and the force of popularity, as well as the constraints of time and resources. Expecting them to be a measure of objective quality, or a way to find hidden gems or raw experimentation, is a comical exercise in futility. Games have to get popular first before they hit an award show. They're never going to have that many sharp edges, because anything too unwelcoming or unfamiliar is not going to get the wide audience interest necessary to get to an award show. It sounds to me, from your closing statements, that what you want has much less to do with what is or isn't indie, much less to do with what an award show says, and a great deal more to do with, "how do we foster the material conditions for experimentation in art to continue to thrive?" Policing or restricting the term "indie" isn't going to do that. Indie devs lean on for-profit structures like publishing and funding drives (largely) not out of greed or dispassion for their art and craft, but because they need to survive and thrive in order to make art. Freeware is dormant not because people don't care about free games and not because people don't want to make free games, but because that system is actually incredibly limiting for who can make games and what games they can make. The system as it is rewards big, polished, formulaic games because those are what make money right now, and money is the system's metric for success. If you want to see more games do other things, we need to build different systems, and that's a much broader and more complicated topic than "does having a publisher preclude you from being indie" alone.

I just finished Dave the Diver last week. I'd agree that they went a little overboard on the minigames, but most of them were fairly short, refreshing breaks from the typical cycles you go through in the game. The fish farm also absolutely does not make it so that you don't need to dive, at least not without dedicating tons of money and time towads upgrading it and collecting the appropriate fish roe (which is a lot, and they are't guranteed to drop). I think DtD is the way it is because of scope creep. The devs probably just kept thinking "hey, this'd be a neat thing to add to the game" and eventually ran out of appropriate places to add said things given the sheer volume of them. The farming was annoying, I'll give you that, but I have very few problems with the rest of the game.

I'd add "Indie in Spirit" to the very long list of reasons that Geoff Keighley is talking out of his arse.

I think part of the issue with how the whole subject is viewed is that there are only two categories of games, indie or AAA. It's treated as a dichotomy. There are so many games, like Dave the Diver or Stray, that really don't fit cleanly into either category, they are neither Indie nor AAA. I think it would be more helpful to think about and talk about the whole thing as a spectrum instead, but I doubt that nuance will ever come to be common.

Also, I feel like the Indie/AAA distinction we have now has a lot to do with the 08 market crash and how it killed the AA developer scene that exists from that time. I think a lot of these games like Dave The Diver or Hades are us seeing the AA dev starting to come back, just being born out of the Indie movement that kept a lot of them alive or that those new players had to grow up in in an age where big publishers and developers became SUPER RISK ADVERSE for like 2 decades.

in fairness to stray, the pre release trailers made it clear you were a cat in a cyberpunk fallen world with humanoids to interact with. much less of a bait and switch than dave the diver

“It’s like if Death Stranding had a drone that you could send out to deliver packages for you” Yeah, that’s in the game lmao

All of the things you're describing were almost certainly put into Dave the Diver to get into Steam festivals. Steam runs these festivals around certain themes. There's a fishing fest, a farming fest, a card game fest, etc. All of the extra stuff is in the game to tick off a box so they can get into the Steam festival to promote the game. Festivals are the best way to get a game promoted these days, so it could be that we are seeing something like festival-driven game development. Not saying that's a good thing. It just seems like a driving force in games these days. A big budget studio pretending to be indie could pull off that strategy really well. They just need to cram all of this content into the game, apply to the festivals, and blammo, exposure.

It's insane to realize how few people finish games, specifically games that they still say they enjoy. BUT The important thing is that they enjoy things.

Wait, but death stranding does have a mechanic where you send drones delivering packages for you

Holy shit the Dave the Diver dialogue is literally a dora the explorer moment

"Hey look indies are doing great! Look at this good indie live service called Hell Divers 2" Sony: Oh.. uh, yea. Totally indie... Please make a Sony account.

I get the impression with The Game Awards at least, that they give awards to indie games based on their viral popularity, not what is actually the best game. They pick whatever they think will give them the most indie cred at the time based on what the current buzz is outside the big AAA space, without alienating their mainstream AAA-loving audience.

I'll be honest, after what you just described what dave the diver is, i actually got interested in playing it lol