@ReaderRagfish That's absolutely brilliant stuff. Hate to burst your bubble, though: that doesn't just occur in English...
And don't even get me started how ridiculous things sound if you LITERALLY translate them from another language to your own...
I think the concept of language as a whole is weird, something I've discussed at length with friends, many, many times, sometimes sober, and sometimes not. We could for example talk for hours on end about who invented the words for colors, and where they originated from.
But ultimately, yes, humans are indeed creative. I'd even dare to go so far as to say that they are a bit TOO creative sometimes, leading to more confusion than necessary. Case in point are constant renewals/changes in words and grammar, sometimes subtle, sometimes not so much, which I'm sure are introduced/applied in many languages. Sometimes, I think it is just to keep the dictionary people busy...
The terminology is a trainwreck. "Indie", I don't know who coined it, but is a hipster Apple-fan style way to apply a term that's usually been used for music to gaming. "Indie" bands (always a hipster term) tend to be small, budget, passionate, startup bands, unsigned to a label (and thus haven't "sold out".) They tend to be experimental and try things established, signed bands wouldn't. They also tend to be rough, unpolished, and slightly amateur, in addition to amateur recording/stage equipment. Fans would call that "raw." Reality calls it "amatuer."
So the label fits well with a lot of indie studios in games as well, with the same reasons. It's young, budget, non-established (usually) developers, with "raw" (amatuer) output that often does something different the big players wouldn't (sometimes for a reason.)
So other than being hipster, that explains why we separate them. It generally refers to low budget, rough works by amatuer/startup teams willing to be experimental but lacking budget, scope, and polish. It's not the same product as fully polished acts. Nobody will confuse a demo disc from a local indie metal band with Metallica.....but Metallica is "uncool" because they were anti-Napster a decade or two ago.
But the analogy also falls apart. Back 15 years ago games used the book model, where you had studios (authors) and publishers. Studios would shop a game to publishers, get a contract, the publisher takes the rights and a cut of profits, funds the game, publishes it. Then around 2005 or so things began shifting toward something more like the old 1930's Hollywood "studio model" where the studio (publisher) is it's own content creator and keeps everything within the studio lot. So what we call "publisher" in the 90's was just that, a company that signed contracts to publish video games from various studios. What we call a "publisher" to day is a "Studio (1930's implication)" of an all-under-one-roof develop and distribute operation.
So then we have companies like Playtonic, who we call "indies"....they call themselves "indies" But they aren't like the local indie metal band at all. They're merely commercial studios still operating under the book model publishing system from 15 years ago. A.K.A. not amatuer startup budget operations, but full studios using the old publishing model before a handful of Studios co-opted the industry into the old (failed) Hollywood Studio system.
And we call them all "indie" because that's the cool thing to do I guess.
So "indies" aren't real 3rd party games, they're a lesser tier of low budget project of passion experimental games.
And "indies" are real 3rd party games made by complete commercial studios and full teams with full budgets provided by a publisher using the publishing system that was the heart of video games for most of its history except the past decade.
That's the first typo of mine you've noticed? I type a lot, and I type fast.....sometimes one finger falls before another and the letters transpose (And then there's phone typing....I don't even try to fix the typos in that anymore!)
A: All indies are third parties.
B: Not all third parties are indies.
That bit's simple. It's the definition of indie which causes things to break down, as @NEStalgia points out. At some point, an indie developer becomes so successful and big that the boundaries start to break down. Is there a cap on the number of employees? The size of the budgets?
@NEStalgia Ah... I see that teacher man Anti-Matter already beat me to the punch. Man, that were a LOT of misspelled amateurs...
Good comment, though. I only have one tiny observation to make: not all publishers are their own studio, and not every developer is its own publisher. Team 17 for example, also publishes for quite a few external teams/studios, and they don't necessarily get involved with the games themselves, other than publishing/marketing them.
@Krull No to both questions, seeing as the official meaning of the label Indie simply points to them being independent developers/publishers, so as long as they remain independent, they're still Indies, regardless of the number of employees or size of their budget.
EDIT:
However, in reality, Indies hardly ever get to reach that point, since them getting bigger budgets and/or more employees, usually indicates a certain measure of success or promise, in which case (or at least 9.9 out of 10 times) they will be grabbed by some larger publisher, such as EA or Ubisoft. And probably needless to say, but at that point, they will most definitely outgrow the Indie label...
@ThanosReXXX Yeah, certain key sequences my fingers tend to operate out of order I didn't edit it though since it's already part of the discussion itself
Yeah there are still "real" (book model) publishers, including the big publishers-become-studios. Heck, every now and again even EA remembers that it's supposed to be a publisher and picks up outside games (and then they call them "indies"...........) They'd all be wise to do that. There's a reason the H'Wood Studio system imploded in the 70's.
You're right about "independent" but the problem was until the past decade pretty much all studios were independent. It didn't require a label, that's simply what a development studio was by nature. Only with the conquest and mergers of the late 00's did the whole industry consolidate under 5 studio banners (in the West. Obviously the big Japanese titans like Capcom/Konami/ etc. were always more studio-esque, but also more focused. ) That's what makes the rise of the name so strange. It was originally referring mostly to hack job garage projects, but then became all encompassing, probably by pedantic internet dwellers, to mean "anyone not a distributor"
@NEStalgia Referred to, aka grossly misused by internet dwellers. And only calling them pedantic is being WAY too nice, in my opinion. I'd like to say that I have a few choice words to better define what they are, but in reality,
I actually have a whole string of expletives, that won't pass the admin board on this site, or any admin filter in this life, probably...
Much like I completely detest, no: HATE the whole people demanding third party support, then getting that support, albeit in part thanks to older ports and indies, and subsequently starting another whining project because "yes, we wanted third party support, but not THAT kind of third party support".
Ugh... sometimes I really DO miss the Middle Ages. At least they knew what to do with useless people, but nowadays, all of that is deemed either politically incorrect or inhumane...
...the official meaning of the label Indie simply points to them being independent developers/publishers, so as long as they remain independent, they're still Indies, regardless of the number of employees or size of their budget.
But, but, but... wouldn't that mean EA, Ubisoft, Bethesda and all the rest of them are also all indies? The only non-indies, technically, would be those studios owned by hardware manufacturers such as Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft. There has to be some kind of tipping point for when a third-party studio loses the indie label, and I think most of us can recognise a true indie, but it's more of a gut feeling than a hard and fast rule. Can a publisher be described as an indie, when it's bottom line is actually piggy-backing off other developers? And can a developer be described as an indie when someone else is publishing the game?
The big problem with indies is how samey they are. It gets hard for people to find the really interesting and unique stuff amidst the flood of retro-styled platformers and whatnot, and so they decide that all indies are garbage. I can be guilty of a similar mentality at times, and overall I don't buy many indies at all because I find most of them unsatisfying and not worth the money, but there are some great ones in there.
No replacement for AAA support IMO, but Nintendo hasn't been great on that front since the SNES.
@Krull Important distinction, to not let this go out of context:
EDIT:
However, in reality, Indies hardly ever get to reach that point, since them getting bigger budgets and/or more employees, usually indicates a certain measure of success or promise, in which case (or at least 9.9 out of 10 times) they will be grabbed by some larger publisher, such as EA or Ubisoft. And probably needless to say, but at that point, they will most definitely outgrow the Indie label...
So there's your tipping point...
But you're absolutely right in some ways: it's mostly semantics anyway, since in general, each individual's understanding of what is a "real" third party developer and what is a real indie or what is not, and what that could potentially mean for the quality of their game, is completely subjective. I do hate the short-sightedness of people instantly labeling indie as bad, though...
Far too black & white for my taste.
And as for most people being able to distinguish it... I would beg to differ. Quite a few people are simply either too short-sighted, close-minded or have already made up their own mind about things, and it's hard to convince them otherwise, regardless of facts staring them in their face, telling them they're wrong.
But even the most dense of them would probably not see EA or Ubisoft as an indie, so there's still a little bit of light left, at the end of the tunnel...
@Zuljaras Minecraft isn't indie (not for a long time) it's made with Microsoft's backing. It's neither AAA nor Indie, just 3rd party.
On another hand, can someone please explain to me why people call WayForward an indie studio? People keep claiming Shantae is an Indie rep, but it seems to me WayForward is more just a small end studio like Deep Silver or Nordic games. I mean, they've been putting out like 5 games a year since the turn of the century, that's not exactly indie.
@link3710 They're an independent developer/publisher, and their games aren't really big budget, so they truly are still and indie developer, whether you agree with that or not.
And Nordic Games and Deep Silver are both part of THQ Nordic, so they aren't independent.
Indie has nothing to do with number of games published, so that's not a parameter to establish if a company is indie or not.
EDIT:
On a side note: Deep Silver isn't a developer. They are the publishing division of the German company Koch Media, who are now also owned by THQ Nordic.
I agree. I feel the same way about "AAA-game" even though I use the term to refer to a collection of specific major releases. On the PS2 you got all sorts of things on a regular disc, from Final Fantasy X and Metal Gear Solid 2 to Katamari Damacy and 2D plattformers. It's difficult to categorize games since it frequently happens that game companies want to do something different.
How do you even categorize a game comprising of episodic releases for example?
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Topic: Indie's ARE 3rd parties and yet they AREN'T.
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