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“You are talking from the point of view of the indie publishers. But indie publishers cannot grow and new indie publishers wouldn’t come into being if there were plenty of high quality PC games being released, as gamers would be buying those AAA games instead!”

No, no, it doesn’t work like that. It’s not either/or. Both can (and do) happily co-exist. People will buy Mass Effect 2 and they’ll buy Gratuitous Space Battles or whatever examples you want to throw into the ring here and indie publishers HAVE been around for a long time. Just not on the scale we see now because, well…

There wasn’t a wealth of indie games outside of the casual space* 4 or 5 years ago (if you ignore the hobbyist scene) mainly because there simply wasn’t accessible tools for more people to make games and no sort of news coverage to speak of**. It’s only in the past few years we’ve seen stuff like Gamemaker mature to a level whereby you can bang out exceptional 2d stuff, where game dev has become affordable with Visual Studio having an express edition, Unity enabling 3d in the browser stuff, Flash becoming ubiquitous enough (and with free tools and frameworks) to be a viable route for development and so on and so forth.

Prior to that, you were looking at a costly outlay (even if it was only £60 for Multimedia Fusion, Blitz whatever…) which put a barrier on entry. There also wasn’t the ease (and safety fears allayed) of digital distribution that we have now. I’ve been doing this whole indie thing for 7 or 8 years now and when I started, 90% of the stuff I see now wasn’t easily achievable by most people at all. Throw in the cost of hardware (now you can get a decent enough netbook to do your stuff on for a couple of hundred quid) too. Oh, and lets not forget download speeds here and the spread of broadband.

To ignore all of those things, when they’re absolutely crucial, is a madness. It’s got nothing to do with the death of mainstream PC gaming in any way. No mainstream publishers left the door open here.

It’s just that now the people who wanted to make games can make games and lo, some people want the games that the people who wanted to make games make. You’re entirely free to assume that people only want those games because they can’t get anything else but I’d call total bullshit on that. This is people doing what people do.

“If just indie gaming had taken off, you may have an argument, but the fact that retro PC gaming is growing as well, through sites like GOG, Steam, ebay and 5,000,000+ DOSBox downloads, I would say it is PC gamers looking for more meaningful entertainment for their $ and their time, and they are deciding more and more to play indie titles and retro PC titles that give them that entertainment for their $.”

That’s a big reach, man. Could it possibly be that people just want games full stop and each of these services fulfill a different need that people have? Just a wild guess there. I’m sure last time I looked Steam has lots of new releases on it too and I’m pretty sure that they sell, y’know? Ebay has been doing a trade on old games (oh look, and recent ones too!) as long as I’ve been on the internet, GOG fills a niche that other stores don’t (old games actually available to purchase instead of having to resort to abandonware) and your DOSBox example, you could replace with MAME for all that it matters.

*which, incidentally, was booming around 2004,2005 and 2006.

**because the ease of setting up a blog is now also a factor in the coverage we get – anyone can do a WordPress install, get a blogspot home or whatever and post about these things.

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“The growth in PC retro and indie gaming is, quite simply, an indictment on modern gaming.”

I don’t think that’s true. The rise of indie has much, much more to do with an increase in accessible tools and ease of distribution than anything else.

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You are talking from the point of view of the indie publishers. But indie publishers cannot grow and new indie publishers wouldn’t come into being if there were plenty of high quality PC games being released, as gamers would be buying those AAA games instead! Indie has been around for years, but only really started growing in the last 2-4 years as more and more PC gamers saw PC only games disappearing, to be replaced by dumbed down – sorry – ‘streamlined’ console conversions! As the quantity of PC multiformat games have increased and PC only games (and indeed PC games in general) have declined so PC gamers have looked elsewhere.

If just indie gaming had taken off, you may have an argument, but the fact that retro PC gaming is growing as well, through sites like GOG, Steam, ebay and 5,000,000+ DOSBox downloads, I would say it is PC gamers looking for more meaningful entertainment for their $ and their time, and they are deciding more and more to play indie titles and retro PC titles that give them that entertainment for their $.

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Anonymous Coward said:
Well that explains why I never listen to indie rock… (by the way, excellent post, sir).

Here is some proper “indie gaming”

The game itself is a solid and compelling little piece of Amiga-styled retro shooting goodness with a nifty rotation “trick”. But the game aside, the developer will sell you the game within a properly boxed DVD case containing the game disc and manual. This is indie publishing in its truest sense. And it warms the cockles of my heart (that remembers buying Treasure Island Dizzy on cassette for £1.99) to see some are going this route.

Hi Casimir’s Blake,

this is BOH’s author. I just wanted to thank you for your nice comment – I liked it so much that I took the liberty of quoting it on the comments page of BOH’s website ;)

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@Sinnerman YOU KNOW WHO WAS ALSO OVERLY ARGUMENTATIVE AND PUSHY ABOUT HIS BELIEF SYSTEM?

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I don’t think that’s true. The rise of indie has much, much more to do with an increase in accessible tools and ease of distribution than anything else.

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For example, almost not indie and yet still indie (in my book) is Neocrone, with thier sub million costing ‘King Arthur The Roleplaying Wargame’. It is currently only available via digital download but may be published by Ubisoft at some point. The title would never have been made by a major publisher and is obviously a labour of love, but it miles away from being a one man programmed game that many would see as the truly indie game!

I think indie can also be associated with some titles in that the publisher allowed the designer full ‘independence to make their own game- and thereby broke moulds This could be titles like Gabriel Knight, Darklands, Psychonauts and Beyond Good and Evil.

As to the statement that indie proves the death of PC gaming is false, I would say the opposite. The problem is that people who believe PC gaming is doing fine do the typical thing of extrapolating the opposition to the ridiculous. Therefore implying people like me who think PC gaming is dying are saying that we believe no one on the planet will be playing PC games. This is obviously ridiculous an no one who believes in the problems with PC gaming believes that! What we mean is that PC gaming will no longer be a mainstream market, no longer part of ‘concious society’. An example would be the end of the horse as means of propulsion. When people back then started saying ‘it was the end of the horse and buggy’ because the automobile came along didn’t mean all horses would be culled and disappear from the face of the earth. they mean that the industry that supported that market,the blacksmiths, the stables, the horse troughs,the saddle makers,etc would all be much much less and that the industry would become ‘specialist’ rather than ‘generic’

AS PC titles disappear from retail and major publishers move away from PC only to multiformat titles, so PC gaming is moving from mainstream. All the while the console market stays as it is now with multiple AAA titles per year. In future of just indie PC titles, there will be no more printed PC games magazines, many PC gaming sites will disappear and many multiformat sites will drop PC. Specialist indie sites will appear and indeed may grow, but just like most people don’t think of horses from one year to the next, but think of their car everyday, so PC gaming will become niche. The average household will more and more see their console as the game playing machine and many,when asked, will say ‘there are STILL pc games? Where?’. That is PC gaming dying. Becoming so niche and specialist it is practically invisible. A market that goes from No.1 titles selling 5 million to 100,000 will not survive as a mainstream market and many, quite rightly will say ‘compared to the 90′s PC gaming is dead’.

The growth in PC retro and indie gaming is, quite simply, an indictment on modern gaming. But as PC games sales continue to fall and more major publishers move away from the format, so will PC gaming disappear from the perspective of the public.

So as indie grows so the PC gaming market shrinks, becomes more niche and specialist and disappears from the general market While a few 100,000 of us, who know where to look, will still be buying these small $10 indie games and will know where to go to seer reviews, etc. But it won;t be the mainstream PC games market of the 90′s with independent games stores selling PC only games along with a dozen or so PC gaming magazine and PC gaming paraphernalia like steering wheels for their racing games and joysticks for their flight sims. You hardly see PC steering wheels and Joysticks any more, and you see even less PC racing games or flight sims…. The PC is a disappearing gaming format, one genre at a time. In a world of more than 5 million DOSBox’s and the growth in indie gaming points in only one direction. The end of PC gaming from the mainstream marketplace.

When you consider that Computer Gaming World magazine, in the November 1997 issue, had 47 PC game reviews and yet in 2008 Gamespot only reviewed 63 PC games ALL YEAR we are well down that road already.

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If you don’t have the desire or ability to collaborate with more than one or two other people, or to manage your resources effectively, that doesn’t give you the right to denigrate those that do.

Having ambition is not “selling out”. Gaming would be a poorer place if Id or Epic (or Blizzard for that matter) had been so enamoured with “indie values” that they’d just kept cranking out extremely rudimentary 2D platformers for decades.

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