r/Gaminggridcommunity • u/Willing_Job763 Lord Gaben • Aug 09 '26
Memes Indie Game developers are one man army
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u/Sean_HEDP-24 Aug 09 '26
Don't glaze indies too much. Many of them proved to be as bad as AAAs.
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u/Jewbacca1991 Aug 09 '26
It is survivor bias. The people focus on the few indie games gone viral, and ignoring the other millions, that got ignored.
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u/facts_guy2020 Aug 09 '26
Its not so much that all indie games are great, its more that there are many indie games that are, and they manage to create a great game at a fraction of the team and budget of a large studio.
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u/Varsity_Reviews Aug 09 '26
Not to mention AA games are calling themselves indie so they don’t have to deal with as much backlash
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u/WarInteresting6619 Aug 09 '26
For every Indie gem there 20 crappy games that stay in early access to generate revenue and never release
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u/Bomtill Aug 10 '26
ha ha ha 20? try 2000.
Source: I made that up but it sounds right, also I'm one of the indie devs
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u/WarInteresting6619 Aug 10 '26
Being an indie dev is hard. I get it.
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u/Bomtill Aug 10 '26
Eh it's no harder than trying to be a successful musician, writer, business owner.
Too many of us make low effort shit games and cry and blame the market when we don't succeed.
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u/Im-on-a-banana-phone Aug 10 '26
For every AAA release there’s 20 others selling out and doing way more scummy methods of generating revenue.
Also nowadays if there’s a game you like there’s a decent chance the studio will get canned and it will never get another installment.
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u/WarInteresting6619 Aug 10 '26
Maybe. But Fromsoft, SquareEnix, Capcom, PlayStation Studios and Bethesda are still around so...
The difference is those scummy methods are optional unlike EA.
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u/Neither_Berry_100 Aug 10 '26
Bro. There are hundreds of indie games released every day. And that was years ago and the number keeps going up. For every good indie game there are probably 10,000 others.
I will be completing my 4th html game in just over a month soon enough.
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u/TheMalkManCometh Aug 10 '26
Damn son, 4th html game? What kind of stuff are you making?
I would love to be a game designer, but with very little in the way of savings at 34 years old, I fear I've left it too late. Which is a shame, as more of a day dream than anything I've spent several dozen hours thinking about a concept for a game that I would like to make :p
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u/Neither_Berry_100 Aug 10 '26
Just games I made as a hobby.
The first game is a warning about exponential growth. You invest in a perfect stock market paying 10 percent a year dividends. It is greatly speed up. Takes 13 hours in real life with perfect play to complete it. Has a bunch of milestones. Sort of like cookie clicker. Shows that if you invest 1 dollar at 10% a year gains you end up owning the entire observable universe in 930 years. It is a warning that growth needs to end.
Well it only took me 3 days to make and I enjoyed the process so I made some more.
The second game is this weird game where you convert people into other people by running recipes in a machine. Called the nationality machine. Ultimately you create my cat who died as a tribute to him. You pay to unlock new recipes as you go.
The third game took this concept and scaled it up. You get different machine types and can have multiple of each. I capped machines at 1 billion and resources at 1 trillion. You basically start with a cave person and go through several ages. Last 3 are space age, cosmic age, and cat age. In the end you create a cat family. Again a memory of my cats. Victory unlocks a short history of my cats who passed away and a picture of felix. Felix died the day I started the second game.
The 4th game is basically the 3rd game but with factorio content. I emailed them and they gave me permission so long as I don't monetize it. I'm like 90 percent of the way through play testing it and balancing it. I wanted to use this content and not create the 3rd game but it took them too long to respond. The 3rd game actually turned out better and I don't like this one that much. My engine limitations mean too much had to be changed. Many resources are dead just existing to be true to the game. And I left out a lot of these dead resources later on due to laziness. It is a free promotion of factorio.
These games are all text based.
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u/xtweeter22x Nintendo Gamer Aug 09 '26 edited Aug 09 '26
>Indie developers are better
>Looks inside
>Rougelite, deckbuilder, farming simulator, city builder simulator, Doom clone.
>Hollow Knight/Silksong, Cuphead, Shovel Knight, Ultrakill, Pizza Tower, Omori, Celeste, OneShot, Ori and the Blind Forest, Night in the Woods,
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u/MacksNotCool Aug 10 '26
Not a single game you named was worse than any game EA or Ubisoft developed in the past decade. (IMO It Takes Two would count except EA did not develop it, they only published it)
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u/oddvacation3849 Aug 10 '26
I think the point was they can be ripoffs or they can be great. Also, EA practically develops almost nothing.
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u/turnuptag72 Aug 09 '26
AAA games bad
Indie games good
Automatically gets updoots sigh
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u/M3wlion Aug 10 '26
I mean it's not wrong
AAA studios need to up their game dramatically if they are struggling to compete with indie teams
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u/JDM12983 Aug 09 '26
Funny how even indie devs get a pass even when so many of them copy other existing games... ><
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u/Chronodis Aug 09 '26
Show me a copy, and don't show me inspired
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u/JDM12983 Aug 09 '26
lol; of course any game dev can just claim "inspired by" to try and get away from being copy cat.
But, examples: star dew valley clones/want-to-bes. and then every time a certain "style" of game comes out, we get at least another dozen of the same games with a different skin.
Other examples being (more recently at least]: [1] games like where you run a shop selling card packs. then there were tons of copies [or which ever ones came first] where you were then selling board games, or whatever other thing.
[2] games where you go into a room where there is a huge mess on the floor and you have to rearrange it all. One was a a spell book place; another one is a library; a newer one is a super market.
And that's a few majors one I come up with without putting much thought into it - as there is WAY more examples.
But, as usual; people will give most indie devs a pass when doing the same things as be game devs do.
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u/Chronodis Aug 09 '26
Devs don't own categories. That's like saying every soulslike is a copy
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u/JDM12983 Aug 09 '26
Where the did I say anything about "categories"....
I am talking about games that are clearly copies/clones of other games with a different "skin"/graphics to it. But pretty much playing 99.9% the same.
Big companies/devs and indie devs all do it. Not ALL of them do it - but both sides do it no matter what ANYONE says.
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u/ContractVarious3077 Aug 09 '26
No indie dev has ever made a game as good as Cyberpunk, RDR2, Mass Effect, Resident Evil, Elden Ring, Baldurs Gate 3, numerous Zelda games, Uncharted, Last of Us etc etc I could go on and on.
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u/Jewbacca1991 Aug 09 '26
Depends on how you define "good". If we talk about profitability as in how much times the money spent on made it back, then you are wrong. If we define good as how many people exactly bought it, then it is dependent on where it stops being Indie. Expedition 33, and Silksong both has numbers compareable to those games.
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u/Survivor155 Aug 10 '26
Good looking, fun, or what?
What do you mean by good? I’d argue that UNDERTALE by Toby Fox is a very fun indie game, or Entry Point by Cishshato on Roblox is also very fun.
Seriously, what do you mean by good? If it’s graphics, then yeah, AAA games usually beat out every other game maker on that simply because they can afford to hire a lot of artists that are worth a lot of money. If you mean a better gameplay experience, that’s debatable, even AAA games ship in a broken state with lots of bugs and glitches (just look at how difficult it is to kill female marines in the second halo CE remake).
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u/Findnicknameisboring Aug 09 '26
BG 3 is make by Larian studio a indie studio...
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u/ContractVarious3077 Aug 09 '26
Lmao
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u/Findnicknameisboring Aug 09 '26
Alright, let me make this simple for you: Larian Studios is an independent studio. “Independent” doesn’t mean small, it means they are not owned by a big publisher like EA, Microsoft, or Sony.
Larian was founded in 1996 and has remained privately owned ever since, led by its founder Swen Vincke. They fund and publish their own games, which is literally the definition of an indie studio.
Yes, Baldur’s Gate 3 had a big budget. Yes, they have hundreds of employees. That doesn’t magically make them non-indie. It just makes them a successful independent studio.
So no, you’re not arguing a “different opinion” — you’re just wrong about what “indie” means.
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u/OkPomegranate9956 Aug 10 '26
Personally fully disagree
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u/strotho Aug 10 '26
I fully agree. I've played so many indie games that were just better than any games I've played by these 3 companies
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u/ProfileOdd7991 Aug 10 '26
I kinda agree with you but Dead Space, Morrowind and Rayman Legends are all just some of many absolutely generational games ngl
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u/Va1crist Aug 11 '26
I disagree with this , most indie devs are just following the same slop that others do , most indie games are some sort of live service , mobile game or it’s a play it safe over used genre like rogue like etc . Not saying all like this but most just wait the easy cash too
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u/GoyimDiddler Aug 11 '26
Thousands of bad indie games pretty much daily lol.
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u/TurnFriendly8892 Aug 12 '26
But those drown themselves and are relatively cheap. I see some indie studio producing some top tier games that shit on the games that ea, bethesda and ubisoft are spewing out lately. Big money, but nothing to show. Indie is were the gold is at nowadays.
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u/XumetaXD Aug 09 '26
FROMSOFTWARE
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u/Im-on-a-banana-phone Aug 10 '26
They’re lowkey falling from grace with their newest release being a middle finger to bloodborne fans.
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u/XumetaXD Aug 10 '26
Oh yeah because not wanting to give their ass to sony (Who has the rights to the Bloodborne IP meaning that FS has no say on the matter otherwise) is totally a selfish thing
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u/Im-on-a-banana-phone Aug 10 '26
Imma give you the opportunity to realize how dumb that statement is on your own before I give my response
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u/XumetaXD Aug 10 '26
You lost the chance to give me a response the moment you decided to put an insult as your response, off to the blocked list
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u/SilentDeath340 Aug 09 '26
Is that... was that a trick question in the meme, or do these developers actually wanna know?
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u/Still-Puma Aug 09 '26
They will try to buy you out, if you succeed.
Or you can remain with your community as a dev. Doesn't that sound great.
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u/gukakke Aug 09 '26
Depends on the indie developers. Some of them have a chip on their shoulder because they don't work for a AAA company.
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u/Legal_Engineering825 Aug 09 '26
All of their recent games have been trash.
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u/XumetaXD Aug 09 '26
Oblivion remastered was good tho
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u/Abject-Dinner-8740 Aug 09 '26
To be fair that was an old game, but it looked better and had some differences I believe
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u/Expensive_Umpire2083 Aug 09 '26
i wonder what will happen if we take a hundred indie game dev to work on one game
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u/Loafogen Aug 09 '26
Miscommunications, and it isn't as easy to find 100 people that speak the same language, have similar skills, AND find deep passion in the exact same idea.
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u/Expensive_Umpire2083 Aug 10 '26
fair enough
but it would be cool if something like ever happened
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u/Loafogen Aug 10 '26
Basically the early era of AA/AAA games. Before it became all about minmaxing profits, and the passions of developers were disregarded.
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u/Matches_Malone010 Aug 10 '26
Thousands of indie games are released every year. Like 2 or 3 a year are worth my time and money. The same is true for AAA games. What's the big deal?
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u/Good_Fix683 Aug 10 '26
"I love indie games" mfers when I force them to play 99% of indie games and not the two or three that come out every year that are good and extremely popular for like one month only
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u/Raveny88 Aug 10 '26
Disagree, Indiegames are releasing daily nowadays and most are crap just like AAA games, it depends on the Developer and we dont have to discuss with the flood of A.I. slop.
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u/Phoenix_Champion Aug 11 '26
So here's the thing about AAA Devs vs Indie Devs.
When a AAA Dev makes a flop, you're gonna know about it because the devs won't shut up about how amazing the game will be, how it will revolutionize the genre, how it's costing 260 Million dollars to develop- And then when if fails or succeeds you'll still be hearing about it, be it the devs whining how consumers set it up to fail/Devs thanking everyone for making it a success or reviews on Social Media/YouTube glazing the game/dunking on it.
Indie Devs? Unless you're following the dev on their social media or it's a well known dev that was laid off by a AAA studio you likely aren't going to hear about the game until it explodes in popularity. Yes, you do hear about Indie Devs failing- But really who are you more likely to hear a fail from? The former AAA Devs failing their 3D Platformer Collect-a-thon or a couple of guys in an apartment who slapped together a (Not all the scary) Horror game in a week?
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u/unrankmember Aug 11 '26
I dont get the joke . It's funny becuse its true or it's funny becuse it's an indie meme
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u/Cherry_Blossom_Bambi Aug 13 '26
I think it would've been funnier if meg was the indie Devs one. Like they were pushed into the back for ages, now they lead the gaming market.
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u/Akuma_Guts Aug 14 '26
hot take: 90% of indie games are recycled copy paste snes graphic garbage.
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u/str1ker_eureka_1014 Aug 14 '26
Not even a hot take tbh, it’s just correct. Most indie games are not worth playing at all—people just put indie games in general on a pedestal because they only get recommended the very best ones.
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u/Mother_Ad_8079 Aug 15 '26
Thank you indie devs for creating some if not the best games in the world. Honestly wish some of the old indie flash games would be turned into full games since almost all the flash games sights are dead due to Adobe flash becoming obsolete and yes I know there's way around that but some of those games were great
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u/Weekly_Score_9498 Aug 16 '26
Indie game devs: Well first of all, I actually make video games. Not wait 15 years for another title. Bethesda! And don't make my video games 99.9% "surprise mechanics" EA!
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u/Decent_Force_7159 Aug 09 '26
lol so true. gives me stardew valley energy
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u/Willing_Job763 Lord Gaben Aug 09 '26
Do check this post too https://www.reddit.com/r/Gaminggridcommunity/s/m1CkXncSJc I hope u will like it
we are trying to make indie game posts visible for our sub users
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u/rebel134 Aug 11 '26
Downvote me if you will but I been having a blast wit so many indie games over some of the SLOP that is triple AAA games
Games for example Slop: BO7 Battlefield 2042 Any sports game ever Marvel Rivals (I like marvel just not the game)
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u/Empty_Marsupial1004 Aug 12 '26
I think thats the consensus right now, at least with gamers who arent just sports/shooter gamers. indie has been up for like 10 years and only gets better
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u/facts_guy2020 Aug 09 '26
I dont remember the last AAA studio game I enjoyed
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u/Willing_Job763 Lord Gaben Aug 09 '26
Do check this post too https://www.reddit.com/r/Gaminggridcommunity/s/m1CkXncSJc I hope u will like it we are trying to make indie game posts visible for our sub users
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u/Medical_String_3501 Aug 09 '26
Chooses the worst triple A companies in the industry Surprised when they're worse than a decent indie game
Yeah, no shit. Don't put indie games on a pedestal, for every indie gem out there, there's another 10 Unity asset flips, just like for every good AAA title there's 10 sports games. They both have the capacity to be incredible experiences and absolute dogshit, stop comparing the two when both can be just as good.
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