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Since when did "Indie" become the definition of trash games?

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cRookie

Apparently 'Indie" has become a term for unfinished crappy games instead of what it should actually mean, small developers making great games with little to no funds or advertisements that big companies have. They would give you that joy of discovering them and thinking wow, what a gem this is.

Now we get things like https://store.steampowered.com/app/1233120/ in 2020 or plenty of -PIXEL GAMES- that call themselves "roguelite" or "roguelike" which translates to "I couldn't finish the game out of lack of inspiration, money, etc so have it this way and we'll make up a term for this unfinished mess". Shouldn't this stop already? I've stopped adding garbage games to my library a while back, and I somehow wish I'd have removed all the other trash in there. I've hidden them using the option, but I was thinking to write Steam support about removing them, only that I have 1000+ games.
Still little compared to other 'collectors' of 5k+ games, but it really makes no sense just to buy some games that you'd never play and clog your library
We should stop giving these developers money, how many 'early access' games have we seen abandoned which were also 'indie' just so the devs could run off with the money?
Stop blindly give in to fake trailers or promises and to consumerism or that hoarding impulse. The industry won't try to improve if we give them the message that it's fine to put out crap games since we'll buy them anyway. It's only a loss for us gamers, either way, while they're making money off easy and sloppy work with little to no effort.

TL;DR
If my op wasn't clear enough, let me rephrase it:
Nowadays, lazy developers put out buggy, incomplete games under the tag of "indie" as that's some sort of excuse for the games being bad, instead of the developers themselves being bad because they didn't put enough effort into the game. As opposed to few years ago, when Indie meant games like Bastion for example, quality games made by small companies. And same goes for Early Access lately

3 years ago*

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35 Comments
Uroboros

Indie merely means "independant", as in, no publisher?

It's not that indiegames are garbage, it's that unfiltered asset flippers and bundled trash-filler have nothing else to market themselves with, so play up the word 'indie' in their sales pitch to try steal glory by the dumbest name association, as if they try to say "we only LOOK garbage, give us a chance, we might be the next sleeper-hit passion project!"

"Indie" only gained positive connotations because occasional gems are created without executive meddling, letting them more readily explore weird themes, mechanics and such. Small teams with small budgets are more likely to be personally invested if they're not just part of the cash-grab machine. When passion has that chance crossover with talent, good things happen. In a bigger environment where there is executive meddling, passion equates to fun ideas, which equates to risk, which equates to wasted financial investment. It's just that when a dev team has a publisher, traditionally they're larger and better funded, so even their flops seem less trashy by comparison (even if the game is actually ludicrously bad, on the surface actually it looks alright).

People just forget that "indie" is a broad term.

3 years ago
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