Indie game
However, by this time, interest in hobbyist programming had waned due to rising costs of development and competition from video game publishers and home consoles.
New industry opportunities have arisen since then, including new digital storefronts, crowdfunding, and other indie funding mechanisms to help new teams get their games off the ground.
Examples of successful indie games include Cave Story, Braid, Super Meat Boy, Terraria, Minecraft, Fez, Hotline Miami, Shovel Knight, the Five Nights at Freddy's series, Undertale, Cuphead, and Among Us.
[45] Print magazines such as SoftSide, Compute!, and Antic solicited games from hobbyists, written in BASIC or assembly language, to publish as type-in listings.
In the United Kingdom, early microcomputers such as the ZX Spectrum were popular, launching a range of "bedroom coders" which initiated the UK's video game industry.
[46][47] During this period, the idea that indie games could provide experimental gameplay concepts or demonstrate niche arthouse appeal had been established.
[47] Publishers tended to be risk averse due to high costs of production, and they would reject all small-size and too innovative concepts of small game developers.
[52][39] Software technologies used to drive the growth of the World Wide Web, like Adobe Flash, were available at low cost to developers, and provided another means for indie games to grow.
[40][55] Social and political changes also led to the use of indie games not only for entertainment purposes but to also tell a message related to these factors, something that could not be done in mainstream titles.
By the seventh generation of consoles in 2005, each platform provided online services for players–namely Xbox Live, PlayStation Network, and Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection–which included digital game distribution.
Following the increased popularity of indie games on computers, these services started publishing them alongside larger releases.
[75] Other successful indie games released during this time include Hotline Miami (2012),[76] Shovel Knight (2014),[77] and Five Nights at Freddy's (2014).
[86] This perception of an indiepocalypse is not unanimous; Jeff Vogel stated in a talk at GDC 2016 that any downturn was just part of the standard business cycle.
With the Steam distribution service allowing any developer to offer their game with minimal cost to them, there are thousands of games being added each year, and developers have come to rely heavily on Steam's discovery tools – methods to tailor catalog pages to customers based on past purchases – to help sell their titles.
[92] Mobile app stores have had similar problems with large volumes of offers but poor means for discovery by consumers in the late 2010s.
[97] Indie games are generally associated with Western regions, specifically with North American, European, and Oceanic areas.
Over time, ASCII saw the opportunity to publish game development kits, and by 1992, released the first commercial version of the RPG Maker software.
[99] The distinction between Japanese-developed doujin games and indie games is ambiguous - the use of the term usually refers to if their popularity formed in Western or Eastern markets before the mid-2010s, and if they are made with the aim of selling large copies or just as a passion project; the long-running bullet hell Touhou Project series, developed entirely by one-man independent developer ZUN since 1995, has been called both indie and doujinshi.
Several successful indie games, such as the Touhou Project series, Axiom Verge, Cave Story, Papers, Please, and Spelunky, were developed by a single person, though often with support of artists and musicians for those assets.
While it is possible for development teams to be larger, with this comes a higher cost overhead of running the studio, which may be risky if the game does not perform well.
Small studios that do not anticipate large sales are generally afforded reduced prices for mainstream game engines and middleware.
[126] Indie developers may also use open source software (such as Godot) or by taking advantage of homebrew libraries, which are freely available but may lack technically-advanced features compared to equivalent commercial engines.
These SDKs were still offered at commercial rates to larger developers, but reduced pricing was provided to those who would generally self-publish via digital distribution on the console or mobile device's storefront, such as with the ID@Xbox program or the iOS SDK.
[133][134] More recently, crowd-funding campaigns, both reward-based and equity-based, have been used to obtain the funds from interested consumers before development begins in earnest.
While using crowd-funding for video games took off in 2012, its practice has significantly waned as consumers became wary of campaigns that failed to deliver on promised goods.
[135] Another mechanism offered through digital distribution is the early access model, in which interested players can buy playable beta versions of the game to provide software testing and gameplay feedback.
For example, Itch.io, established in 2013, has been more focused on serving indie games over mainstream ones, providing the developers with store pages and other tools to help with marketing.
These versions are typically produced as special editions with additional physical products like art books, stickers, and other small items in the game's case.
Indie developers also tend to be open with their target player community, using beta testing and early access to get feedback, and engaging users regularly through storefront pages and communication channels such as Discord.
The expansion of roguelikes from ASCII, tile-based hack-and-slash games to a wide variety of so-called "rogue-lites" that maintain the roguelike procedural generation and permadeath features bore out directly from indie games Strange Adventures in Infinite Space (2002) and its sequel Weird Worlds: Return to Infinite Space (2005), Spelunky (2008), The Binding of Isaac (2011), FTL: Faster Than Light (2012) and Rogue Legacy (2012).
