How long is the internet going to pretend that indie gaming is some kind of bastion of creativity and ingenuity? For YEARS, we have been assaulted with trailers of indie games that push the same propaganda as AAA games, if not worse than AAA games oftentimes. So many indie games have female protagonists, or LGBT, or black women as protagonists and are filled with SJW themes or marvel slop humor and dialogue. Even the ones that aren’t filled with that garbage tend to just make derivative games that regurgitate the same survival crafting, farming, souls-like, deck-building or roguelite/roguelike elements in their games. They are just as guilty of trend-chasing and soullessness as the AA and AAA studios.
You can tell me, “not all indie games are like that,” but if we are giving such leniency to indie gaming as a whole, why do we not do the same for AAA games? AAA games of today are complete slop, with a few exceptions mainly coming out of Japan, and I feel the same way about indie games nowadays.
Why do we continue to defend indie gaming when the indie gaming clique is overwhelmingly filled with the same SJWs who write for game media sites like Kotaku, or work in consultancy groups like Sweet Baby Inc? A big part of GamerGate was the relationship between indie devs and game journalists and how corrupt the relationship was and most likely still is, whether they were having sex for positive coverage, giving financial incentives such as profit-sharing for positive coverage or awards, or just getting positive coverage because they were good friends with the game journos without any disclosures by the game journos, indie devs were at the heart of all of this controversy and the fact that people are willing to give indie gaming a pass for all the woke shit they are inserting into their games is absurd.
It’s ok to praise indie games when they are done well, but it’s foolish to believe that the indie developers producing anything of actual value would be the ones who take over the industry and not the SJWs who are seemingly able to fail their way upwards.
It's not specifically that indie games or indie devs are "automatically" good, but that you and I, and many others, can very much MAKE our own games these days if you have the time and put the effort into it.
Also, a big part of why there is a large swathe of shitty woketard indie games is specifically because those are the kinds of little studios that are almost always taking shortcuts and whatever DEI money passes are available to speedrush their projects.
A good indie game takes a fair bit of time to complete, and thus they are far less numerous and frequent.
Because ALL AAA studios are compromised. At least 3 Indie studios are not. Wube, Ludeon, and possibly Warhorse. Thus sorting through Indie studios to find the 10% that beat Sturgeons law is the only way to find anything.
I'd hardly say uncritical, there's loads of "indie" games that I'm pretty sure almost everyone here knows are garbage. Pretty much any indie game not backed by a big publisher that gets coverage in the obsolete gaming press is obviously immediately suspect. And on the flip side the games that blow up from weird parasocial streamer/YouTube trend chasing are also red flags.
It's just obvious that the only hope for actual good games is from indie development. Anywhere publicly traded and HR infested has essentially no chance of producing anything free from globalist agenda pushing, and minimal chance of producing anything playable underneath that slop. Being indie doesn't guarantee that either, but at least it's not a foregone conclusion.
The biggest difference between if an indie game succeeds or fails is based on marketing. Marketing is a sales multiplier. If your game is a 100/100 but it's shown to 0 people then you earn 0 dollars, but if a game worth 10/100 is shown to hundreds of thousands then it makes much more just by volume of impressionable people willing to waste their money.
Who controls the marketing of indie games? Mostly the institutions. People who can get funding for ads. People who can get articles written about it. Streamers who on a whole are not trying to be political so they end up being center-left to go with the path of least resistance. And people who can get good marketing from social media posts.
Personally I would just ignore anything that shows clear signs of infection. Female girlboss protagonist, ugly designs, forced diversity, etc. That's all you really can do.
There's "indie" the faggoty hipster "aesthetic" and indie the term, which is short for independent. Independent just means self published. That's better than massive publishers, and faggots making their own games is superior to them trying to infect and destroy existing IPs. It's what we want " just fuck off and make your own shit". It's when they ruin an otherwise passable game that it's a real problem.
Indie games can be great or trash. What you're complaining about falls more under the category of shovelware, cheap shit clones of better games.
''The Indie Scene (TM)'' with which games journoïds hang out is woke garbage.
This dosen't represent independant games developpers in general, but that's what gets most of the media coverage.
Just let the games stand on their own merits.
Youtubers who do Let's Plays have been more useful to find stuff that fits your likes than games journalists for a decade.
Lots of coping.
Gamers took Indie games and refused to acknowledge the opening is not real.
The only thing about Indie games is that they are not under as much scrutiny as AAA so they can get away with non-woke games. Not many but there are some.
This. I hazard to venture into normie spaces every so often just to see how people are responding/reacting to certain events, political, media, or otherwise, and it's really, really bad. There is a lot of coping and people accepting woke messaging out there just because it's not as bad as the most extreme forms of woke propaganda.
Good games sell, bad games don't.
Once the glitz and glam of the allure is gone only solid memories will live on.
There is a lot of junk and the racketeering of what gets talked about and why people should spend their time and money on certain things is what Gamergate is all about.
The best example I can think of is Sunset, a solid abstract concept about the daily life of a maid working for a dictator during a civil war. It's a bit out there, certainly not made to carter to those who would need the high-end specs required to play it at the time of release and failing terribly on user interface, story and playability. This tried to get sold as a AAA game and was promoted by all the usual journos who didn't have to shell out their own money and anyone with valid criticisms were labelled as white supremacists or misogynists or whatever other labels had power at the time as derisions towards potential customers.
Now jounos and the pundits working the grift at the time were well known to be attacking potential customers, that was nothing new. But when the game developers let it be known that they hated their potential customers the lid blew off on the panhandling going on across the industry. People who can't make games shouldn't be praised as game makers. it a top of the line rig is required to play a glitchy game which isn't enjoyable then whoever approve the initial funding for the game didn't do their homework on what their product was. Blaming potential customers for not wanting dross is what poisoned the watering hold for other indie developers at the time and instead of reflecting and evolving the fashion of the day was to double down on those who could buy products and berating them.
Thankfully things like Among Us and Cats and the Other Lives still managed to be made and let the world know that straying a little from the popular path can still lead to having fun and enjoying yourself - in all it's weirdness and variety.
Once those trying to gatekeep finally see that they are only destroying creativity at an intrinsic level for their own personal gain we can finally move onto seeing more works which are worth engaging with. But until then it's a case of good games sell, bad ones don't.
the best bit of sunset lore is the broteam video where he immediately predicts how up their own ass the devs are and then refunds it.
For those who haven't seen it yet, it's just 40 seconds of booyah!
I get what you mean. But when people say indies, they don't mean the ones who have obvious signs of being made by someone who enjoys huffing the smell of their own farts.
You can almost instantly tell when an indie game is made by them, and they're easy to avoid.
Indies don't get a free pass either. People are just more lenient as a whole for games made by a small group or one person, because AAA and sometimes AA is falling for the consultancy scam. Which is honestly looking more and more like racketeering with extra steps.
There's the easy to spot and avoid, but there's also the ones who are suspect, but you have no reason to believe they'll be messed up in some way.
Just check the website of the development house, or the twitter of the devs.
That should solve any lingering questions.
Indies are full of leftist cliques, bit they are also full of actually good games. Platforms like Steam don't give a shit about the dev's politics (for now), so if you look in the right places you can find good stuff.
Oh that's simple to explain, most of humanity is reactionary on MOST issues so when they reject one they immediately sign on with the other ignoring the nuance and full context that side works in.
I would be more reactionary myself but my extremely low opinion of humanity at large tempers that quite a bit. It's ok to be reactionary on some things if they are so egregious but when you're talking about companies it's best to ALWAYS keep them at arm's length since money is the guiding factor here and as shown with ESG it only takes the lure of money to get the wedge in the door for a company to be quickly infected.
It’s because
My general rule is that if I see an indie game on Steam that features any "award badges" from either websites or events, I won't give them any money.
Or a single featured quote from Kotaku, IGN, Rock Paper Shotgun or any other anti-gamer website. Even if the game is good and not woke, if you're giving air to any of that shit, you don't get my dollars. No exceptions.
I don't know, I'm not a collective. I'm just a guy. If an indie game is good I praise it, and the rest of the slop I avoid.
I know I'm getting older now because I get the sense that this is a generational drama that is unnecessary. Decades ago when I was renting physical game discs at the brick and mortar stores, you just browsed the selection and grabbed what looked kinda cool and tried it out for a couple days. If you loved it you would save up to buy it, if you hated it then you're only out $2-4.
Theres always been a huge selection of literal trash games that you have to sift through. I think it's honestly childish drama to assume that because slop exists that we have to make a huge deal out of it
It's not about the slop existing, it's about the slop being used for predictive programming and cultural influence.
Normalising degenerative behaviours and encouraging people to accept ideologies themed around enabling societal decay.
For instance, you can say that BLM is "childish drama", but it encouraged countless people across places like America and parts of the U.K., Germany and France to riot, loot and cause destruction. That was not childish drama, it was physical, purposeful chaos where a lot of people lost a lot of their livelihood, and some lost their lives.
BLM was not something that happened in a vacuum -- it was a coordinated effort by politicians and the media alike, utlising almost every avenue of cultural interaction to rile people up to destroy aspects of civil society.
In isolation you can definitely say things like propaganda-filled indie/AA/AAA games are pointless to get angry about, but when you look at it from the collective point of view, the broader message that is being reinforced across other mediums, you begin to see how damaging its effects can be.
For instance, when you have ideologues using music, movies, shows, news, and video games to push degenerative messages, eventually it influences how those people think and behave. It's Cultivation Theory in practice, and -- as the BLM example shows -- it works.
Indy isn't automatically good, rather it's a potentiality.
independent studios/developers will always have flexibility and a willingness to go against the grain, hell, to try something new that nobody else has done before. A guy in his basement may not have the budget or the manpower to make his dream game perfect, but he doesn't have a supervisor, a manager, a CEO, a marketing team, a board of directors, or a gaggle of investors breathing down his next to make somebody else's dream game out of his, either. If he thinks the woke horsehshit is just that, he can ignore it. If he thinks it's the greatest thing evar, well he can go down that road as well, but it's his choice to make, not some entrenched bureaucracy trying to make sure they can take that vacation in cancun this summer and maybe visit a BRIDGE (look it up) seminar while they're at it.
Thank you. A lot of people here (especially a certain highly opinionated Brit) seem to think that indie devs will save the industry. I think that some praise is warranted but certainly not to the degree that it receives here. Firstly, 99% of indie games are shovelware. Like you said, many are derivative and follow well tread paths where others have done better. Or they're extremely shallow. Or just unfun. Secondly, lots of indie devs are just as woke, just as trooned out, just as communist as the big dev studios. Third, there's no guarantee of any less corruption than with the big studios.
You're being a bit reductive. Some indie developers suck, but that does not condemn the rest.
It's been said here several times already, but the reason indie is good isn't because current indie offerings are what we want, but because it offers a mechanism for variety and niche.
"I don't like these TV shows, so I'll go make my own," gets chuckles.
"I don't like these games, so I'll go make my own," is possible and can be successful.
That's why indie gaming, as a concept, is seen favorably even if the "community" is rotten and incestuous. I guess you could call it cope, but that possibility serves as a light in the darkness.
Indie games are not a monolith. And there are tons of them. Ignore the ones that suck from shitty devs, and play the good ones.
Entertainment and pop-culture in general will always generate a dynamic wherein you got the mainstream, the controlled opposition/competition to the mainstream in the form of astroturfed Indie™/Alt™ content, and then you have the real indie/alt scenes that are just waiting to be tapped as pop-cultural oil reservoirs. The constant upcycling of marginal subcultures into mainstream entertainment genres is the engine of pop-culture itself, because the object of pop-culture is the paradoxical condition of being a popular loser, hence why it's so hilarious that Kurt Cobaine blew off his head in the name of "authenticity," only for his turbocunt widow to make the commercial value of his brand skyrocket. It's what he gets for being such a self-righteous faggot.
But anyways, my point is in any entertainment industry, there's an easy trap to fall into of becoming Rage Against the Machine or Hot Topic or some other brand of fashionable social-signaling masquerading as rebellion, and boy if the left hasn't mastered the art of being the court dissident. So "indie" scenes are always gonna be infested by the same milieu that comprised the mainstream industry in the first place, coming from the same neighborhoods and the same schools, running in the same professions and convention circuits and cliques, getting glowing coverage by their friends in the MSM to get launched into becoming the next big "outsider" hit, etc.
I mean shit, that's also social media these days. Almost every big e-celeb today was handpicked by a talent agency and pushed on normies by the algorithm, and that's frankly the history of pop-culture in general, with some exceptions. So while I hate blackpill shit, it's extremely important to not fall for controlled competition masquerading as "indie." Much like how Microsoft sponsors a lot of Linux projects and Google sponsors Mozilla and tons of Silicon Valley startups, you gotta be weary of astroturf fuckery and willing to autistically screech at it like how HarmfulOpinions fucked up Candid's attempt to astroturf a free speech app for the sake of training a censorship AI.
As bad as the politically correct tribe is, the biggest thorn in gaming was normies slurping the yearly sports slop and CoD at full price. Even with stagnant quality, ads in paid games. Soon afterwards, the advent of MTX with whales coincided with smartphones and the explosion of the casual, undiscerning audience. The sustaining presence of indies simply was seen as an alternative to mass consumer culture. Caring about corporate and woke infiltrations would require a lot of people to choose pro-social behavior over their instant gratification.
Indie games fill niches that are otherwise ignored by the big companies. Look at some of the recent and popular indie offerings—Balatro, Vampire Survivors, Against the Storm, Manor Lords, and a few I'm probably forgetting. You know what all of those games in common? They stick to actual fun gameplay instead of expensive cinematics, predatory microtransactions, and political messaging. At the end of the day, gamers just want a fun game to play and it seems like a lot of AAA developers forgot that part.
Most indie games aren't destroying or derailing beloved brands. I think that alone gives them an air of goodwill. It's easier to avoid an indie title that is rancid with post-modern garbage.
I have been asking this myself for years. It feels mostly like cope combined with a "no true Scotsman" fallacy.
"Those aren't the indie games we mean, we only mean the perfect non woke indie games in our head. True indie games have never been tried!"
i wish you were right, man. trannies run most popular games. ULTRAKILL sold gay pillows and added an anal vibrator mode and still became part of popular culture. celeste is so gay they retconned the main character into a tranny, still universally praised for just being super meat boy: gay edition.
join any indie game community, especially on discord, any of them, you'll see trannies as moderators and running the show where they try to make Early Porn Introduction a reality to as many minors as possible. it's bad out there.
Yeah, Celeste especially hurts because the game was actually good, and both the gameplay mechanics and music were solid.
But...it's a game meant for speedrunning. It shouldn't be a surprise, in hindsight, that one of the creators later started crossdressing and then retconned the main character. Ditto the music's composer. Ditto most of the major mod-makers.
I love speedrunning. I'm not autistic enough (in the internet and not clinical parlance) to be any good at speedrunning, but I am autistic enough to enjoy doing it. The groomers running the Discords are poisonous snakes who need to be kept off the Internet, but I can't help but feel pity for the autistic kids just wanting to get good at a video game, who stumble on these forums and get sucked into a world of degeneracy.
Nobody should have bought Celeste because it was made by the same dude that did Towerfall who came out as a vocal Sarkeesian supporter and anti-gamer very early on.
oh, also cuphead, which was not only legitimately fun (if hard as balls), but also delivered one of the most delicious self-own by a game "journalist" I've ever seen in my forty years on this beautiful blue marble.
FNAF (whatever your opinion on the game series itself) was literally made by a christian who donated to anti-abortion charities and almost got cancelled for it
agree to disagree. by your standards only call of duty, dota, and counter strike are successful AAA games.
I think all of those are successful. Obviously, Terraria, Minecraft, and Stardew Valley are on a whole other level, but ULTRAKILL and Celeste both made plenty of money and the complaints about them are due to the dev politics, not the gameplay.
I don’t like that the trannies got a win either, and I certainly don’t approve of the post-launch retconning into trans that Celeste did, but to say that they aren’t objectively successful because of the better results of the biggest indie games of all time seems like saying that your local minor league team that has a winning record and consistently fills their small stadium isn’t successful because they’re not the Yankees or the Red Sox.
You nailed it.
Worse yet is that way too many people keep saying the "pendulum is swinging the other way", but in reality, it's not. It's just swinging further left.
A lot of games that gamers now consider to be "good" are still Leftist propaganda, it's just not as bad as the more prominent Leftist propaganda.
For instance, all the people complaining about The Acolyte being "woke" will then go and watch The Boys, or Gen V, or Arcane and praise those shows as being "good". They're all Leftist, just some are more extreme than the other.
I see the same thing in gaming A LOT. People complaining that Suicide Squad was "woke" but then in the next sentence praise Baldur's Gate 3 as being "amazing!". Even though Baldur's Gate 3 is actually way more woke than Suicide Squad.
Sadly, the Left's plan is working; they're playing the long game and Gen Z and Gen Alpha are eating up a lot of their slop.
They have the two pots -- the hard boil pot featuring ultra-woke nonsense, and the soft-simmer kettle featuring moderate-woke nonsense. When the frog hops into the hard boil pot and recoils, it then hops into the soft-simmer kettle and claim that it's fine.