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[Craig Stern]

Right: that's only true if the school you're going to makes you sign a contract that assigns them the rights to all work you produce while going to school there. Not all U.S. schools do that.

[Alistair Aitcheson]

When you've worked hard developing a product with the hope of making a living off it, it makes sense to accept a generous offer for your wares! Trying to sell it without support of a publisher could be a massive risk, and I'm not sure how much profit they could stand to gain otherwise. I think that what it does show is that the indie market is becoming attractive to big-time publishers. In the future it might be much easier for small teams to make a living off their work with investment like this.

[Benza]

Good for them.
Honestly they could be indie they might not be. Who cares? Is how a game got developed really that important? If the game is good it's good, if not it's not.

If a game is a horrible mish-mash of bad art, bad design and boring gameplay made by one guy in his basement better then a good game made by a heartless corporation?

[Evan Balster]

I'm throwing in with the fellas who say indie is about creative control.

A personal example follows.


Last summer I had a job making an iPhone game, "Fly Boy" for a small web development company. (something I went into knowing I would try once and never do again)

(I disdain the name they gave it.  "Fly Boy".  Euch.)

Design and development were fun and my team (consisting of me, Beau Blyth [participating remotely] and Matt Rittman) was great to work with.  Development of the game under the working title "Terminal Velocity" was lots of fun.  As the summer went on and the game showed promise, the marketing team (half of the small company) got to work doing "branding" and making design changes.  And we never met with them.

So for a long while all kinds of changes were being made to the project we were hard at work on, and we didn't know what was coming next.  They renamed and re-themed the game and character to "Fly Boy", an adolescent pilot researcher (don't ask) and re-skinned the menus.  Beau, a longtime game dev partner of mine, was hired in part because the game design was based on his game "Das Uberleben Dem Grossen Sprung", but we feared all his art was going to be thrown out, as (according to the marketing head, who I'd butted heads with before) his art wasn't "high-level" enough.  Evidently the company had a strong bias toward vector art.

Three-quarters of the way in our team of three launched a little mutiny, threatening (and expecting) to leave the company together if our demands to meet with the marketers and unify project design and development weren't met.  The company gave in, and we all grudgingly served the remainder of our terms.  When we left there was a week's worth of menu changes to be made to the game, which another member of the company who I'd given a once-over of the engine assured me he'd comlete.  That was close to six months ago and the game never came out.

That was not indie.


Now Beau and I are remaking Uberleben again in my engine "plaidgadget", as a glorified sequel to the first.  We're doing it our way, with our own workflow, the way it was always meant to be--with online play!  We (the creatives) have complete control.  We are making the game because we love making games.  It will be free on computer platforms.  We may make mobile or XBLIG ports if people like it.

This is indie.


So, regardless of who's footing the bills (my producer is student loans) indie, as I see it, is about making things your way, and moreover because you love making them.

Alternately it could be about motivations.  If you're faced with a choice between making a game genuinely better or more profitable, and choose the former, you're indie.  Indie fund is an acceptable 'publisher' because its motivations are to help good games arise rather than generate revenue, and the way it works reflects this.