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[Udderdude]

Because once upon a time, he made some games widely considered to be revolutionary and genre-creating.

[Kinaetron]

Because once upon a time, he made some games widely considered to be revolutionary and genre-creating.

That walking incarnate of hyperbole made something of worth, go figure.

[s0]

i dont think molyneux's newer games are even that bad, in fact fable and black&white were pretty enjoyable.  he just can't seem to help overhyping them

[armedpatriots]

i dont think molyneux's newer games are even that bad, in fact fable and black&white were pretty enjoyable.  he just can't seem to help overhyping them

"That bad" isn't exactly praise lol. I do feel like his relevance is running its course a little bit, even though I did enjoy Fable.

[Türbo Bröther]

I was disgusted that B&W didn't live up to its promise of realistically modelled genitalia on creatures.

[Ashkin]

I don't get it. Did kids stop meeting up and making music in their basements when pop became big? As I see it, the 'death' of indie can only be a good thing, as it would remove the current bloat of the industry and let hobbyist devs go back to their roots, to the things that really matter- making games, rather than the glowing glamor surrounding the trade. I'd prefer a return to small, closely-knit communities and collectives, sharing their work for the pure fascination with video games.

[Udderdude]

Indie is dead, long live indie.

[Boreal]

I think the big issue is that indie game development changed.

In its early days, it was all about making a fun game that people liked.  You didn't care about money.  The arguably greatest indie game of all time, Cave Story, was freeware.  Concepts were innovative and broke barriers.  Games were polished and released as complete packages.

Now, it's all about being "the next big thing".  Thanks to Steam, Kickstarter and other similar services, you can become well-known and make money just by making empty promises and showing some pretentious "retro" art, along with some pandering.  People flock to buy unfinished products that never will be finished, like Minecraft.  Games don't try new things because developers are being afraid of only attracting niche audiences.

That's not to say that there aren't some games still being developed with the original spirit in mind, like a lot of games I see here and in some other tightly-knit communities.  Games should be developed to fit your vision, not to open the wallets of the masses.

[gimymblert]

The funny things is that despite all of t(hat indie have still open a new golden age. There is still new genre created and new bizarre half bred, and things that weren't on the radar becoming hot and mature. I mean twine start to be a thing, visual novel makes a come back, IF became influential, space shooter resurrect, narrative game broke from hardcore gameplay, hard core 2D rpg get funded back, 4X game exist again, etc ... New thing are made, there is just more of a spectrum between radical and traditional, so the contrast is not there anymore for radical to stand up like art game and walking simulator use to be. I'm mean we have got from the graveyard to gone home and many game are now taking teh inspiration, we are in a world where infinite was criticized for having too much gameplay that prompt his creator to go indie like ... GOLDEN AGE IS BACK BABY!

[Keops]

Golden age is back, now we have access to more games than ever, for cheap, for free, for all platforms, this is a gaming renaissance, it's so big that even Mr. Molyneux can benefit from it (the fact he's a very renowned dev himself notwithstanding).

I had some trouble getting Gimym's msg, but I think I got it. These waves of indie, niche and experimental games have come in all shapes and forms and we can be sure that for the forseeable future pretty much every type of game will get made, and if not, you can always try to make your dream game, now we have so many good tools for free or for little cost, it's a bit overwhelming.

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

if we're going to make the music comparison "indie music" as a brand has been going strong for more than 20 years (possibly even 30). im pretty sure the last vampire weekend album sold a ton.

i think he meant that it'll be harder to make money as an indie game developer (or next to impossible), compared to now, when it's relatively easy (or at least a lot easier than at any other time). i don't think he meant that indie game developers will no longer exist

anyway, i think it's possible, but it's too early to say. it's really hard to predict things like this. like nobody would have predicted that the flash game market would just suddenly collapse/disappear, nobody even predicted facebook/mobile games becoming more important than hardcore videogames afaik, the future is generally unpredictable

like if i were back ten years ago in 2004 i would imagine that there'd be thousands of indie webcomic artists making a living today, but no, webcomics sort of died out -- there's still a lot of them but they don't make money anymore except for the very biggest ones. so what happened to indie webcomic artists from like 2004 to today might happen to indies in 10 years too, or maybe it won't, who knows

[lanerobertlane]

I wrote a blog post with my views earlier today

http://ralabaloza.blogspot.co.uk/

Ultimately, I think indie games will go back to their corner, and the reason they're popular at the minute is due to the boredom and stagnation of AAA titles for the past few years. When the new consoles have AAA games coming out for them that aren't launch games, they'll go back to the shadows.

[framk]

I'm in the camp where I don't really mind if I make $5 or $500,000, that's not the reason I make games, and I'm assuming it's not the reason many people on this site make games. If one's sole purpose for creating games was to monetize, they would create shitty shovelware titles with no value whatsoever. Sure, with all things there is going to be a natural waning and waxing of popularity of indies, but yet again, I don't think that this change in popularity will really effect those who just want to create games without money being the sole driving force.

I didn't really know how to word that

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

i don't think wanting to make money is the same as making games solely for money. most indie developers would make more money working as programmers in a field other than games. even the most successful indie games usually won't make you as much money as working for amazon or western digital or something and coding boring stuff

but i do think the explosion of creativity in indie games in recent years is very highly correlated with it becoming sometimes possible to make a living making indie games; that shouldn't be underestimated -- a lot of the most unique and innovative indie games of the last 5 years would not have been created if there wasn't at least some hope that they could make a living doing it. even as it is, it's staggeringly difficult to even survive as an indie, but there are at least a few hundred (maybe a few thousand) people who do manage to make enough to survive. however, if that hope were completely gone, and *nobody* could make a living at it, we'd very likely see far fewer games being made

i mean, it'd go back to the way it was back in the early 00s and late 90s, when nobody had a hope of making a living making indie games. we saw far fewer indie games during that era in comparison to now, and they didn't get very much attention from the games press either

[Kinaetron]

I wrote a blog post with my views earlier today

http://ralabaloza.blogspot.co.uk/

Ultimately, I think indie games will go back to their corner, and the reason they're popular at the minute is due to the boredom and stagnation of AAA titles for the past few years. When the new consoles have AAA games coming out for them that aren't launch games, they'll go back to the shadows.

I'm not quite sure about that. AAA game budgets are a lot higher than they were in the previous generation. This will make them a lot more wary of risk and in turn probably end up churning out less interesting stuff. While the smaller indies won't be able to take full advantage of this, the larger one's Team Meat, Jon Blow have the reach to really exploit this to their advantage. So up until the point AAA studio's start to act sane again and start making spreading their bets on smaller and less expensive projects, I would have to say the influence of indie games not going away anytime soon.

EDIT

Long story short, I do agree that indies influence will eventually wane. I don't see that happening to anytime soon as AAA games are too expensive and large to make anything of real interest.

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

that's actually a myth. the *highest* AAA game budgets are indeed higher than they used to be. however, the *average* AAA game budget has not significantly increased since around the year 2000 (adjusting for inflation). i think you'd be surprised how high the budgets of games were even in the 90s, though. for example, final fantasy 7's budget was orders of magnitude higher than the budgets of games like final fantasy 12 and final fantasy 13. shen mue's budget was about as high as GTA5's budget.

[Kinaetron]

Something about that seeems off, could you supply some sort of source for this information ? I mean the amount of staff needed to make a game in the 90's and the amount of staff needed now is magnitudes larger and that seems the kind of thing that would have a major knock on effect on a games overall budget

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

budgets can easily be looked up. for example:

"The budget for both games amounted to $70 million, equivalent to over $98 million in 2013." -- shen mue's wikipedia

"GTAV's budget was rumored to be as much as $265 million ($150 million of which was spent on marketing)" -- article on GTA5, which leaves 115 million for development of the game itself, which is about the same as the 98 million for shen mue

according to its wikipedia page, ff7's budget was 45 million, which is equivalent to 70 million today. ff8's was 66 million, which is equivalent to 96 million today. ff12's was 53 million, and final fantasy 13's was 60 million. so you can see it isn't significantly changing, and sometimes it decreases quite noticeably

here's a list of the most expensive games ever, adjusted for inflation: http://vgsales.wikia.com/wiki/Most_expensive_video_games

you'll notice that SIX of the top SIX are from the 90s. the only modern game on that list even in the top 10 is number seven, gta5, from 2013.

also, note that, generally, marketing budgets have drastically increased, but not development budgets. a lot less money is going to the development of games nowadays, but a lot more money is going into marketing them. sometimes a game's marketing budget is two to three times its development budget. that was not the case in the past, previously most of the money went into the development budget, with a little left over for marketing. but today marketing gets the lion's share of the money (and people wonder why games seem worse than they used to be). there are exceptions to this of course -- ff7's budget also mostly went to its marketing. but typically that wasn't the case back then.

contrariwise, manufacturing budgets are less than they used to be, because it's now much less expensive to manufacture games (carts were more expensive than CDs, which are more expensive than digital distribution). in some cases in the past almost all of the budget went into manufacturing the physical game.

[Kinaetron]

Something still seems pretty damn off even with a cursory glance. The most obvious being after accounting for inflation Street Fighter 2 costing nearly a 700 million dollars to make. Even if you account for the cost of producing and distributing cabinet's I doubt that so many people bought those to the point it cost Capcom $700 million dollars

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

if you aren't old enough, you may not realize just how big sf2 as a phenomenon was -- there was like literally a cabinet in every store back then. there was one across my street, another a block away, another next door to that, etc., they were everywhere. they also made more than enough money from them to justify 700m spent on manufacturing cabinets.

in any case, that wiki also says that the *average* development costs by console generation have gone up.

Xbox - 202 million yen ($1.8 million) / 13 titles
PlayStation 2 - 96 million yen ($877,634) / 194 titles
GameCube - 90 million yen ($822,857) / 11 titles
PlayStation Portable - 90 million yen ($822,857) / 6 titles
PlayStation - 80 million yen ($731,429) / 1 title
Game Boy Advance - 53 million yen ($484,571) / 47 titles
DS - 37 million yen ($338,286) / 3 titles
Dreamcast - 25 million yen ($228,571) / 2 titles

so in general it's true that newer games cost more, on average. but it's not as steep of an increase as you'd expect (ps2 games cost only slightly more to make than ps1 games, going from an average of 700k to an average of 800k, not several times more; it's a slow gradual increase). and the extreme outliers in high costs often took place in the 90s, not the modern day.