Words By GreywolfeLast week, I talked about why I don’t buy AAA games at full price any more.  For the most part, these problems boil down to bad Quality Assurance, the slow upward trend in prices as games release content piecemeal and charge for it in the form of “downloadable content” [a terrible, terrible misnomer] and the fact that games are almost always packaged in the form of “hits” with yearly game cycles.

This week, I’d like to talk about the contrast – at least for me – with indie games.  I will [and have] paid full price for many an indie game and you know what?  Often, those indie games have rewarded me with far more interesting experiences than most regular AAA games have.

Maybe the biggest single difference between an AAA publisher and an indie developer is that the indie developer is pretty much tied to the internet, now and the related issue with that is that indie developers cannot get away from being “out in the open.”

In years past, when the indie scene was also the shareware scene, it was easy-ish to make a demo, get it submitted to a shareware library and see how it did.  If it didn’t pan out, that was fine.  The world of shareware was such that you could always just put on a new name and try again with a different demo.

The internet has made that nigh-on impossible.  Some of this, of course, is bad, because we’ve seen people actively be pushed out of development as a result of perspectives they hold that aren’t related to gaming [or that are, but which are entirely just opinions.] So, in the modern era, your reputation as an indie studio matters.  Make a good game and that reputation will follow you all over the place.  Make a bad game and you’ll probably end up in some kind of trouble, because someone will rip you to shreds.

The matters.  Especially when the indie studios are often willing to talk back to their fan-base, something that an EA or an Activision basically refuse to do.

AAA Developers are only starting to realize this, but gaming can be lots of things.  One of these things is small, interesting experiments that don’t have to run into millions of dollars by way of budget.  There are some amazing little games that Ubisoft have tried which go a long way to restoring some faith in a company that has churned out nothing but terrible Assassin’s Creed fodder for years – in fact, parts of Far Cry 4 [the Shangri-La sections] almost seem informed by indie design.

As an actual, bona fide indie, though, there are lots of things that you can try that an AAA would never bother with.  Do you want to make your game more story heavy and less fixated on mechanics?  You can do that.  Do you want to try different genre mash ups to see what sticks?  You can do that.  Do you want to go retro with your graphical style and make your game stand out that way?  You can do that.

By not having to walk the tight rope of being every game to every gamer, indie games have been able to champion ideas, graphical themes and styles and game play ideas that AAA developers would never bother touching.

Because indie games are often smaller than their AAA counterparts, they’re also often cheaper.  [to an extent]  I paid $15 for Shovel Knight.  Now, admittedly, most folks would finish Shovel Knight in anything from four to six hours in their first play through.  It took me twelve.  I just don’t have that sort of hand-eye co-ordination.  Did I think it was worth it?  Oh, God, yes.  There were problems with that game, but it provided everything I wanted.  It gave me a complete game [with no DLC that I had to buy later] which had a defined end [beat the big boss at the end] and did all of this in a fairly well executed manner [there were no/few Quality Assurance issues with the game in question.]

Would I buy a game made by Yacht Club Games again?  Yes.  In a heart-beat.  They’ve proven that they can deliver quality and that they know their name counts for something.

The same is true of the more modern indie games I’ve bought.  Almost all of these have turned out far better than any of the more modern AAA releases I’ve even thought about picking up.

While I think that indie development keeps getting better and better and while I certainly hope that there will be far more good indie games that come to market, I realize that this isn’t a choice many are willing to make.  Many – sadly – associate “indie” with “terrible games” that “are casual’ and “that don’t matter in the grand scheme of things.”

While this might be at least a little true, it is arguably also true about AAA games.  There is a lot of dreck out in AAA land.  Dreck that never gets tested properly.  Poor games that merely exist to sell you more of themselves.  Surprisingly awful games that have very little challenge, because they have to be everything to everyone.

Since that is the case – according to me, anyway – I will keep the indie games I love close at hand.  AAA development studios could certainly never pen a Primorida or a To The Moon, and I am grateful both of those games exist.

Images Courtesy of Pixabay:
Pixabay