- #Getting over it with bennett foddy copies sold movie
- #Getting over it with bennett foddy copies sold software
So I guess No Man’s Sky is out, eh? I mean, look at the damn thing. There’s nothing wrong with dealing with the big kids, but if slice your games up by corporate affiliation as some do, then signing with them and having your game featured on the front page is the exact opposite of anti-commerce.
Yet both are vying to be the voice of indies.
#Getting over it with bennett foddy copies sold software
Microsoft sells enterprise software to Fortune 500 companies and Sony is so sprawling that its most successful unit is selling insurance. This perhaps comes the closest, but one asks, personal to whom? The player? The designer? The critic? And how personal? Autobiographical or just really, really deep, man? Indie means non-commercial: Both are “independently-owned.” Indie means personal: Yet the term persists according to this faulty logic. When the winner of grand prize at the Independent Games Festival is unclear what indie means, it might be time to jump ship. To every potential categorization, there exists dozens of meaningful counters. The biggest problem is that there’s no easy way to define what indie even means in a games context. In an earlier Game/Show, I explored this idea thoroughly. The term “indie game” no longer makes any sense. And if you’ve been following Kill Screen you’ll note that this isn’t a “new” problem for us. I’m in as good a position as anyone to say this. On the other hand, this Cambrian explosion has spread the term woefully thin and it’s this current reality I’m interested in interrogating. Given the new details that the average game designer is making less than $50,000, a sizeable segment of the profession is finally making good on both the “starving” and “artist” part of creativity’s past, present, and future. Whether this is a bubble, I cannot say, but there is certainly an excitement around the act of making new games. Prima facie, this is all clearly wonderful, and the influx of game makers from big studios to the stark blue ocean of self-sustainability will leave a lasting impact on the world of games. “Indie” is whispered as if an enchantment over crowd-funded projects, big and small, in hopes of another Double Fine Adventure moment. On the one hand, there is clearly something heady in the air in games these days.
#Getting over it with bennett foddy copies sold movie
Pajot and Swirsky’s movie was a smash hit, titles like the Apple design award winner Badland touted “100% independent” in their credits, submissions for the Independent Games Festival and Indiecade ballooned, and multi-national corporations like Microsoft and Sony now vie for the strange title of BFF to the this game community (loosely defined), even allowing them onstage for their presentations at E3. Since then, there’s no doubt that “indie games” are a desirable asset in the world of game making. A couple months later, they filmed me as a talking head for a small little title called Indie Game: The Movie. We met at an early Kickstarter get-together and they followed up, stating that my article was a signpost for them as documentary filmmakers that a new “scene” that was emerging. Īfter the article was published, I received an email from two young (and recently married!) filmmakers named James Swirsky and Lisanne Pajot. “T his gaming culture is launching its own stars who are both challenging the industry’s traditions and working with larger publishers,” I wrote back in 2008. Microsoft and Sony were taking modest risks and dedicating marketing real estate to untested game makers who would then introduce new ideas to an otherwise samey and fatigued game-playing audience. My argument in the Journal was simply that the means of production that were enabling titles like Braid to exist and thrive were the same that fueled the New Hollywood movement that birthed Spielberg, Coppola, Lumet, Kubrick, and others. These were magically called “indie games.”
The insurmountable obstacles surrounding commercial releases were suddenly being lowered and gamemakers like Jonathan Blow and the Behemoth started making serious bank, but in the guise of very personal and thinly assembled titles. A crop of very small teams were starting to get much wider distribution and, ultimately, sales through digital platforms, albeit through an unlikely source: videogame consoles. In 2007, when I was a reporter at the Wall Street Journal, I (and most likely others) noticed something odd that was happening in the world of games. “ It ain’t what they call you, it’s what you answer to.” ? W.C.
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