So, what is “Indie”, as i call it, and is it worth reading about?
Well, the definition of Indie is not really clear, most developers have different opinions on it. This is just mine.
An indie is someone that develop a game, without any large publishers or game companies to back him up. He designs the game, make the game and finally publish the game online to make profit of it, profit that will contribute to his upcoming games. The indiebusiness is not really a business in itself, as Indie and Shareware isn’t the same. The sharewarew business is huge, and it includes various types of software like screensavers, webdevelopment tools, smileys, and of course games. Indie-developers used to be the only developers in the Shareware games genre, but in the later years has larger companies begun developing Shareware games.
The indies that had the largest cut of the market a couple of years ago naturally grew faster than the others, and started to hire people to work for them, and thus being capable to publish games of a higher quality than the other indies, thus was their games selling more than what the regular indies games was. Their profits made it possible to hire more people, and the once so small indies were evolving into big studios.
Today, more and more of these game studios are taking their pieces of the market, leaving less room for the small indie. Still, the indie-business is larger today then that it was three years ago. The reason behind that is exposure. Indies have adjusted to the larger companies presence in the business, and the general quality of Indie-games have largely increased.
This endeed up being a rather large introduction, which wasn’t my intention. Hopefully it gave some insight on the subject.
