Indie is about to explode. It’s no longer about David and Goliath, with the bedroom coder being jack of all trades and going it alone. Because now the “indie scene” is dominated by giants and ex console developers. The quality bar is just too high.
There’s exceptions which will always sing loudly like minecraft, but these are 1 in 1 million, literally what with development of games now open to anyone who can point and click. So to stack the odds in their favour, indies are now moving to teams to raise that quality and step in the ring with Mohammed Ali.
Indie is now standing toe to toe with the big boys, and this is changing the nature of the old fashioned game industry where you had to get a publisher, you had to go retail and so on. Now anyone can do it, and the competition is boundless.
This means quality for indie titles is now easily on par with AAA, it is just due to time and work restraints, indie titles have to have creative edge to survive. This means like in The Other Brothers, you need to think out of the box and create great AI, and playability to die for… and marry them with a stylistic and iconic retro style. That kind of stuff can only come from really hard working indie developers with prior experience.
Absolutely true.