Indie game

• 1. Introduction

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  Dan Pearce of IGN once said that the only consensus about what makes a video game indie is an "I know it when I see it" judgment. That shrug sits at the heart of the indie game, a video game made by individuals or small teams without the backing of a large publisher.

  The label covers Among Us, released in 2018, which drew half a billion players during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021. It also covers countless games that almost nobody has heard of and that never turned a profit.

  This documentary follows several questions. Where did the idea come from, and how did a pastime for teenage programmers turn into an industry with its own awards? Who pays for these games, and why do so many vanish unnoticed? And what must a game be to count as indie at all?

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• 2. Who Counts As Independent

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  Laura Parker of GameSpot offered the simplest answer: independent development is the business of making games without the support of publishers. That works for many games and fails for others. Two kinds of independence usually come up. Financial independence means the developers paid for the game themselves or used sources such as crowdfunding. Independence of thought means no outside party steered the design.

  The borderline cases make the problem vivid. Journey came from thatgamecompany with financial backing and publishing support from Sony. Kellee Santiago of the studio still argued that they were independent, because they innovated without Sony's involvement.

  Bastion, from Supergiant Games, was published by Warner Bros. Entertainment, mainly to sidestep difficulties with the certification process on Xbox Live. Greg Kasavin of Supergiant says the studio is indie because it has no parent company.

  The Witness, from Jonathan Blow and his studio Thekla, Inc., was self-funded and self-published. It cost around $6 million to make and sold for $40, while most indie games cost up to $20. Blow saw it as something between indie and AAA.

  No Man's Sky, from Hello Games, had Sony's publishing help without Sony's money, and launched at the price of a typical AAA title. Sean Murray of Hello Games argues the team is still small and the game highly experimental, so the studio remains indie.

  Dave the Diver was made by Mintrocket, a thirty-person studio owned by Nexon. The studio itself says it is not indie. Even so, the industry found the game unconventional enough to nominate it for Best Indie Game at The Game Awards 2023.

  Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 went further and won both indie awards at The Game Awards 2025. Its developer, Sandfall Interactive, was an independent team of 30 plus outsourced work. Yet the game was often compared to AA or AAA releases because of its budget and its high-profile voice actors, funded by the publisher Kepler Interactive.

  Jesper Juul, an associate professor at The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, tried to bring order to this in his book Handmade Pixels. He described three ways a game can be indie: financially independent of big publishers, aesthetically independent of mainstream visual styles, or culturally independent in the ideas it presents. Even he concluded that no single rule settles the matter.

  Neighboring labels sharpen the picture. Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice from Ninja Theory is the prime example of a "triple-I" game, made by a larger independent studio with AAA polish. Double-A studios run 50-100 people and work like AAA studios, yet keep creative control from publishers.

  Open source games are a different thing again, since they are released with their source code as a hobbyist pursuit. Commercial sales are not required of an indie game either. Spelunky was offered as freeware on its original release, and the base version of Dwarf Fortress remains free.

  The word indie itself barely existed before the early 2000s. Before that, people spoke of amateur, enthusiast and hobbyist software.

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• 3. Bedroom Coders to Shareware

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  Spacewar!, from 1962, was made by a small team without commercial financing, but there was no video game industry yet to be independent from. Joyce Weisbecker, who considers herself the first indie designer, wrote several games for the RCA Studio II console in 1976 as an independent contractor for RCA.

  The first personal computers arrived in 1977, and each shipped with the BASIC language and example programs, including games. David H. Ahl's book BASIC Computer Games, rereleased in 1978 with source code for over one hundred games, eventually sold more than one million copies. Readers who typed in its listings often went on to write their own.

  Atari, Inc. launched the Atari Program Exchange in 1981 to publish user-written software for its 8-bit computers. Print magazines such as SoftSide, Compute! and Antic asked hobbyists for games in BASIC or assembly language, which they printed as type-in listings.

  Other hobbyists sold directly. They placed ads in computer magazines such as Creative Computing and Byte, then filled each order by hand, copying the game to cassette tape, floppy disc or CD-ROM with documentation. In the United Kingdom, where game development took off in the early 1980s, distributors arose to handle the copying for them.

  The ZX Spectrum was the machine that launched the UK's "bedroom coders" and, with them, the country's video game industry. Manic Miner, from 1983, carried the quirkiness of British humour, and Alien Garden, from 1982, showed highly experimental gameplay. Infocom advertised its text-based interactive fiction by stressing its lack of graphics, leaving the picture to the player's imagination.

  By the mid-1990s, 3D graphics and the rise of the personal computer as a gaming platform had created major commercial opportunities. Publishers coalesced around large developers, covered their marketing, and rejected small or unusual concepts as too risky. Consoles added another wall, because their development kits were expensive or hard to get.

  Shareware kept small developers alive. Players tried a limited version for free and paid the developer to unlock the rest, so copying by friends became a feature instead of a threat. Tim Sweeney, later the founder of Epic Games, released ZZT this way, and magazines packed shareware samplers onto discs.

  Then id Software released Wolfenstein 3D in 1992 and Doom in 1993, which showed that shareware could carry titles from mainstream developers too. By the 2000s, with mail order long dead, a game without a publisher had almost no chance of reaching a retail shelf.

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• 4. The Digital Turn

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  In the early 2000s, the Internet let developers sell straight to players. Adobe Flash was cheap, and tools such as GameMaker Studio, Unity and Unreal Engine removed much of the programming barrier. Cave Story, released in 2004, showed how popular a retro-styled game could be, and some developers began using games to carry social or political messages that mainstream titles avoided.

  The larger industry was pulling the other way. Electronic Arts and Activision stepped back from smaller one-off titles to focus on their biggest properties. AAA games cost tens of millions of dollars on average in 2007-2008, leaving little room for risky ideas.

  The critic Roger Ebert argued in 2005 and 2006 that video games could not be art. Some developers answered by making indie games designed to prove him wrong.

  Valve built Steam to deliver updates to its own games, and it grew into a storefront. By 2005 it was curating third-party titles, including some indies. Steam Greenlight arrived in 2012, letting any developer propose a game to the userbase, and Steam Direct replaced it in 2017 for a small fee. Itch.io, established in 2013, focused on indie games, and Humble Bundle supplied the tools to sell them.

  Consoles joined in. The Xbox 360 launched in 2005 with Xbox Live Arcade, but indie games there drew little attention at first. That changed in 2008 with the "XBLA Summer of Arcade" promotion, which paired Braid, Castle Crashers and Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved 2 with two AAA games. Braid won critical acclaim and attention as a game developed by two people.

  Microsoft kept going with Super Meat Boy, Limbo and Fez, and Sony and Nintendo followed. By 2013 all three console makers let indie developers apply for low-cost development kits and publish straight to their storefronts.

  Around the same time, World of Goo arrived in 2008. Its developers, 2D Boy, had tried and failed to find a publisher. After the game won recognition at the Independent Games Festival, the publishers who had turned it down offered to publish it. In 2012, Journey became the first indie game to win both the Game Developers Choice Award and the D.I.C.E. Award for Game of the Year.

  The hits piled up. The Binding of Isaac came in 2011, Hotline Miami in 2012, and Shovel Knight and Five Nights at Freddy's in 2014. Hotline Miami inspired many people to start making games, while the latter two grew into media franchises. The App Store and Google Play, which opened in the late 2000s, drew mobile developers with their low barriers. In 2012, the documentary Indie Game: The Movie covered several of these success stories.

  Minecraft, released in 2011, began as an indie game and had sold about 60 million copies when Microsoft bought its developer Mojang in October 2014.

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• 5. Paying for Independence

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  A developer with no publisher must find the money alone. New studios may "bootstrap" with personal funds, take personal or bank loans, or seek investment, while existing studios can draw on past revenue.

  In 2012, crowdfunding for video games took off, and several large indie projects raised millions of dollars on Kickstarter. The practice has since waned, because consumers grew wary of campaigns that failed to deliver. A successful campaign now usually needs substantial development work done before launch, to prove the game will be finished.

  Minecraft was one of the first games to prove the early access model. Players buy a playable beta, give feedback, and receive the full game free on release, while later buyers may pay more. Like crowdfunding, it works best when much of the work is already done.

  Dedicated investors have also appeared, such as the Indie Fund, which gives seed investment that is repaid through game royalties. Several national governments have offered similar grants through public arts agencies.

  Since 2010, boutique publishers such as Raw Fury, Devolver Digital, Annapurna Interactive, Finji and Adult Swim Games have supplied funding and marketing with little to no creative control. Annapurna Interactive sought games that were "personal, emotional and original". Successful indie studios such as Chucklefish, Coffee Stain Studios and Team17 have also begun publishing smaller developers.

  The arithmetic of selling has changed too. In 2008, a developer could earn around 17% of a game's retail price, but around 85% if the game was sold digitally. Today digital platforms still take a revenue cut of each sale to pay for running the storefront.

  Most indie games do not make a significant profit, and only a handful earn large ones. The Dunning-Kruger effect has been shown to apply here. Some newcomers succeed from the start, but most developers need upwards of ten years of industry experience before they regularly make financially successful games. Most people in the industry therefore see indie development as a career stepping stone.

  The few that do succeed sometimes earn physical editions. The distributor Limited Run Games produces limited runs of proven indie titles, with art books and stickers in the case.

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• 6. Getting Noticed

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  Around 2015, worry spread that easy-to-use tools would flood the market, a fear called the "indiepocalypse". Jeff Vogel said in a talk at GDC 2016 that any downturn was just part of the standard business cycle. In March 2016, the market was estimated at no less than $1 billion per year for games sold through Steam alone.

  In April 2016, the Devolver Digital co-founders Mike Wilson, Graeme Struthers and Harry Miller said the market was more competitive than ever but looked healthy. Gamasutra concluded that by the end of 2016 there had been no catastrophic collapse, but growth had slowed sharply, in a "post-indiepocalypse" phase.

  A small number of games receive wide coverage and are called "indie darlings". Celeste and Untitled Goose Game earned the label through players' praise. Other games were positioned as darlings by the press before release, then failed to impress players, as happened with No Man's Sky and Where the Water Tastes Like Wine.

  Steam adds thousands of games each year, so developers rely heavily on its discovery tools, which tailor catalog pages to customers based on past purchases. Mobile app stores faced the same flood of offers in the late 2010s, with poor means for shoppers to find anything. Many developers now run public relations campaigns and talk to the press early in development, which raises costs.

  Some games break through anyway. Undertale, from 2015, was popularized mainly over social media. Lethal Company, which entered early access in 2023, spread through internet culture and became one of that year's most played games.

  Awards have grown more welcoming. The Independent Games Festival was established in 1998 and held its first event in 1999. Not until the 2010 Game Developers Choice Awards were Limbo, Minecraft and Super Meat Boy treated as competition alongside AAA titles.

  Since then, indie games have appeared in nominations at the D.I.C.E. Awards, The Game Awards and the BAFTA Video Games Awards. What Remains of Edith Finch, Outer Wilds, Untitled Goose Game, Inscryption and Vampire Survivors have won Game of the Year honors. Hades and Balatro are counted among the best games of all time.

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• 7. Japan's Doujin Soft

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  In Japan, the doujin soft community was treated as a hobbyist activity through the 2010s. Bedroom coding took off there in the late 1970s and early 1980s, but consoles soon overwhelmed the computer market. ASCII Corporation published a hobbyist programming magazine called ASCII, then turned to game development kits, and by 1992 it had released the first commercial version of RPG Maker. Users could release finished games as freeware or commercial products.

  Doujin games were often built from existing assets and won little respect from consumers. They were made to be played and shared with other fans, often at conventions. Comiket, the largest fan convention in the world, was inaugurated in 1975, and it let independent developers sell physical products. Touhou Project and Fate spread through it and dominated the convention for years.

  Around 2013, the popularity of Western indie games started to shift attitudes. The Tokyo Game Show offered its first special area for doujin games that year, with support from Sony Interactive Entertainment. English-speaking groups also translated titles with permission, and Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale became the first doujin game published on Steam, in 2010.

  The line between doujin and indie stays blurry. The bullet hell series Touhou Project, made by the one-man developer ZUN since 1996, has been called both. Cave Story was made in Japan but is mostly called an indie game, because its success came in Western markets.

  Mikhail Fiadotau, a lecturer in video game studies at Tallinn University, found three differences. Conceptually, indie games promote independence and novelty, while doujin games tend to share ideas within a group, with strong favoritism toward the RPG genre.

  Genealogically, doujin culture dates back as far as the 19th century, while indie is relatively new. Finally, doujin games were long discussed only among doujin circles, whereas indie games have shared a stage with AAA games.

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• 8. Makers and Their Tools

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  Cave Story, Axiom Verge, Papers, Please and Spelunky were each made by a single person, though usually with help from artists and musicians. More common are teams of two to a few dozen. A larger team brings higher overhead, which is risky if the game does not sell.

  Some teams start in school. And Yet It Moves, Octodad: Dadliest Catch, Risk of Rain and Outer Wilds began as student prototypes. The founders of Vlambeer left school when it demanded rights to the commercial game they were building.

  Others come from industry veterans who leave from creative burnout, or who lose their jobs. FTL: Faster Than Light, Darkest Dungeon and Gone Home came from such groups. A third route belongs to self-taught newcomers, whose lack of formal discipline can allow fresh ideas. Braid, Super Meat Boy, Dwarf Fortress and Undertale came from developers like these.

  Tools make this possible. Indie studios usually rely on existing engines such as Unreal Engine and Unity, often at reduced prices or with royalty discounts, or on open source software such as Godot. Before 2010, console development kits cost several thousands of dollars and came with heavy restrictions. Programs like ID@Xbox and the iOS SDK later offered reduced pricing for developers who self-publish.

  The community is highly collaborative, since developers rarely compete directly once funded. IndieCade has been held before the annual E3 convention, and the Indie Megabooth was established in 2012 to showcase indie titles at trade shows. Developers also gather feedback from players through Discord and storefront pages.

  Game jams such as Ludum Dare, the Indie Game Jam, the Nordic Game Jam and the Global Game Jam give developers a few days to build a prototype. Double Fine runs internal jams called Amnesia Fortnight. Superhot, Super Time Force, Gods Will Be Watching, Hollow Knight, Surgeon Simulator and Goat Simulator all grew from jam prototypes.

  The lasting mark of indie games is on genres. Rogue-lites, which keep roguelike procedural generation and permadeath, grew directly from Strange Adventures in Infinite Space in 2002, Weird Worlds: Return to Infinite Space in 2005, Spelunky in 2008, The Binding of Isaac in 2011, and FTL and Rogue Legacy in 2012. Slay the Spire in 2019 popularized the roguelike deck-building game, and Vampire Survivors in 2022 inspired many "bullet heaven" games.

  Metroidvanias resurged after Cave Story and Shadow Complex in 2009, and Stardew Valley in 2016 revived life simulation games. Art games drew attention through Samorost in 2003 and The Endless Forest in 2005.

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