The future of indie games

I've followed Alice Ruppert on social media for a while now. She runs a good website focused on horse games. I'm not a horse girl! I mean horses are fine, but they're not something I'm mega into. But what I am interested in is the culture of games, and I am interested in ways to expand that culture. Anyway, she's recently posted a breakdown of the marketing strategy for a game she's been helping on, and it gave me some thoughts. Here it is:

And let me quote a nice big chunk of it:

Key Learnings and General Takeaways

• The people yearn for good horse games
• You can do what I do for horses with whatever interests you and whatever might be useful for your future games. Cats? Dogs? Trains? Fashion? Archery? Cooking? Whatever hobby and interest you have outside of games, community and expertise can be built around it and its overlap with games, and you can then use that community to give them what they want, i.e. thematically fitting games. If you WANT to do this and aren’t sure how to get started, please reach out, I’m happy to share my learnings and strategies, but don’t want to further inflate this post.
• Building thematically focused communities is providing a genuine service for players who want that type of content (and it’s a bit of a moderation effort of course), but it’s also an incredible tool for targeting your exact audience. And if you run those communities, you can run them in a way that is relatively developer-friendly rather than allergic to “self promotion” as some player-run communities are. (just don’t let people spam, and lead by example of posting content that adds actual value to players, not only your own self promo)
• See all you have to do is invest your free time for seven years to become known for the one thing that you care a lot about in games and then maybe you can make that profitable and you know what they say about dream jobs the only risk is completely mixing up your hobby and job and never having actual free time again surely that can absolutely not go wrong, it’s easy!
• Nostalgia and childhood memories can be an excellent driver of reach and interest, even without any official IP or existing brand following

And all this is pretty inspiring, right?

Because the story of indie games is that it started as an identity. You were an "indie game dev", you were the kind of person who "played indie games". There was lots of range within this, but there were core games and events that you would know about if you were in this world. You would have opinions about Indie Game The Movie. There was a community - it was large and amorphously defined, but it was a real community.

And that time has long since passed. What counts as an indie game? It's too broad, too diffuse. The competition to just be a game in that space is too much, the only people can cut through are the lucky and those with deep pockets. "Indiepocalype" and those graphs of more and more games getting released on Steam each year.

So, what can you do as a creator? You find a smaller space to exist within. You find a smaller community where you can know a bunch of the people within it. And to do this, you need people who can create those spaces, who can label those games as something. People who bring a community together. Now you're not competing with "indie games", you're competing with "horse games". It's a more interesting space to be in - you can talk about horse animation, you can talk about how horses will rest with a back leg locked but not a front one, you can reference very specific games you wish people would remake.

And there's a few of these communities I can think of. They operate differently, but they're all places where interesting work is happening & where people are pushing each other to explore new spaces. Here's a off-the-top-of-my-head list:

• Alice's horse game stuff
• Thinky Games, a big umbrella term for puzzle games etc. A website & community & convention & ...
• Domino Club - a gang of folk making games largely for each other and slowly getting more and more into fucked up sex stuff as they realise there's no reason not to. That's my understanding anyway, and I am going to assume it's true from the way the link at the start of this paragraph is blocked in the UK.
• I assume all this low-fi PS1 horror stuff is coming out of a community, although I don't know the details.
• I think Laura Michet mentioned discussion of tropes in the incremental game community? Again, I don't know the details
• Oh yeah, not videogames but this is probably a good place to link to Adrian Hon's upcoming Jubensha convention
• I'm sure I could come up with like 10 more if I sat and thought, but I want to spend less time writing each of these posts and this is a dangerously big topic to start to get into, so I won't.

To conclude: I hate people saying that anything is the future of indie games. Because there is no "the" about it. There's loads of futures, and they'll all exist side by side with each other, influencing each other and diverging and going in weird new directions. Indie games are dead! Long live indie games!