Despite all of the effusive praise indie games get these
days from platform holders, press, and gamers, I’m starting to think it is all
just lip service. If the media actually
loved indie games, they would bother to review more than the tiny fraction of
releases that they do. If gamers really
loved indie games, they would actually buy more than just the major hyped up
ones. If platform holders – Sony and
Microsoft - really loved indie games, they would actually promote more of them
instead of sending so many out to languish in obscurity with no fanfare each
week. This is a problem.
I have only really been involved in the indie games scene
since June 2016, but even in the short time since then I have noticed several
patterns. Every single week multiple
indie games come out on Xbox One and PS4 but most of them get almost no
coverage from mainstream gaming websites.
The only games that get a lot of coverage are already popular ports from
other platforms or games that Sony or Microsoft specifically chose to highlight
and hype up in an “Indie Games Montage” during a press conference. The rest of the indie games on consoles –
probably 75% - get little to no coverage at all.
The reason? Reviews
and coverage of most indie games don’t generate enough traffic for mainstream
sites to deem them worthwhile on top of an already full workload of covering
“AAA” games. And why don’t they
generate traffic? Because a huge
percentage of gamers, despite a vocal minority claiming to want innovation and
fresh ideas and new IP’s, don’t really want any of that (but that discussion is
for another article on another day) and, thus, don’t seem to really care about
indies.
There is a certain subset of gamers that do actually seem to
care, of course, but the problem there is, once again, the lack of coverage. Recently there was a thread on NeoGAF about
how everyone longed for the return of the Xbox Live Arcade format from the Xbox
360. People liked the weekly releases
of small competitively priced digital games and wished that would come
back. This discussion struck me as
particularly stupid, even by GAF standards, because right now we’re seeing more
digital XBLA-style games released every week on Xbox One than ever before
thanks to indie self publishing, but people simply don’t know about them. They don’t know about them because the media
won’t cover them. And the media won’t
cover them because, apparently, no one reads those types of articles. See the pattern forming here? It is a real catch-22.
While the lack of mainstream coverage definitely hurts
indies, some of the problems are also self-inflicted by indie devs and the
platform holders themselves. Indie
games have developed a bit of a stigma of being unpolished and half-baked, and
the oversaturation of certain genres and styles of games has made a lot of people numb to the whole
concept of indie games. Of course, we
all know that there’s more to indie games than just 2D platformers or retro whatever games (but damn if
there aren’t way too many of them …) and some of them can be incredibly
polished, but the damage has already been done. Those misconceptions of what indie games are has muddied the
waters so much that people can’t, or aren’t willing to, find the great games
among all of the muck. They assume all
indie games are the same so they don’t even read the coverage of the good
games. And now we’ve come full circle
back to the issue of the media not covering indies properly because people
don’t read it because they don’t really love indies as much as they claim.
Another issue with console indie games is that they just
suddenly get released with no fanfare or warning more often than not. This is more Sony and Microsoft’s fault for
having complicated certification procedures that cause delays more than
anything, but it still needs to be improved.
Triple A games have a set release schedule so that you usually know
weeks or months in advance when something is coming out so you can do some
research on them if you need to. If
more indie games had set release dates in advance rather than just suddenly
coming out it would be a lot easier for gamers to get excited about them.
And that really is the biggest problem that I’ve mentioned
over and over again – gamers simply don’t know enough about the indie games
coming out. Pretty much every week when
Major Nelson tweets out “Blah Blah Blah Indie Game is Now Available on Xbox
One!” I have no clue the game even existed prior to that announcement. If someone like me, a professional games
journalist with 15-years of experience who is now actively looking for new
indie games to cover, wasn’t even aware of your game before release, how do you
expect normal gamers to be excited about it?
Even the sites that do cover console indie games don’t do a
particularly good job. Most Xbox One
and PS4 indie games on GameRankings only have a couple of reviews from the same
handful of sites. Not naming names, but
these reviews are usually poorly written, poorly thought out, and are seemingly
(occasionally obviously) produced ASAP after mere minutes of play time on the
day of release just to be the first one posted. Sites like that aren’t really helping!
That was a big reason why I decided to make PSXBoxIndies in
the first place. Console indie games
are a huge blind spot in the industry right now and someone needs to cover them
properly with the love and attention they deserve. I have discovered in the last several months a real passion for
indies and want to help elevate the good ones as best I can, but I can’t do it
alone. Microsoft and Sony need to do a
better job of promoting them. Indie
devs need to do a better job of making the public aware. And gamers need to start actually playing
indies rather than just claiming to love them while spending their money on the
same “AAA” games every year.
What can you do to help? Go read my reviews of indie games and find something you like and actually buy it! Even better, buy an Xbox Gift Card at Amazon with this link to help the site out a bit while you're buying you new indie game.
As an aside, I also want to add that I really appreciate all of the indie devs who have been willing to help me along the way so far. We’re all little indies helping each other out - devs giving me codes to review and me trying my hardest to get the word out about great games - and it is kind of magical.
