StingingVelvet wrote on Aug 2, 2010, 14:46:
Yup. The PC will lead the rise of the indies and small studious because there are no license fees and it's easy to digitally distribute on an open platform. Arguing otherwise is borderline retarded.
Agreed, though don't discount the consoles, the indie scene is strong there as well but it's in the PC that it's flourishing. We're starting to see more and more quality titles and projects, some with AAA production values, a rare few even surpassing them like Heroes of Stalingrad because it's still much cheaper for an Indie to produce a quality title than a developer house under a publisher.
Right now Natural Selection 2 is in its open alpha and reports are pouring in, along with 16,000 pre-orders for the special edition. Though 16,000 isn't much since the studio making NS2 doesn't have massive overheads those 16,000 sales are basically all profit while a publisher has to sell hundreds of thousands of units to even break free. I believe it's this financial flexibility and freedom from schedules and stress that are making the indie scene more and more attractive. The Titan Quest developers, for instance, almost every single one of them, went indie and started working on a game of their own, Grim Dawn. There seems to be a growing tendency for developers to burn out working on a publisher and go indie. It's often that you meet familiar names on many indie houses.
There are risks involved since an indie developer has to eat and care for his or her family and needs but on the other hand when the game's out and if it's decent he doesn't have to sell hundreds of thousands of units just to break even, the return of investment can happen far more quickly than in a publisher.