What are Indie Games?

You might be wondering: "What Does Indie Mean in Games?". It is a term that is used a lot in the gaming world but the meaning of it is unknown to many people. So what is "indie games meaning"? The term indie games comes from game developers that develop a game alone or in a very small team without a large budget. The term "indie" is short for independent.

Most of the popular games today are developed by large companies that have enormous budgets for their games. Indie games however are developed often by small teams or lone wolfs that have a very limited budget, if any. That is why they are called "independent". They often do not have the financial support of a large publisher. This can limit them in their creative freedom and their ability to innovate.

Due to powerful game engines becoming more accessible to all (aspiring) developers is has become a lot easier to develop a (high quality) game. The game engine serves as the backbone of every game and is very costly and time consuming to develop. Due to these engines becoming more accessible it has become a lot easier for small teams or single developers to develop very fun games.

Indie games examples

To get a better idea of what games are indie games are, I have listed some indie games examples. You might be surprised by some games on the list as their quality is very good, even though they probably didn't even came close to the budget of today's AAA titles. Some popular indie games examples are:

Undertale

This is a prime example of a game that was entirely developed by a single person. The developer of Undertale is Toby Fox, he designed, wrote, composed and programmed the game almost entirely by himself. This takes a major effort. He initially started a Kickstarter campaign to fund the development of the game. He aimed to raise $5.000 but was able to fund the project with over $50.000 from almost 2.400 people who backed the project.

Hades

This game is a good example of a game that is developed by a small team. The developer, Supergiant Games is a indie game studio from San Francisco. The company was formed in 2009 by a pair of former Electronic Arts employees. Before the development of Hades, Supergiant Games had already found success with their previous indie titles. The game was initially released in early access what caused the team to implement player feedback in iterative improvements to the game.

Is Minecraft a indie game?

This item often surprises a lot of people. Minecraft was originally developed by a single person, Markus Persson also known by many as "Notch". Minecraft was a personal/passion project that ultimately has exploded into one of the worlds most popular games. Ultimately Notch started a game development studio named Mojang to further develop the game. Even after forming the company the game stayed a indie game due to the small development team relative to some of the large AAA studios. So yes, Minecraft is a indie game.

What counts as an indie game?

To recap the article, exactly what counts as an indie game? Indie games meaning is "independent games". These games do not have large budgets or large teams. They do have a lot of creative freedom what causes these games to be a lot more innovative than games from AAA studios. I hope this post has explained what is behind indie games meaning.