Triple Click - What's The Deal With: Indie Games?

Episode Date: April 8, 2021

Just what is the deal with indie games? When did they become financially viable? How did they become so popular? And what is "indie" anyway??? This week, Jason, Maddy, and Kirk look at the modern history of indie games, from Braid and Castle Crashers to the Nintendo Switch's big bumps. They talk about the rise of digital distribution, some misguided old comments from former Nintendo boss Reggie Fils-Aime, and whether "indie" even means anything anymore.One More Thing:Kirk: Monster Hunter RiseMaddy: Vaccine appointment tipsJason: GnosiaLinks:The excellent Double Fine Adventure documentary series:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zVwg-9WL3dEArekkz Gaming’s MH Rise longsword tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jscDTUOHdw&ab_channel=ArekkzGamingSupport Triple Click: http://maximumfun.org/joinJoin the Triple Click Discord: http://discord.gg/tripleclickpodTriple Click Ethics Policy: https://maximumfun.org/triple-click-ethics-policy/ Happy MaxFunDrive! Right now is the best time to start a membership to support your favorite shows. Learn more and join at https://maximumfun.org/jointripleclick 🚀  SUPPORT TRIPLE CLICK:Join Maximum Fun | Buy TC Merch💬 JOIN THE TRIPLE CLICK DISCORD🎮 Triple Click Ethics Policy📱 SOCIALS | @tripleclickpodInstagram | YouTube | TikTok | Twitch

E3 is coming back this year, but it's going to be digital only, which means you better buy it now or else Sony's going to take it down. Welcome to Triple Click where we bring the games to you. This week we are talking about indie games. What is the deal with that? How did they become popular? When did the indie rise start? Let's get into it. I'm Jason Dreyer.

I'm Kirk Hamilton. And I'm Maddie Myers. Hello. Hello. Hello. Hey. Hello. Hello.

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The end of the floating continent. So if you want to play along, we'll play up until then. Okay, Kirk Maddie, today we are doing a, what's the deal with? What's the deal with? What's the deal with? Indy games. What's the deal with indie games? Kirk Maddie, everyone's talking about these indie things.

What is the deal with them? Yeah, what are those? It's true. What are those? I think I like them. I think I like them. That's where I'm starting. So far.

Do you? So far, I think they're pretty good. They seem pretty good, yeah. They seem cool. In DVD games... There's just been so little time to evaluate them as we'll get to. It's hard to say if they're good or not. So today, I have a thesis to propose to you guys that I think is kind of...

Well, it's not really a thesis as much as it's a true fact that some people might not realize. This is a good way to begin a term paper, by the way. I think you're supposed to say, I have a thesis. In fact, it is not a thesis. It is a true fact. And here it is. No, if it was a term paper, I would be saying, Webster's Dictionary defines thesis as

as independent as So what people People who are kind of newish to gaming Which I think is a decent size of our audience People who like came into gaming late or took a break Or like are rejoined the club The gamers club In modern year

Might have seen this glut of indie games And think like oh my God there's so many cool indie games This is awesome like this treasure trove of games Surely this one must have always been the case. But no, it is not. In fact, the indie game kind of rise that we know it today didn't actually happen until the late 2000s.

Wow. That's really wild, Jason. That's like 10 years ago. Like 15 years ago, we basically didn't have an indie ecosystem. Now, that's not to say we didn't have indie games. There were always indie games. People were always tooling away and making games all the way back into the late 80s and early 90s.

you would have, like, hobbyist developers making games on floppy disks and passing them around. And sometimes they would do what was called shareware, where, like, you share the first couple of levels. And people have to buy the rest of the game if they want the rest, kind of like the original demos. But most of those indie games were free or shareware and some are, like, not really financially viable. It was very difficult to make a living as an independent developer, unless you signed with a publisher or got bought by a publisher. So if you look back in history, most of the game, most of the game, games that came out had to go with big publishers because that was the only way to get your games sold at Target and GameStop and what was the electronic?

E.B. Games? E.B. Games. Software, etc. Babbage. For Bavages. For Blockbuster. I would rent games from Blockbuster all the time. Yeah, for sure. But it wasn't really possible to make a living as an independent developer and stay independent. We saw like all the famous game developers of the 90s got purchased in some way.

Id Software got purchased. Origin Systems got purchased. That was Richard Garriott's Ultima, Ultima Studio. Maxis, Will Wright Studio, got purchased. Everybody got purchased, got swallowed up by the big guys, the AAA beasts. Until, I would say about 2006, 2007. And I think there's kind of like what people might not. realize is that like the company of all the companies to really open the floodgates for indies was

Xbox and Microsoft of all companies. And Xbox started a program that was called Xbox Live Arcade. Because Xbox Live was really like the PlayStation and PlayStation Nintendo did not have a kind of online infrastructure that Xbox did with Xbox Live. And Xbox was able to set up a digital store and a digital ecosystem way before those other guys. And they started this thing called Xbox Live Arcade. Do you guys remember Xbox Live Arcade using? using that at all? Mm-hmm. Yeah, of course.

Although mostly there were also any games on PC that I remember from this time period. Like, I know Steam wasn't as much of a juggernaut then as people think of it as being, but that's my other main memory of indie games in the late 2000s was just PC games being the only way that you could have an indie game. Yeah, so you couldn't really get on Steam until they started opening the doors a little bit more cracking over the doors with steam green light, which we'll get to in a little bit. But yeah, but like back then, if you were an indie developer and you had some idea of like, I'm going to make commercially viable games, Xbox Live Arcade was like your big option.

And yeah, you could find ways to sell it on PC. You could maybe luck out and get on Steam if you were really lucky. But there wasn't super viable. If I, Jason Shire, decided, hey, I'm going to make a game on RPG maker and sell it. There weren't a ton of options for me until Xbox Live Arcade came along. And so you go on Xbox Live Arcade and it's essentially this like cordoned off section of the Xbox Live store that is essentially meant for like smaller. They call it arcade because it's like smaller experiences. And so that was that is where you find all these indie games. Suddenly we saw a ton of success coming from indie games. And I think the real the real biggest games of the time were braid and castle crushers, crashers, which I believe were the first two game, first two indie games to sell a million copies each, which was unheard of. back then 2008. That was quite a time. Did you guys play Braid and Castle Crasters back then, either of those games? I did. Yeah. Part of why I mentioned PC games was because by this point I was

already working at the Boston Phoenix for a while and the Phoenix was very into covering indie everything. It was a local paper, very cool, very hip left-leading paper. So I was always like, well, there are indie games. They're just not very popular. So in 2006, when I was in, intern. I was like just digging around desperately trying to find indie games by anyone, which is part of how I like knew about Edmund McMillan before he made Super Mate Boy, which is one of the other games that we'll mention in a little bit. And like I don't know if I'd heard of Jonathan Blow, but like when Brade came out, I was already very familiar with indie games. And so I was prepared to cover them by the time 2008 came around. And then I remember some of my coworkers at that time had finally started to hear about

Braid and Super Meat Boy and some of these other games in that time period. And they were like, oh, like, Maddie's already on these things. But they weren't popular. It wasn't like, you know, regular people knew about them until the Braid era, or at least that was my perception of it at that time. Yeah, I played Braid. This was right around when I was getting back into video games after taking a little while off. And my main memories of it are that I had bought an Xbox 360. and the main way that I could play games with that console was by putting discs in them. And I don't know if they were selling full downloads of games at this time.

I think that they weren't yet. So there weren't a ton of games you could download that weren't on the Xbox Live Arcade. Like Xbox Live was just so that you could play games online with your friends. And so Brade also was a smaller game. Just like the hard drive on the Xbox 360 was very small. It just was not, they weren't to the point where they are now where it's like you just download everything.

Of course, obviously. You buy it day one and just get it. You had to put everything in on a disc still, usually. And I think, like, then later they added, like, you could take the disc game and install it on your hard drive and have faster load times. But even that wasn't possible in 2007 or so when I started out. So then Brade came out, and I remember playing it. And it was just this feeling of, oh, this is kind of just a different, a different, like, little subcategory of games in general. It's smaller.

I can just download it. There's no game box for it. And also, it was this, it was Brade. So it was this game that was, like, basically. on Mario, but it was really arty and had this whole, you know, kind of sad storyline that unfold. It was like a very subversive game, like, really obviously in a lot of ways of being like, what if the hero like doesn't win in the end? And actually like, it's a big metaphor for like not being able to undo your mistakes and rewinding time. And it was just kind of like more artistic

and more obviously so than other games too, which I think really also just established for me, okay, like, that's, there's this other avenue of games that I know had existed, before, but I was pretty ignorant of a lot of that. And just seeing it on Xbox and playing it, I was like, oh, okay, like, this is this other kind of game. Oh, this is pretty cool. And I have a feeling that a lot of people had my experience, where it was just the first time they'd really experienced that kind of a game. And it was largely because it was just on Xbox. You could just download it and play it. Yeah. So what happened was, the Xbox Live Arcade launched. It was, I believe it was first launched for the original Xbox, but then it was kind of repackaged for the X-O-C-60.

Yeah, yeah, for the 360, the 360 came out. And then Microsoft really started pushing Xbox Live Arcade, and I think that's what the big difference was. And that's why some of these Indies were able to really stand out. So what they started doing was, by the way, the original limit for these games was 50 megabytes. You couldn't have a game that was more than 50 megabytes, which is hilarious today.

Wow. But, yeah, so Xbox would start doing these summer promotions, and they called it the Xbox Live Summer of Arcade. Castle Crashers was in there too. Castle Crashers was in there, too. Castle crashes was in there. Braide was in there. Bionic Commando Rearmed was in there.

One of their first big sellers was actually, before all these, was actually Uno, which I don't know if you really count as an indie games. It's just like a frigging. It's not like a new title. It's a cultural juggernaut, obviously. Yeah, sure. Everyone has Uno. But yeah, the summer of arciving turned into this big, big thing.

And like, that's how people would really, that was essentially curation of indie games. That's how people discovered, like, limbo. was one of the summer of arcade games in 2010. I believe Shadow Complex was another huge one that was like that really, really took off. So, yeah, so that was, so Microsoft really just like was on the vanguard of this indie phenomenon. And it's funny because they kind of like, like lost a lot of ground to Nintendo and Sony in the years to come when it came to indie development. And they've since gained that back. But yeah, Microsoft was really the first company pushing this stuff.

And in fact, if you go back in time, I'm going to read you guys a quote from Nintendo's, Reggie Fisimi from March 2011 that really kind of speaks to what the indie scene was like 10 years ago. I would separate out the true independent developer versus the hobbyist. We are absolutely reaching out to the independent developer. Where we've drawn the line is we are not looking to do business today with the garage developer. In our view, that's not a business we want to pursue. And that is so, it's so funny and out of touch, but it's especially funny because he said that a couple of months, maybe a few months after, maybe a year after, a little game called Minecraft first came out and entered Early Access.

And at this point, by 2011, Minecraft had really, like, really made waves. And Minecraft was really, it wasn't quite like Minecraft, Minecraft. It wasn't a cultural phenomenon just yet. But it was at the point where people were like, like, Kataka was posting Minecraft stuff. Like, here's what this cool, these cool things. People build a Minecraft, that sort of stuff. But Minecraft in a lot of ways became the first indie game to just become a cultural phenomenon, to become something that just exploded and was everywhere for a very long time.

Well, Anne, interestingly, was then later bought by Microsoft. There was also Xbox Live Indies, which, so it's worth mentioning that Microsoft was also providing tools for people to make indie games. Like they were actively supporting the development of games, which was also something that they could do because Microsoft. has this huge software company that can provide all these tools for people. So I don't think any of those like XNA games

were super successful, like on the scale of, you know, Castle Crashers or Brade. But they did, like, there were a ton of games that were made because Microsoft, like, fully facilitated it and then gave a marketplace for them as well. Yep, yeah. And so, yeah, so Nintendo back then and Sony, to a lesser extent,

were just, like, not interested in entering these waters until suddenly, like, they started gaining this traction and I think it was around 2011, 2012, that they kind of hit a pivot point. And then in 2012, something else came along and changed everything. And that little something was called Kickstarter. And I remember this because it was like my third month at Kataku in 2012 when DoubleFind and Tim Schaefer came out and said, hey, we're going to go on this little thing called Kickstarter. And they started the Double Find adventure.

I think they wanted to raise something like $200, $250,000. and they wound up raising $4 million and exploding. And it became this suddenly everyone was chasing Kickstarter, like companies but big and small. And we saw this just sudden glut of like cash infusions from fans who could just donate and support their favorite creators and find things that look cool and support them. And this was also the rise of the many unfortunate scams

and Kickstarter's that failed to deliver Yeah. And not just scams, but I think just a general atmosphere of hopefulness around the idea of what Kickstarter could provide that was overly optimistic in some cases where it just seemed like anybody could strike it riches in indie. I mean, the other thing that came out this year, which you're about to get to on your list is indie game, the movie came out, which is this documentary about Jonathan Blow, Edmund McMillan's game Super Meat Boy and Phil Fish's game Fez. And Tommy Rufinnis also helped with Super Meat Boy. He's in the film as well. And just the idea that you could make an indie game and sort of be presented, at least in that film, as this solouteur or like duo, just one guy or like a couple guys in a garage, basically, as Reggie would put it, and make it big, make a ton of money. And then that paired with these huge Kickstarter campaigns, or at least huge seeming, like we know that a couple million dollars isn't actually enough to make a game and Double Fine found that out at the end of that campaign.

But at the time, it seemed like this huge number. It seemed like this period of time where anybody could just make a ton of money on an indie game. And I think that was kind of dangerous and sad. And it didn't necessarily crash, but it did change a lot in the years to follow. Yep. Yep. Yep. Quick correction.

Double find adventure raised over $3 million. And also worth noting that the Double Find Adventure YouTube series is one of my favorite things ever. and I highly recommend that everyone go watch it. Yeah, we always recommend that, but we haven't, I think on triple click, have we ever, it's so good. Everyone should watch it. If you want to know how video games are made and how hard it is, you should watch that documentary. And what it's like to run out of money and resources as you're going along and like still want to develop more things. It's a very, it's a good insight into how that process happens.

Yeah, they were wonderfully transparent, I think. It was very cool that they made it. And I can't wait for part two, which will hopefully come along when Psychonauts do comes out. Oh, yeah, right. That's right. They're making another one. Yeah, remember Tim Schaefer told us on an episode of split screen. A thousand years ago.

Yeah, that was before Microsoft bought his company. Yeah, that was true. I'm sure that'll be part of the documentary because they've been filming it. It's not like they're going to throw out that footage. Oh, man, that'll be great. And that's true. That'll happen while the cameras were rolling. I think the thing they really regret it is posting videos like during the course of

development because they could actually affect morale and like affect development. And so I think they still want to be transparent. but this time they're just going to release everything, like close to launch, which makes sense. I think he said as much when he was up. Yeah, he told us that, yeah, which I get that. Anyway, so cut to 2013, putting aside the Kickstarter revolution. And putting aside, by the way, we're not really going to get into mobile games, but at the same time that all this was happening, the Apple Store also was changing in really big ways.

Like at first, it was very much like Waldgarden. Like, we only want certain things on here. And then it wound up exploding. And tons of games made tons and tons of money. This is when you have like Flappy Bird and Zach Gages stuff and all of these different... Ridiculous fishing, yeah. Angry Birds.

Angry Birds is really the original cultural phenomena. Candy Crush, of course. But anyway, so 2013, so this is where we get into a new generation of consoles, the PS4 and the Xbox One come out. And both of those consoles kind of from the get-go are very digital focus. Obviously, the Xbox One is not as digital heavy as it originally says it will be. But both consoles very clearly like,

are okay with you buying everything digitally. They're like, we've clearly, we have entered the digital revolution. And what that means, and that's a part of this whole story, is that that barrier for entry has kind of come down. And over time, it really became viable to just buy all of your games online. And while that can be a problem for all sorts of reasons, like if Sony decides, hey, we're going to take down the PS3 store this summer. It can also be really cool if you can't afford to print discs

and get your game in store shelves. which can be an expensive proposition. And only really big publishers can do that. So that was a barrier that allowed indie games to thrive. And by 2014-2015, all three publishers, Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft, all had their own dedicated indie teams, and they were holding like indie showcases. There was a Nintendo showcase at GDC and Sony's showcase

and Microsoft Showcase. They would all do their own things, where they would be like, look at all the cool, quirky indie games we have coming. And it actually eventually got to a point where we had too many games and we were approaching maybe the first or maybe the ongoing indie apocalypse, which a lot of developers call it. We'll get to that in a second, though. A couple more milestones we should mention. Gone home comes out in 2013. We did a spoiler cast on that a few months ago.

Twine isn't on this list because it's a little bit more small scale, maybe too small scale for you. but I think it is worth noting just in general that a bunch of tools for developing games were coming out and becoming much more accessible during this time period, which is, it's not just that these big publishers on console are making it possible for Indies to develop for their platforms. That was happening, but it was also true that development on PC was just getting easier as more and more tools were being released and Indies were sharing tools with one another and collaborating more in these online spaces that were growing. And that led to stuff like the Twine Revolution as it's like, called where there were a whole bunch of interaction fiction games around this time. And then also stuff like Gone Home inspiring other really small scale PC games that were short and sweet. Yeah, I do think that that's worth mentioning that on the development side of this, just the tools had grown more powerful. And it was possible for a smaller team to make a game that made an impression with players like a game made by a lot more people that would have been a lot more expensive. Gone Home is a good example because that was a first person exploration game that

looks really nice. Like it looks, you know, it doesn't look like an uber expensive game from 2013 would look, but it looks good in its first person. It has 3D everything and it's sort of simulated in that way. You can pick stuff up. And that just, I don't think, would have been possible at all a few years earlier. The Stanley Parable is another good example. A game that was made using Half-Life, using the Source Engine and then eventually made into its own thing. It was very, very successful for Davy Redden. Another one where it's like a first-person narrative game that's very clever, looks really nice. just doesn't feel like, even what a few years before, like where braid looks really nice

and has a lovely art, but it's just like a side-scroller, it's fairly simple in some ways. And then, of course, Jonathan Blow would go on to make the witness, which is like a first-person game and it's way, way, way more complicated. So, yeah, the tools were rapidly developing alongside these market-like openings also developing. Stanley Parable was a half-life mod, was it not? It started as one, and then it was released as a standalone game. And that was where it was much more fleshed out. I actually, I covered that game for Katakka's one of the first things that I wrote about when it was a half-life mod.

I played it. Someone left a comment on one of my posts just being like, hey, you should check this out. It's cool. And I played it and was like, this is super cool. And I like got Davey Redden on the phone and interviewed him and then ran this. It's probably still on Kotaki, this profile on him and about the game being like, this game is really clever. And then a couple years later, of course, he releases it on Steam. And it, like, makes a ton of money.

And it's this massive one. And now he's, you know, very successful. I'm one of those, like, snobby people who likes the, original version of the game better than the like cleaned up version that he made later. He added a bunch more jokes. The original is much simpler and just makes its point in a more elegant way. But it's not as it's not as flashy as the one he made later. You get the idea really quickly. And you're like, this is great. And then it ends. And it's like, okay, that was wonderful. Where yeah. The fleshed out version is really cool and has a lot of nice hidden stuff. But it's the same idea. And you're like, okay, I get the idea. And so I totally. I totally get that. Yeah. Yeah. But I mean, it does show how people could do a lot with a little during this time period, which I think it was part of what was so exciting about indie games in this time was like, oh, you can just do something that only lasts a couple hours. And also it can get accolades from publications and journalists and be celebrated in this type of way.

Like that was exciting too. Right. It can hit you the like aesthetically, like the way that Stanley Parapal, he just got this great actor with a lovely British voice. And you heard that voice and it was that same feeling of like, oh, this feels real. You know, like this feels like legit in that same way that playing gone home, you're like, oh, this looks real. because the four people who made this are experienced AAA devs. They know how to make a thing real. And like got a good voice actor.

Yeah. Yeah. Those aesthetics do matter. So to your point, Maddie, I think that's what's really interesting is that the latter half of what you just said is what changed over the turn of the century

and like through the late 2000s. The part of where you said can get attention for this. Can get like media attention for this. Can get buzz for this. That's really what changed. And I think that that you could find games in the early 2000s in the 90s, especially on PC,

you could find all sorts of weird indie stuff. I remember one of my favorite games way back in the day was a series called Jumper that was actually made by the people who would go on to make Celeste. It was the same concept where you're doing all these tricky platformers and you jump and you collect dots that give you an extra jump. It's the same exact concept, but like rudimentary and released for free back in the day. But those games wouldn't get nearly as much attention as like the Braids and the Castle Crusher's and then the Stanley Parables and other sorts of. So the creativity level I think was the same. maybe like you said you said kirk the tools were easier to use so you could funnel more of that creativity onto the screen but it's really the biggest difference was suddenly these things were getting

headlines and you were i mean this also happened to coincide with the rise of digital media and youtube and there's a lot more space as opposed to like magazine pages where you could only showcase so many games but this was a time where really if you made something cool you could stand, you could get attention for it. Not everybody would get attention, but you could, you had a good shot at it. Speaking of which, we should talk about steam greenlight, which was so weird, such a weird system. So Steam back in the day didn't really know what to do with Indies because it wanted a curated store. It didn't want to be a Wild Wild West where anyone could publish anything. So when the indie scene started to kind of explode in the, in the 2010s or so, it started a program called Steam Greenlight.

And essentially, if you wanted to put your game on Steam through this Greenlight program, you had to put up a page that was like your description of your game and some images, a trailer, whatever, and you had to go get people to vote for it and steam with Greenlight X number of games every so often based on popularity. And it was pretty ridiculous. I know some people got some success by like posting on Twitter and like social media and getting attention that way. But man, it was tough. It was rough to be a reporter covering that stuff too because every week you'd get someone being like, check this out, my game is on Steam Greenlight, please cover it. It's sort of similar to Kickstarter for a while. We have a Kickstarter, please, you can help this game become reality. And it's like, all right, all right. I know.

Yeah, I mean, in some ways that hasn't changed, but it does suffer from the same problem that we have now, which is like if you're already successful, you can continue to be successful, which I guess I'm describing capitalism. But it really did feel that way when Greenlight came out and a bunch of indie devs levied that criticism at it very fairly. And we're just like, this just means that developers who are already really popular on Steam

are going to automatically get a bunch of followers and votes for their games because people already trust them. But the more out there ideas from people who have something cool to say, but like, how do you, how do you sell something that's a lot weirder in that environment? Yep, yep, yeah, yeah. So a couple more beats we should talk about around the. this time, like mid-2010s, we see the rise of, like, quote, indie game publishers, like DeVolver and Annan Perna, who do some awesome stuff. But if you're working with a publisher

can really be called indie anymore. Then we, I mentioned before the indie apocalypse or the beginning of the indie apocalypse where there was this glut of games. And I think the indie apocalypse, it kind of like, it's gone through these waves. And it kind of like, there was a point where it wasn't a concern to some people anymore around 2017. Because in the Switch came out. And there was a period of time around 2017, like the latter half of 2017 into 2018, maybe a little bit of 2019, but mostly those first two years where the switch came out, everyone was taken aback by how popular it was. Nobody expected it at all. And the library was really thin. So if you released an indie game on the switch. Do you think that nobody expected it?

Because when I heard Nintendo's releasing a handheld console that also plays near TV, I was thinking it was going to be awesome. I feel like some people probably thought it was going to be awesome. I think you I think in when they have their big January event like in the couple months before when they announced a bunch of games and stuff, people were really pessimistic. And yeah, people always count Nintendo out. It's a whole big thing. I think people should go listen to the episodes of Kotaki split screen from around that because I think you and I were both like, this thing is going to be amazing. Yeah, we were stoked because we were like, yeah, well, we love like hand out gaming and like we were like, this is what the Wii should have been. Anyway, anyway, I don't mean to derail you.

I just, you said nobody thought it was going to be good. And I feel like some people were probably like, this thing is going to be possible. Well, no. Well, so to that point, game publishers certainly didn't. Like, they didn't care. Like, the Switch versions of games at that point were just an afterthought. I mean, here's a perfect example from my new book, Press Reset, which you can go pre-order an hour at your local books.

All right, all right. All right. All right. I spoke to the developers of a game called The Flame and the Flood, who saw the Switch version as an afterthought. And when it came out in the, like, the fall of 2017, they were like, holy shit. Like, we're selling a couple hundred thousand. copies on the switch. We had no idea. Like, this can literally keep our studio alive because of the switch version. So there was a period, like, around that time where because the Switch's library was so thin and everybody had a switch or lots of people had switches and wanted stuff to play on them, you could really make a lot and indie games could do really well on the Switch. And that was also when people started saying every game needs to come to Switch. And like every indie game that would come out. And the first thing people would ask would be, come to Switch. When is the Switch port? When is the Switch port? When is the Switch port?

So yeah, so the switch made a huge different Indies. And now let's cut to today. So today we've just saw, we're starting to see now like the kind of final milestone that indie games really needed to hit, which is Hades and Hades being considered,

widely considered, unanimously considered, a game of the year contender along the lines of The Last of Us 2. And this game made by like 10 people is competing with like the AAA game made off of the made on broken backs of hundreds of people. And I think really, at this point, it's fair to say that, like, indie isn't a useful distinguishing point anymore. You guys know what I mean?

Like, what does indie even mean in a climate where, like, we're just all, we're looking at all these games in exactly the same way. Like, a Hades can compete with The Last of Us, too. Well, but indie music and indie movies. I mean, I'm sorry to walk down this road because we have to do another media comparison. No, it's fine. I was going to if you were going to. But if we're talking about award shows and like publications considerations, you are evaluating like an indie gruntruck album alongside like a slickly produced like rock album from somebody

who's backed by some major studio. Like you're trying to evaluate those things as pieces of art within the parameters set by them. And that's what we're trying to do with games. We're trying to evaluate them as pieces of art within their parameters. Their stated goals or their intention as far as we can. can glean it. And like in that way, I think it's still a useful way to think about games just in terms of like, well, the 10 people made this game as compared to a naughty dog made game that has a lot more backing. Yeah, I guess so. Okay. So I should, I guess I should frame this a little bit better. Actually, let's put this question on pause for a second. I'll get back to this question in a second. But first of all, I want to, I want to zoom out, right?

Yeah, I do. I want to zoom out. No, I want to hear both of your takes. And Kirk, I want to hear your take as Matt, you just I want to hear your take on like this idea that do you feel like indie games have really just like hit it hit their their cultural zenith? Like are we at the point where indie games are essentially treated the same as any other games? Oh yeah. I mean, yeah, I'm not really sure what that would what that means. Like that they're that they're treated the same as other games. Well, I mean, I to me the last hurdle was like getting past the AAA hype to win the awards. Right?

Uh, yeah. I mean, I think like. Or at least be nominated. That to me struck me as a landmark Because we haven't seen that in the past In previous years it's always like The Dragon Age, Skyrun, the Metal Gear The biggest games always get all the most attention

And win all the most awards. Hades really felt like a kind of a breaking point for that. Yeah, and I guess it's hard to like tell what What getting attention means. Like games that get attention among our circles on super online Twitter video game discourse people Is like very different than games They get attention among other people.

people, because like Minecraft got more attention than anything, and that was from 2011. You already talked about that. So like, but yeah, I mean, in any meaningful way, I think that, yes, indie games are, they're absolutely their own robust, diverse, complicated whole world of creativity that is its own thing. And like exists and it's an island the same size as the island of any other given, you know, subgenre of video games. Yeah. I think the other part of it, though, is.

is, again, that tools aspect of it in the ease of creating these games, because that's the other thing that's happened for other forms of media as well. Like, it became easier for more people to make movies. And so you can have, you know, Kevin Smith making clerks and showing it at a festival and so on and so forth, because he was capable of making it. And of course, now it's significantly easier for more and more people to make movies than it used to be. And that's true of music as well. There's more tools to make it and tools to share it. And games have experienced that later than those other art forms. It's only been in the past 10 to 15 years or so. So indie games are on a different like quest line as compared to music, but like it's catching up in the same type of way because those tools are now

more accessible to more people, which basically just means that they can be evaluated in a similar way because the distance from your creative idea to the final product is it's easier to make that distance now because you can actually just create something that looks like what you envisioned in your mind in a better way than you could in 1998. There is kind of a worthwhile distinction too since I know you had mentioned this and then put a pin in it, but like this whole like what does it mean, this distinction. Yeah. The incentives behind the creation are worth considering and there's a, you can speak very broadly

and we're all speaking very broadly in here because there's just specific exceptions to any given thing. But the difference between like a shareholder like driven, corporate creation like a huge publisher-backed video game. It's just the incentives for the creation are very, very different. Like they need to like make X amount of money

or like have X amount of whatever like sell, like get people to buy consoles from the same manufacturer or like you know, synergized with whatever. Like there's all these different reasons that the game has been made and like incentives for the people making it to chase different things.

Where with indie game development I would say that it does seem generally cleaner like most of the time you're just trying to like make enough money to make another one or like just make money in general make a thing that will be profitable you know there's not all of that complicated stuff that tends to come in in the more corporate world and that distinction still kind of holds for me again speaking very broadly and being aware that there are exceptions well so okay so circling back to that question so the reason i ask what do any games mean anymore is because it feels like mattie to your point earlier it feels like so many games so many games we would call quote unquote indie made by small teams have so many structural advantages that like even smaller games might not and it feels like we have all these different tiers of indie games looking at hades as an example haides was announced at the 2018 game awards and like there's a big showcase of it and it was like out on the epic game store today in early access and so it immediately got the eyeballs of millions of people in a way that most indie games don't have the the the platform

to do. On the flip side of that, if you're just like one guy in your basement making a game, you just have to cross your fingers and hope that like a triple click or a Kotaku will pick up on your game. Or more likely a PewDiePie pie. Let's not overblower importance too much. Yeah. Well, so I just think it's fascinating to me that we kind of have this big group that we call indie. But so much of it is like an indie game that is published by devourable. or something like that, like has a publisher or even an indie game that's, I don't know, published by Google or something like that, as opposed to an indie game that is made by one person who puts it on Steam and it's like lost among the Steam new releases list. And I wonder if it's even like useful to talk up to frame things in Indy versus AAA anymore. And I almost feel like we kind of use Indy a shorthand to not actually mean indie, but to just mean kind of like a quirky unusual game that doesn't. and play by the same rules as the AAA games because it doesn't have an open world or skill trees

and all that other shit that like every other AAA game has. So I don't know. That's something I've been ruminating. And that's the reason I asked, like, does Indy even mean anything anymore? Yeah. I do think it is cool, though, that in the past 15 years, we've seen more of those mid-sized studios

that you describe. And that also means that there are these mid-sized publishers like Anapurna and Devolver that are interested in not necessarily just the garage games, but games made by five people or games made by 10 to 15 people. And how do you describe a game like that? You can make a pretty complex game with a team of that size,

but it's still not naughty dog, but it can be Hades. And that's interesting to me. I feel like that is something that I didn't see that much, or at least it wasn't maybe viable in the same way in the early 2000s, and now it is, and that's exciting. I do think there is a difference between that

and something like you describe like a Google-backed game or Microsoft buying Double Fine. That, to me, seems like, not great. I mean, it's fine for Tim Schaefer if he wants to do that, and I'm sure it seemed like the only way forward for him for any other reasons. But that's also kind of depressing, though, if that's the only way forward for a studio of double-fine size, which is like it's not naughty dog size, it's not 15 people, it's between those things. And like, what's, what's there for those studios? And is it possible for them to be profitable without getting bought by Microsoft? I don't know. And that worries me.

Like, ideally, I think you have studios of a ton of different sizes and then games of a ton of different kinds. And yeah, then indie is meaningless, but in a fun way where it's cool, then it doesn't matter. But I would hate to see that divide become really stark again the way that it was 15 years ago where it was like you just have the garage game developers on new grounds. And then also you have like Halo. And those are the two kinds of games there are, you know? Yeah. I hold out optimism that that won't happen, like that it'll continue to just be. be these sort of gradients within AAA, which I also think is like an annoying label for a number

of reasons. Like AAA, it just sounds so jargony. We should start using quadruplea guys. Well, that's the thing is, and we've joked about it, but like there are examples of, like, I feel like the last of us part too is kind of a quadruplea game there at times. Yeah. You're like, this goes beyond that. And then we've also talked about double A games, you know. Yeah.

Ninja Theory is a good example of a studio that was bought by Microsoft and Hellblade that game. It's like kind of a double A game. it has really great production values, but it's not, you know, the last of us part two. It's not some bonkers level, huge production. The rope physics just aren't up to snuff. Well, those studios, but those studios are still making those types of games, double-fying. No, no, no, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's not my point.

My point is just that, like, there are now these gradients on that side, on the, like, publisher-backed corporate side, whatever AAA, big budget, whatever you want to call it. There are just these gradients that go all the way after crowd triple A or quintuple-A and all the way down to double A or single A. And, like, we just kind of have to have the memorabilia. flexibility to understand. Yeah, we're going to start pronouncing it, ah. Right. How long we need to say ah for when describing the game. And on the indie side, there's kind of the same thing. And there's a

ceiling only because as your organization grows and you become more successful, you have to just keep expanding. And if you're smart, you know when to stop growing. Because like, it can totally kill so many, so many things. And I think, we're making an independent show as someone who now makes two independent shows. This is something I think about a lot more than I used to of like sustainability and scale and size and I look at other things and as they grow or they get acquired by other people and it's like you have to be very very careful when you're independent because there's so much room for growth going up and it's just like you have to kind of navigate all of these different possibilities and so as a result I just think that like indie games will

keep there will be a lot of diversity like all the way down to the person by themselves making it some amazing twine thing that maybe somebody at a polygon or whatever somebody at Bloomberg News decides to tell all the Bloomberg Reuters about. Yeah, we cover a lot of time games. You know, that's one person. Like, that can still happen or the 10-person team, the Super Giant Games, or the slightly bigger team or the team that realizes, you know, for us to really keep doing this, we actually kind of need to find

someone to buy us. You know, I'm optimistic. I think that all of these gradients can exist in the current world that, you know, that exists now, at least. I hope so. It's way more exciting to be in this version of the world. Not that I didn't manage to find some cool any games in 2006, but it's cooler to be in this world of indie games now. I totally agree.

Agreed. Yeah, I mean, nowadays, you don't have to play a single major publisher game and you can just have a non-stop awesome experiences. Yeah. Which is pretty cool. Yeah, there's a lot of cool stuff. And we haven't even mentioned some of the biggest and most critically acclaimed indie games,

Undertale, Star Doe Bowls. They're fine. They don't need us to mention. Yeah, they don't need... Kirk, what do you talk about? They need the triple-click bump, man. That's true. Undertale really could use.

Yeah. All right. I love Ending. on this note of optimism. So why don't we take a break and then we'll be back for it with one more thing. Hey folks, it's me. James Arthur M. hosts a Minority Corner. You're home through these but wild times for weekly doses of pop culture, history, news, nerdy stuff and more through a BIPOC, queer and allied lens. That's how you get Joel Schumacher putting nipples on Batman. I didn't ask for it. And I say this as a game. I say this as a gay man. Didn't ask for it. I don't

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Depression mode for maximum fun, wherever you get your podcasts. And we are back. Kirk, Maddie, it is time for one more thing. Maddie, start us off. Okay, so I played the game of getting a vacancy. appointment this week. It's a good game. It's a really cool game.

So Massachusetts has been pretty slow with the rollout. Supposedly we're being very methodical. I don't know. I'm sure that's it. All I know is that I don't qualify for a vaccine and my girlfriend does. And I got her an appointment and I'm just really proud of myself for managing to do it. And I want to recommend one of the tools that I use just in case we have any Massachusetts based listeners who are interested.

It's called Wario 64's Twitter account. Yeah, you've got to turn alerts on and you got to follow that guy. Who is he? But actually, though, there's a Twitter account called Vaccine Time that is just Massachusetts appointments. And that's mainly what I used, although, of course, I also did all the other classic tips that you do if you're waiting for like a PS5 drop or a sneaker drop or whatever thing you're into, which is using a wired internet connection, keeping a ton of different tabs

open, refreshing all the pages, entering all the data really quickly, memorizing everything so that I could type it really fast, et cetera, et cetera. Everybody knows all those cool gamer reflex tips and tricks by now, I'm sure. But I got the appointment and I felt like a million dollars and like the coolest girlfriend in the world. So that was what I did this week. Good job. I think it's wonderful using those skills for the people that you love. Yeah. I think that is like it is a, it is kind of like the gamer's love language is to be like, I'm going to use my weird skills at buying things to get you a vaccine shot. So that's really nice. She was definitely like, oh, I don't know if I'm going to be able to that one and she was like more nervous about it than I was and I was like, oh, ho ho. I got this.

And I feel like I have some kind of brain problem, honestly, because there were some moments in there when I was actually having fun. And I don't feel like that's good. I feel like it's bad actually if any aspect of getting a life saving vaccine is gamified. And if it feels like you're playing a game. Like that's horrifying. And that shouldn't be how it is. And I shouldn't feel like my gamer juice. That's a system problem, not a you problem. Maybe. But I just, I shouldn't be experiencing that dopamine rush when I'm like refreshing a page and like barely making it like I don't want that sensation to be associated with getting a vaccine. That's stupid. That's not how it should be. I sometimes think that we will look back at our at the games that we played now and be like,

it's weird that I felt really excited every time I brutally murdered that person on screen. So, you know, like sort of like our brains are weird and we can take we should just take what we can get. Yeah, yeah. I mean, this was an unmitigated victory by any, any stress. job. I wish you the same success when you have to book your hour. I can totally do it again. I've, I've beaten the game once. I'm totally going to get it in two weeks when my eligibility opens up. I'm going to nail it. Nice. Yeah, so I did the same thing from me and my wife. And what I did is every time I knew it would pop up, I would just register for it. So I had like 10 different appointments. And then whenever an earlier one would come up, I would do that instead. And so that was really a video game because that was like, okay, can I cancel this one? You're juggling the appointments. Yeah. It was like Starcraft 2 basically. You need more pylons, though. Kirk, you got a repeat game. Give it to us.

I do. I'm still playing Monster Hunter Rise. I'm still really liking it. I switched weapons, and it was a big deal, and I wanted to make this my kind of topic for this. So I had been using the dual blades, which are very straightforward. You have two swords, and you use that to hit the monsters in the face until they are knocked down, and you win. And they go boom. But I switched to the long sword, which has proved very popular in Monster Hunter Rise. And I knew it was cool. And I watched a video of someone playing with it.

And it was like the coolest shit I'd ever seen. Because there's a move you do with a long sword where you attack and then you do a button. It's like it's like part of a combo. First you attack and then you sheath the sword. And this is a huge long sword. This is a long sword that's like 15 feet long, gigantic weapon. Like Sephiroth's sword. Yeah.

Seferoth's sword. And you sheath the sword and you do this anime pose where it goes. and like it goes in and this like little you know flash comes out right from where the hilt is like in and you pose to the side and then you can do any of a number of moves from there and one is like this amazing like ninja guideon like slash where you go flying forward 15 feet and you like end facing the other direction kirk is acting all of this out no one can see this but kirk is acting it all out right now so i had seen how it worked and i knew people like the long sword but i had always tried to use it and it was just sort of like

waving the sword around at the monster's tail. And that works okay, if you're like not good. But I was like, okay, I'm going to really learn how to use this thing. So I've been talking some with our friend Russ Frustick at the besties at Maddie's colleague at Polygon, who has also been playing this game. This is the first time he's really gotten into Monster Hunter, so I've been giving him tips. But he'd been using Longsword too, so he started talking about it.

He sent me this video from ARECT's gaming, which will link in the show notes. And it's like this 28-minute tutorial on the Longsword. And the thing with this game is that each weapon has a really kind of complex move set, and it's like a character class, and you have to really learn how it works. And there's this whole thing with the sword where, like, you hit it to, like, build up this one energy. And then once you have the energy, you can, like, raise your swords level up to three levels. And that unlocks other moves that you can do. There's a lot of combos.

It's very fighting game. And Shmattie, you would definitely enjoy this. I'm sure I would like it if I weren't, you know, still playing Dark Souls. Yeah, it's right. It takes a lot of time. But I've been really getting into that. And it's just, it's been so fun because it's. a much more complicated weapon than the dual blades, but it's so much more fun because I'm like,

I can watch videos and the skill ceiling is just so high for me now. I'm like, this would be awesome. Like if I can know that monster so well, that I can time all the counters because there's a lot of countering that you do with the longsword. So it's like you have to learn the attack patterns and then get all of these moves and like, it's so sweet. And when you really nail it, which I do sometimes, it's the best feeling. I'm just like, I am the master gamer. You do like a four-hit combo and then like counter it And like your dude looks so cool You're doing these and it's great

And so I that was my main story is like the feeling of switching to a different weapon And realizing that I actually have a lot of learning to do But that being super exciting Because the game had started to feel a little flat Like I was like well I just had these kind of boring swords that I fight with And now it's like oh man I can't wait to just get better and better and better So I'm still loving it. I'm still playing it. I'm still playing it.

I'm taking a break and playing Final Fantasy 6 for next week but it's begrudgingly because I'm really, really into Monster Hunter Rise. Wait until you find out about all the sweet combo moves you can do in Final Fantasy saying. He's lying! I've been playing it. He's lying to you. It's almost as cool as pulling up some of those blitz attacks.

If only. Okay, I am also playing a game that I've talked about before, and it is a game called Noshah, G, with the G. I think it's just pronounced NOSHA. I talked about this a couple of weeks ago, but I have now finished it, and I want to say it is one of the most. infuriating games I've ever played. But I also really liked it.

But I also really liked it. Okay, let me set the scene for you. So this is a game that is essentially among us, or like Mafia or Werewolf, one of those games where you're guessing the imposter, crossed with a visual novel. And the way it works is you are on this ship with 14 other people,

and it is one up to X number of people are going to be these aliens called NOSHA, and they're trying to kill everybody, and everyone else is trying to figure out who is who. But then the other part of the game is this kind of meta-narrative that is you are caught in a time loop where you're doing these loops over and over again with someone else and the two of you're trying to figure out why. And to do that, you have to learn as much as possible about all the other characters on the ship. And you really get to know all 15

of the characters and you get to know their quirks and who they are and their personalities and who they'll vote for and blah, blah, blah, blah. And that part is all super interesting. And so Who the vote for as an imposter? For a second, I was like, who they'll vote for? Like, Democrat or Republican? Yeah, it's a vote for Trump. You mean, I got to get to know. And you got to convince them.

You mean, at the end of this loop, who they'll vote for is the imposter. In each loop, yeah, each loop at the end of, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so to do that, you have to, like, fill out these bullet points, like, each of them has a profile page, and it'll be, like, six question marks. And each of them is a fact about that person that you learn through, like, a cutscene that you can activate in some way. And the way. the way that to finish the game is to trigger all of those cutscenes. So it's probably, I don't know, 50, 60 of these cutscenes that you trigger or events that you trigger in some way or another. The problem is the game doesn't tell you how to trigger them. And so what the game does is you, it'll give you a hint by giving you this kind of, it's called an event searcher at the beginning of every loop where it'll tell you what conditions you need to set that loop in order to potentially trigger an event. So okay, on this loop I have one doctor,

no engineer for Notia, 15 humans, or something like that. Whatever the, and you can change all these manually if you want, by using the Event Finder, it'll tell you like, okay, this is how to trigger that. Your role should be human. Your role should be Notia. Your role should be doctor, whatever it is. But when you get in there, it doesn't tell you like how to actually trigger the scene. So you just have to kind of brute force it and like hope that a scene will trigger,

talk to people. Like, it's, it's super frustrating because you're then seeing the votes over and over again. and you have to do like 100 plus loops. I think my final count was like 137 loops or something like that before I finish the game. And it's fascinating. These characters are really good and the story is really interesting and it explores a lot of interesting stuff

along lines of any good visual novel like a zero escape or a 999 or whatever. But because you are seeing the same lines of dialogue in the voting sequences so many times as everyone just votes on whoever and says, I agree with this person. No, you know what, I don't think this person is to be trusted. Over and over and over again, it is infuriating how repetitive it gets. So, like, I really want to recommend this game because it's such a creative game and it's really

cool and it's really enjoyable and the story's really good and the characters are fantastic. But the repetition is like a lot to get through. That sounds to me like a caveat more than a, you know, like a disqualifying thing, right? Like, everything that you just said that's good about it sounds great. Like, that all sounds good. Yeah, no, it's a really cool game, and I think both of you would enjoy it. Was it worth it to get to the ending and, like, unlock all that stuff? Like, did you feel like the payoff merited all the work you did?

I wouldn't say, I wouldn't expect, like, some huge earth-changing, like, game-changing payoff at the end of it, the way that, like, a traditional visual novel might have. It's more that along the way, there's so much cool stuff as you, like, get to know the characters and, like, see all these cool scenes. And it's funny. It's, like, legitimately funny. There's, like, some great moments. there's one scene my favorite scene in the game light spoilers my favorite scene in the game is there are these two characters and one of them like looks like a gray alien and that's just it looks like an alien that's just his thing and one of them is like this this the captain of the ship who is also like a psychopath and has forgotten it like gone totally crazy from wandering in space and the two of them

are playing video games with each other and they're getting really competitive about it and it gets to the point where one of them accidentally slips up and says how could you beat me i'm noia and then he's like, uh, shit. And like the next voting session, everyone's like, all right, I guess we go for him now. Okay, let's vote for him. And we just spend the rest of the time doing whatever. Um, and also, I should mention that you like, over the course of the game, you level up and gain skills that you can use to manipulate the discussions in your favor. So you can generally, by the end of the game, you can generally, like, get the voting to go in whatever way you want by just convincing everybody with your mind tricks. So it doesn't really have to be a grind. I think the best way to play this game would be. to try to find a spoiler-free walk-through

that tells you how to activate each of the clues so you don't have to go through the same repetitive grind that I did. So that's what I recommend doing if you decide to let's like what I would do if I were going to play it. But it does sound cool. But it's a really cool game. I do recommend it despite the fact that it was just really frustrating for me

because I went through so many loops where I just didn't activate any scenes and I was just like, wow, I'm really wasting my time. And yeah, it gets repetitive. All right. That's it for me. Kirk Maddie, it is time to say goodbye. It is. Indeed. It is.

I'll see the two of you next week. See you next time. Bye. Triple Click is produced by Jason Schreier, Maddie Myers, and me, Kirk Hamilton. I edit and mix the show and also wrote our theme music. Our show art is by Tom DJ. Some of the games and products we talked about on this episode may have been sent to us for free for review consideration. You can find a link to our ethics policy in the show notes.

Triple Click is a proud member of the Maximum Fun Podcast Network. And if you like our show, we hope you'll consider supporting us. by becoming a member at maximum fun.org slash join. Find us on Twitter at triple clickpod, send email the triple click at maximum fun.org and find a link to our Discord in the show notes. Thanks for listening. See you next time.

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