Indies Have the Power Now
They Are Afraid of You
We recently covered the bogus “deprofessionalization” article floating around the ‘net recently and the insane take that, somehow, indies are taking up a bit too much limelight from the big Triple-A studios and that’s a BAD THING.
We’ve spoken about this phenomenon and what indies can do to leverage Triple-A fumbles all the way back in June of 2024 and now it’s time to yet again revisit and drive the point home that, yes, AAA is afraid of you.
AAA Fumbles Lead to Independent Gains
It doesn’t surprise me to see the corpo gaming industry recoil in terror as their sales are dwindling, players are playing older games and flocking to indies to get their gaming needs met. The Triple-A industry has been long ignoring the customer in favor of their own agendas – driven by greed, self-aggrandizement and “we know better than the customer” attitude of inflated egos and hubris. Favoring internal struggles and trauma dumps over making a product the consumer enjoys and, instead, force habits, themes and “lessons” on the player that nobody asked for.
I’m going to be real – as a dev I’ve ghosted 3 successful titles and I do not know better than the customer. Each title taught me something new about the player and about myself. I made games for the love of gaming, but, ultimately my job is to deliver a product to the customer. Not to me. Not to my ego. Not to my ideology. To gamers. Sadly, Triple-A has rejected this notion that the customer is the most important element in the games industry. They see themselves as the arbiter of what is good, what customers should be playing and how gamers should be spending their money.
Not anymore. Customers are speaking with their wallets and Indies are here to capitalize on Triple-A’s mistakes. Ignoring releases from Triple-A to the point where finished games were scrapped just weeks after release, sales figures suffering to the point where corporate has begun using the term “players” instead of using actual sales figures as a metric of success. What a strange way to pat yourself on the back. The behemoths that used to shape landscapes and move mountains have become self-aggrandizing lemmings, speedrunning themselves to irrelevance using nothing more than the indomitable force of sheer ignorance.
Taking the Industry from the “Professionals”
Expedition 33 is just one example of an independent game that has absolutely taken the gaming world by storm – proving you don’t need Triple-A budgets, team sizes or marketing to push millions in sales. You just need a competent game that respects players and gives them what they want. Who’d have thought that was the key to success? It sure seems like Indies understand how this works – giving players games they will love from the serene to the absurd (and comically so).
These games don’t talk down to the player, they don’t try to dump the developer’s trauma onto the player or make them feel inadequate or awful for merely having a different preference in gameplay – they merely exist as a medium to facilitate the fun act of pressing buttons and that is what this industry is about.
Fun seems to be something only whispered in Triple-A studios these days, something that can’t outright be stated because of some grand vision the lead designer has to make sure gamers “understand” whatever thing they are trying to convey is in the most unfun and non-game way possible because it is an “artistic vision” and not a video game where you bash monsters over the head with sticks.
We are the jesters and the performers and we are here to give them a show so give them what they want and they will reward you for it.
– Jack Vania
Make it FUN
Neil Druckmann of Naughty Dog has gone on record proudly stating that at Naughty Dog “We don’t use the word fun” – what an absurd notion that when making a video game you don’t think of or use the word fun.
I know you may be thinking “but some games have very serious tones, stories and themes” – and you’re right – but that doesn’t mean the input/output loop of pressing buttons and getting feedback should not be fun, that it shouldn’t induce a “HELL YEAH” when you perform an epic feat in a video game. Quite the opposite. A topic or theme may be uncomfortable, hell that one part in FAITH where you turn into a writhing mass of lumpy flesh or whatever the hell that thing is was definitely uncomfortable – but in a “wow this dev is messed up that’s awesome” kinda way, not the “wow this game is trying to be as boring as Hollywood” kinda way.
The gaming community and the human race, at large, has grown tired of the over-importance of the corpo Hollywood type. Stop it. You can make a creepy game with weird themes and make it fun. You can send a message and make it fun. Customers play games to escape the monotony of the real world. WE play games to escape it just the same. With the resurgence of indies going back to what seems like the OG formula of game dev, it has lit a fire in the gaming community and got them back into the fun of gaming – by making games, games.
How Can You Leverage?
Easy – just make games players want to play. That’s it. That’s all it takes. You don’t need complex inputs or mechanics for a player to have fun. Sure, players love that stuff, too, but don’t think every game has to go on the same assembly line to become a “good” game. Strip the inessentials, go for the smaller box, polish the few systems and mechanics you have in place until they are tuned to perfection. Remain agile and flexible with your ideas, test things out and if they don’t work – maybe try something else and quickly, experiment and have fun. Have fun while making your game! This is the antithesis of how Triple-A games are developed.
Committees are very much a poor way to design a video game and the Triple-A space is riddled with the corporate mess of development by committee where the folks at the top rarely or legitimately don’t play video games, they dictate movement based on some theoretical number because a focus group gave them the input they wanted – not the input they needed.
The player has long been forgotten in the Triple-A space – replaced with algorithms, spreadsheets and the all-encompassing and all-important “data”. An ambiguous metric that can be molded to fit whatever current mood the top brass is in or whatever [CURRENT THING] is happening in social spaces online that absolutely must be included in the themes of whatever game they are making, even if it doesn’t fit the game world at all.
The behemoths that used to shape landscapes and move mountains have become self-aggrandizing lemmings, speedrunning themselves to irrelevance using nothing more than the indomitable force of sheer ignorance.
– Jack Vania
Put the player first. Don’t treat them like they are the unwashed that you must bend to your ideals – they matter more than we do. We are the jesters and the performers and we are here to give them a show so give them what they want and they will reward you for it.
We have the power now.
Sources
- https://industrydevs.com/deprofessionalization/
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NFzt0i4rCUU
- https://blog.playstation.com/2024/09/03/an-important-update-on-concord/
- https://x.com/bethesda/status/1924921261253075244
- https://www.pushsquare.com/news/2025/05/analytics-firms-predict-pitiful-full-price-sales-for-doom-the-dark-ages-on-ps5
- https://www.expedition33.com/
- https://store.steampowered.com/app/3164500/Schedule_I/
- https://www.gamesradar.com/we-dont-use-the-word-fun-says-the-last-of-us-2-director-neil-druckmann/
- https://store.steampowered.com/app/1179080/FAITH_The_Unholy_Trinity/
- https://store.steampowered.com/app/1794680/Vampire_Survivors/
- https://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2024/10/31/dragon-age-the-veilguards-clumsy-preachy-political-messaging-does-more-harm-than-good/
Updates
- May 25, 2025 ~ Added link to Push Square with DOOM: The Dark Ages analytics data
