Deadly Fredly Tumbly

I think that the real problem with “indie” is that the term is about the publisher’s experience and not the customer’s. As a result, when a customer is presented with an “indie game”, hey have no idea what this means for their impending experience of the game. They used to, because indie was small and many of its games shared attributes. But that commonality diminished as more published the “indie way”. So now we have an empty bucket term that customers have been trying to fill for years in an effort to explain that they like it. But nobody had the same hose for the job. So we’ve got a bucket of slop that’s supposed to be drinkable, and it ain’t. It would be more useful for gamers and retailers if we described our games in terms that focused on the play experience. It is only marginally useful to a small section of the market to know about the publisher’s experience. So I’m at this point now where, if someone tells me a game is indie, the only proper response seems to be: so what?