I'm honestly not sure why innovation is always regarded as the defining mark of a good game. Some of my favourite games in the last few years haven't been innovative by any stretch of the imagination, but they're great because they took something that already existed and made it better. If you want to make a truly innovative game, you have to take all of the conventions that people are used to and turn them on their heads, and I'd argue that isn't always a good thing as far as games are concerned. You're dealing with an interactive form of entertainment, and in order for people to enjoy your game, they need to be able to interact with it intuitively and easily. When you totally defy convention, it becomes alien to people and takes them time to adjust. Most of the commercially successful indie games change a few things up, but otherwise follow some kind of a convention that people would be used to. Super Meat Boy is a fairly traditional platformer, but with faster respawning and no lives. Braid is also a fairly traditional platformer, but focusing on a different mechanic. Even Minecraft, as much as it's paving the way for a new genre, is set up like an FPS as far as the HUD and combat work. There's a reason these games do so well: people feel comfortable playing them.

Wall o' text aside, I agree pretty much entirely with Grif. There's no use arguing over this stuff anyway - buy a game and play it if you like it. There shouldn't be any other factor affecting your choice to play a game.

Agreed With grif.

Though i think you can't really compare the two seeing as one has usually a large company of people developing it, knowing this will likely take off do to it's mainstream gameplay and style is .
And the other is developed by a single to small group of people who don't have money or professional and only have their idea, their time and their motivation.

Bottom line:
Don't compare.

It doesn't have to cost five hundred thousand dollars to make a game for PC, and by extension, the arcade marketplaces of consoles.
I thought I'd saturate the above sentence with hyperlinks to different sorts of indie stuff, but I think the point is already made.
Due to the ridiculous production costs of an AAAAA-game, it has to be profitable.


But yeah. About the industry: it's the modern, average video game consumer.
You rarely think about it, but the actual demographic of these computer/video games is in fact the faceless masses who buy a game, presses start twice and then throw in the shelf.
It's the guy who buys Madden n every year. It's the guy who couldn't kill the first boss. The guy who didn't get to the second achievement in the story mode.

Sadly, that guy also does not care about DRM on the pc.


While I do understand that people might have better things to do than spend hours a day with video games, I don't like how it... polarizes the industry.

That's the very nature of a mainstream game developing companies. They wont release games they aren't sure will sell.
Knowing that, many "innovative" games are simply too risky for mainstream developers to try - since they might be a hit, or they might just crash and burn.

That's why I'd say if this is about innovation and trying new things, sure, indie games win out.


However, If we're talking about GOOD games... well, that's subject to opinion.
But I think most of us can agree that not every innovative game is a good game, and visa versa.

I enjoy sandbox gaming, open ended stuff, and the indie market seems to cater for my tastes more.
LittleBigPlanet is the only mainstream game that I can think of that would offer the same experiences as many indie games.

I'm not a big fan of sequels that don't add anything new to the gameplay, or if something could just be DLC (See: The entire Rock Band/Guitar Hero franchises).
And it seems we're in a bit of a sequel culture: Every game and it's mother has it's own sequel.

I love open world games having the freedom to do as you want I think there's more Open world Indie games than Mainstream.

...what open-world indie games do you know of? Because I know of plenty open-world AAA titles. The Elder Scrolls, Fallout, Just Cause 2, the GTA series, Assassin's Creed, inFamous, Prototype, and so forth.

SCZ is one check the Zombies thread Clonks open world KAGs close to Open world theres a whole list of them you just have to keep your eyes open for them they're all over the Internet.

btw Ragdoll you've tried to make me sound stupid on this thread twice .

KAG isn't open world and neither is Clonk. Survival Crisis Z is, but the world isn't nearly as expansive or interactive as, say, what Ragdoll said.

Elder Scrolls, Fallout, GTA. Open ended gameplay.

Creed was just repetitive tasks. Sure, you got a few towns and some road between them, but you were confined to shitty tasks, over and over.

Terraria is open ended gameplay, as is Minecraft.

Dwarf Fortress is another one and you could probably get by on a technicality by saying that every identical roguelike is too, but I'd say there's more highly rated open world AAA games than independent ones.

K but Indie games sure as hell have more destructible terrain games.

You're managing to do that by yourself quite nicely. ...so? How on earth does destructibility factor into how good a game is? Besides, most games with destructibility that are indie have incredibly boring destructibility, ie, Cortex Command- where you can destroy any pixel you want so long as you have a sharp enough round, or Minecraft, where if you click on a block long enough, it will disappear. Destructible terrain has been around for quite a while in mainstream games- Worms is a great example of this. Games these days tend not to have destructible everything because that's pointless. Instead, you can just destroy what's important which actually affects gameplay; DICE's new Frostbite engine, developed for the Bad Company games and Battlefield 3, is probably one of the better examples of this. That's destructibility done right- it's not a core part of the gameplay, it flows naturally with all of the other elements, giving the player a more realistic and streamlined experience.

Your arguments for supporting indie games over mainstream titles are incredibly poor... and I'm typically a fan of indie devs.

Hrmmm. If it's fun, ♥♥♥♥' play it. I see a lot of indie games that are just as creatively bankrupt as many mainstream titles.

I think findude has touched on my thoughts, but I'm coming to the realisation that my views here are the product of evaluation through subjective criterion. It's more or less impossible to be objective here, which means ultimately that this discussion is pointless. I think I just prefer the idea of someone loving their creation, not pumping out 30 versions of it. Then again, I like farb's captain series, so in the end I'm just biased. Damn.


I didn't say that polishing old mechanics was a bad thing (See: I've spent quite a bit of my time doing that. Z'09?).

Where was I lecturing you about petty game label ♥♥♥♥? I think I've gotten annoyed about console wars before but not game labelling. I realise that this is no better but it's not direct hypocrisy this way