The Indie Game Magazine November 2014 | Issue 43 | Page 6

editorial The Importance of AAA... Indies W e’re getting into the Holiday season, which means that over the next two months we’ll see an outrageous number of high quality games releasing, all vying for your hard earned dollars. It’s no se cret that AAA releases tend to dry up over the summer, while developers work hard to make sure their games wind up on the Holiday wish list of all the good boys and girls of the world. With AAA games already on everybody’s mind, I figured now might be a good time to discuss something I’ve been thinking a lot about lately; the notion of “AAA Indies.” It’s getting hard to define “indie” nowadays anyway. The advent of indie publishers kind of throws the whole “independently published” thing out the window, and with games utilizing the likes of CryEngine and Unreal Engine 4, we can also tear down the tired idea that “indie = 8/16-bit era pixel art games” too. Within a couple years, it will be hard to tell that a game is “indie” just judging from screenshots, and that’s a good thing. Like it or not, a lot of mainstream gamers judge a game by its back cover, so if the graphics aren’t up to snuff, they’ll pass it by. But drawing mainstream attention is another topic entirely, what I wanted to discuss is the emergence and relevance of AAA indies. In the broadest of terms, these are the titles that have a sizable budget behind them, allowing the creators essentially the perfect scenario of total creative freedom, with the resources to design their game as close to the original vision as possible. Crowdfunding can sometimes play a role in this, in the event a project scores huge support, like for the devs behind SUPERHOT who managed to raise a quarter of a million dollars. In other cases, a developer simply puts out a game that finds tremendous success, netting enough profits to fund their next passion project. What makes AAA indies so important is that, if successful, they hold the key to bridging the gap between both development philosophies. While gamers like to turn everything into Red vs. Blue confrontations (console wars, AAA vs. Indie, etc.), the truth is that the industry exists as a whole. If indies can find success designing games that appeal to the mainstream audience who are more graphically than nostalgically inclined, while maintaining the uniqueness and accessibility we champion that so appeals to the current niche market, it proves that creative ingenuity can not only lead to big profits (to satisfy “the suits”), but it also encourages the risk-taking we so often accuse the AAA scene of shying away from. Basically, everything gets better. Indies find a larger market and more success, which leads to higher quality games, and the few AAA publishers who are actually guilty of shackling creativity in favor of the cookie-cutter formula they demand for success are forced to take a hard look at themselves. The bottom line for gamers is that video games get better all across the board, and I think that’s the one thing we all want. If you take anything away from this month’s editorial, aside from the fact that AAA Insurance should owe me a fortune for all of this free, indirect promotion, it’s this: AAA Indies are going to become another established sub-category of games pretty soon. Rather than each of the current sides taking an arm and pulling until it pops, let’s use this new hybrid as a way to bridge the gaming industry together as a single unit, taking the best of both design philosophies to come up with a new development cycle that leads to better games, and happier developers. Vinny Parisi Editor-in-Chief Indie Armada Fleet Admiral