The link would have been adequate and wouldn't have taken up 5 screens.

>> ^ant:

Featured Games:
[snip]

Your video, 235 Free Indie Games in 10 Minutes., has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

>> ^entr0py:

>> ^mentality:
This sounds exactly like the kind of game that I hate playing: Shallow repetitive quests, bad story, time consuming. Red Dead is kind of like the anti-Portal.

Bad story? Did you get that from when he said the game was beautifully written? And I'd venture that almost no one who buys a $60 game wants it to last only 5 hours, as portal did. It's definitely not a casual or budget game. As for the MMOish quests, as he mentioned they're all optional.


I think you've completely misjudged something there - i'm willing to bet the majority of people who played portal would in retrospect pay $60 to have played portal. The fact that valve gave it away as a freebie as part of the orange box is one of the most amazing gifts to gaming.

The length of a game is irrelevant to me, if they had spread portal out over 30 hours and charged me for it i would have thought it was crap. Some of the best games i've ever played have been indie games costing a fraction of normal games, lasting a fraction of the duration too, but Braid was probably one of my favourite recent games since portal.

More often than not i'm disappointed by big titles. The only ones to never have let me down so far IS valve. Bioshock was a really great and fun game, i loved it, but if you said i could only play one and offered me bioshock or portal, i'd choose portal and give you $60 and a thank you.

The gaming market obviously goes in the direction that people like best. Whatever sells, sells. But i cannot get my head around people like you who think that the most important thing is that they give you 60 hours of gaming, WHATEVER the quality of that gaming is.

If a game lasted 30 minutes but it blew me away like no other game before, that'd be a good game. Hypothetically of course, because it's unlikely to be able to do that in 30 mins, but you get my point.

For those people that enjoyed Fallout 1 and Fallout 2, you might want to take a look at
Age of Decadence.

It is shaping up to be a very interesting indie game with turn-based combat and very in-depth story. It is the game that I'm looking forward to playing.

They put out a combat demo (more like beta) in the setting of arena combat to really test the balance issues. It's on the third version and is available for download here. An introduction to their combat system can be found here.

Even though they are focusing on combat balance right now, you can complete the game without personally fighting; however, you can convince or trick people to fight on your behalf if you chose to do so.

Great game. I picked it up a ways back on a Steam indie games mega-pack, which probably netted the developer about as much as gwiz buying it for $0.01.

Meh, I'm equally tired of conventional, expensive, shitty games and inexpensive, shitty indy games.

I love these cheap, indy games. I don't have a 360, but I've bought a ton of $5-$15 games on the PS3's PSN, and I'm happy to do so.

Latest was Fat Princess.

As for this week's ZP, I ell-oh-ell'ed when The Lost Vikings took LBP from behind.

What he was saying is, we reward games disproportionately for the first impressions they make, the marketing, distribution etc... of them when we buy them off the shelves without having tried them, and that's what leads to an industry of derivative sequels, a lack of risk taking and creativity and a side lining of indie games. Whether they gaming industry likes it or not though, piracy is basically enabling people, especially when it comes down to single player games, to 'try before you buy'.

He's not saying anything new by any means. The same thing applies to movies, music, virtually any other genre. The movie industries is flooded with sequels, remakes, rehashes, whereas the music industry basically rides on the coattails of a few big celebrity bands/singers/routine dancing pop stars. If anything the game industry is ahead of the bell curve. When I discuss games with other people, what reviews it's getting comes up way more often as a conversation topic than for movies. I guess movies are generally a more subjective medium though. Not to mention some but definitely not all indie games like Braid, World of Goo, Plants VS Zombies did get lots of coverage on prominent review sites like Gamespot/IGN, which helps a lot.

Ok, he basically said 1 thing, then repeated it 6 or 7 times. I guess that's why he calls himself "reverend"...

anyway video games and movies alike - publishers/studios simply aren't willing to risk millions of dollars on something that is independent and creative. The more money that's involved, the less risk they are willing to take.

All these indie games he mentioned - they probably took thousands of dollars (or tens of thousands at most) to create. Assassin's Creed 2 took several million. The only reason they made the sequel was because the first one sold many copies, and many people liked it (even if the good reverend didn't)
The argument he should be making is why isn't there a better distribution channel for indie games? Sure, Steam and XBLA exist, but they aren't teeming with a huge variety of indie games. Braid and World of Goo are good examples of success, but how many others have failed to even be noticed?

I'm a gamer, and like others mentioned above, I've never heard of a single title he mentioned.

i fully agree on game quality these days but unfortunately his ideas on it are just.. not right
i don't care enough to go on a corrective rant about it though

but.. i always acquire my games from teh internets with illicit means and if i like what i play, i buy it
most times when i get the game box i don't even install it cos the warezed copy already works fine (and better, without drm slowing it down and corrupting my windows)
but i buy it all the same cos i feel good paying for something that made me feel good

this also extends to indie games, and incentive to buy is adjusted by price it has
but with indie games also breed trust and loyalty between the company and consumer
they're usually very small companies.. two to ten people or so.. so people feel more comfortable buying from them even without playing it

like how zombie cow released ben there, dan that for free, and i loved it, and it's equally brilliant sequel time gentlemen, please was $5
you would have to be a pretty cold bastard not to buy it on the spot if you liked the first one, knowing it's by the same two people, in the same vein

budget for these was literally zero, and they're better adventure games than i have played in years
no huge budget and financing required.. indie projects like this just need an open market to put stuff on and get seen by people

Another reason is publicity... I'd never heard of any of the indie games he's talking about. Demanding a revolution in either micropayments or ads is a bit much to ask for, though...

aggregating services are great for Long Tail type dealies like indie games, but it also centralises a lot of content on a very limited space (digg's or Videosift's front page), and thus has a limited attention span.

Only 10 indie whiz kids can have their 15 minutes of fame per week.

Unless each "sift channel" was a community unto themselves, maybe.

[edit]

VonNeumannSift!

It's one thing to disagree with an opinion, it's another to disagree with a logically sound and valid argument. But nevermind that.

You don't seem to realize that shutting down the Pirate Bay changes nothing. Everything on the Pirate Bay can already be found in umpteen other places. Should the Pirate Bay lose their appeal and get taken down completely, boo-f$!*ing-hoo. You have not solved the problem - you've merely relocated it.

If you really want to stop piracy, you have to change how digital media is marketed and sold. Take a hint from Radiohead releasing "In Rainbows," or iTunes' business model of $0.99 per song. Release your indy games on XBox Live and Steam for reasonable and convenient prices. Make a subscription-based game. Or just make a damned good game that people actually think is worth the $50 price tag, like Fallout 3, Half Life, Starcraft, Call of Duty - the list goes on. The biggest deterrent to piracy is NOT MAKING GARBAGE.

You know what one of the most commonly pirated pieces of software is? It's not a game. It's Adobe CS4. Why? Because the retail price tag is over $1500 for the full suite. I guarantee you if the price was $100 or even $200 for the full suite they would see an immediate and precipitous decline in piracy. Because suddenly it doesn't cost two mortgage payments for someone to copy and paste their face onto the body of Britney Spears.

>> ^CaveBear:
>> Actually, I have. I just don't write games for Windows or Macintosh anymore, and I've shipped over a million games. Now I just write for iPhone / iPod touch since they are harder to steal. Who loses? You guys - the consumers.
I still disagree with many of the your arguments. It seems like Pirate Bay supporters just want to justify their pirating by arguing specific points to obfuscate the big picture. Pirate Bay just facilitates stealing stuff, and that's wrong. It's just as simple as that.

^ Sure

You're playing the SIMS, you need to die a slow horrible painful death for allowing EA to teabag you repeatedly in the face whilst you sit there, open mouthed for the grand phallic phinale. For continually buying the trash that this terrible, terrible company attaches their name to like a vampiric leech, your eyes have assaulted your brain. They are unhappy with the years of abuse you have put them through whilst playing this game. As your optic nerve snakes its way towards your brain, it picks up electrical signals which translate as spewing gushes of water.

There is an operation to help, but unfortunately it costs exactly the same amount as the combined price of the 3000000000000 addons that EA shat out for the game which you bought, each costing more than a fantastically designed and developed indie game - which will never get the respect it deserves for ingenuity and gaming fun, so you can't afford it anymore.

If Portal has left you aching for more physics based gaming wonderfulness, you could do a lot worse than check out Armadillo Run - an indie game that is so addictive you will loose days playing it.

Grab the demo from here www.armadillorun.com

I'm not much of a Penny Arcade fan, but the game looks like it has a lot of potential, especially since it's targeted at being more of an indie game, rather than some huge blockbuster-style game. Plus Ron Gilbert is involved, and he knows how to make fun games.