Indie game: Difference between revisions

{{Video game industry}}

An '''indie game''', short for '''independent video game''', is a [[video game]] created by individuals or smaller development teams without the financial and technical support of a large [[Video game publisher|game publisher]], in contrast to most [[AAA (video gaming)|"AAA" (triple-A) games]]. Because of their independence and freedom to develop, indie games often focus on [[innovation]], experimental gameplay, and taking risks not usually afforded in AAA games. Indie games tend to be sold through [[digital distribution]] channels rather than at retail due to a lack of publisher support. The term is analogous to [[independent music]] or [[independent film]] in those respective mediums.

 

Indie game development bore out from the same concepts of amateur and hobbyist programming that grew with the introduction of the [[personal computer]] and the simple [[BASIC]] computer language in the 1970s and 1980s. So-called bedroom coders, particularly in the United Kingdom and other parts of Europe, made their own games and used [[mail order]] to distribute their products, later shifting to other software distribution methods with the onset of the Internet in the 1990s, such as [[shareware]] and other [[file sharing]] distribution methods, though by this time, interest in hobbyist programming had waned due to rising costs of development and competition from video game publishers and home consoles.