Everybody indie!

I had to describe our company the other day and for the first time I couldn’t bring myself to call Tale of Tales an independent studio. I just said the truth and called us a small studio instead.

Independent always was a proud way of saying small for me anyway. But today, every other studio is calling itself independent. Indie seems to have become a synonym of cool, disregarding whether you’re big or small or whether publishers or investment firms fund your production.

At the same time, the regular games industry has become as lot more accepting of small development teams. Probably because some games developed by small teams have become commercially successful. And maybe also because there is no end to the fast descent of AAA towards the deepest possible boredom, encouraging each and every employee of such a studio to at least consider “going indie” once in a while.

Maybe we should give the term back to the hobby game developers. The creators who are truly independent, who work without budgets, live off the goodwill of partner or parents and give their games away for free.

Since it doesn’t seem likely that independent will ever mean the same in games as it does in music or cinema. We’re just too much of a business for that. We just have too little artistic blood in our veins. We’re not adventurous enough. We like numbers too much.