Do you think indie games are getting as stagnant as the mainstream?

[Sight Unseen]

I don't know. I've been having quite a bit of fun with some of my indy games lately. I've found two games that are up on Steam Greenlight ( one of which is already greenlit) that I've been playing quite a bit lately even though they're both still in early alphas.

The first one is Gnomoria, which a lot of people are saying is like dwarf fortress but with graphics (I've never played dwarf fortress so I don't know) It's on sale RIGHT NOW on the indygamestand (https://indiegamestand.com/) so you should check it out before that expires. It reminds me of minecraft except instead of being the worker you command your gnomes to do the work for you and I've been having a lot of fun with it lately.

The other game is Project Zomboid, which is trying to create a realistic zombie survival game in the form of a top-down isometric RPG.

There are still a good deal of good innovative indy games out there you just have to find them. I think platformer games are the easiest kind of game to make so that's why they're so common nowadays.

 

[number2301]

Yea, there's some decent shareware games (hate the term 'indies')

So how about say Independent? Or Leftfield? Or anything which isn't a word which means a completely different thing? I don't remember the last time I saw a shareware license on a modern game.

 

[Bad Jim]

If you want to make a highly original game these days, it's sensible to make it on a small budget. Innovation requires risk and even if successful it may only appeal to a niche.

However, game development has always been mostly derivative regardless of budget. It's just that in the past, say the PS2 era, budgets weren't big enough to deter innovation, while current AAA budgets are.

I don't think it's worth looking too hard at indie games for original ideas. You'll hear about the interesting ones regardless. Look at indies if you're a fan of niche genres like puzzle platformers, turn based strategy, schmups etc.

 

[Enizer]

indie games are usually experimental, predictably, many of those experiments will fail

however, i buy a lot of games, (probably a lot more then i should)

and while my enjoyment of the indie games is somewhat 50/50,(and here the lower price really helps)
my satisfaction with AAA games is approaching 0% however, really, even those few that i liked were disappointing in many ways, and so far never worth the full AAA price
for excample, i like torchlight 2 better then diablo III in every way, so why exactly am i paying three times more for the one from blizzard? looks like i'm just paying 40$ for the blizzard logo here..

disclaimer for borderlands 2 though, i have no clue what it's really about other then it gives me horrible motion sickness in record time, so i cant play it

 

[Theminimanx]

Indie devs are making many (puzzle) platformers because:
A: It's the easiest genre to make a game built around a single mechanic in.
B: They're trying to be the next Braid.
When so many games are in the same genre, things tend to feel rather stale.

Also, part of it may be that only the really unique indie games (Braid, Limbo, Bastion, Amnesia) get much mainstream attention. When you start paying attention to indie games that got less exposure, you'll often find that there are actually many samey indie games. But since you only discovered those games after your first impressions of indie games as something innovative, you'll get the idea that they've become less creative over time, even though many of those samey indie games may have been made before some of the games that got mainstream attention.
(Note my use of the word may, I haven't done any actual research on my second point, so I could be completely wrong.)