Following the events of the 2013 Game Developers Conference, and some recent word from Nintendo regarding same, a couple of interesting notions became clear, and so tonight looked like a good night to talk about the concept of indie developers in games.
Now, the idea from Nintendo that caught my attention was that Nintendo had recently shown off its new development platform designed to take advantage of a variety of Web-based tools, like HTML5, Unity and more, in a bid to get more apps to the Nintendo Wii U. That's certainly a good start for Nintendo, who has been suffering from something of a shortage of new games of late. By bringing in the various new tools, Nintendo can open up the platform for indie development, and potentially even buy time for the major developers to get their products out and rolling.
It's not just Nintendo, though; Sony has been, reportedly, looking to gain ground on the indie front. A recent report on indiegames.com described a slew of new indie games coming to the PlayStation Network, and only a bit before that, a new plan to simplify the approval process, making it easier for games to get to the PlayStation Network.
Indie developers have also been seen well represented on Xbox Live Arcade. One of the biggest upcoming games isn't from a major studio at all, but is rather a more indie title called "State of Decay", being developed by Undead Labs to be published by Microsoft Studios. The success of "Minecraft" is clearly on developers' minds, and personally, I'm terribly fond of side-scrolling shooter "Dead Pixels".
But this is what it comes down to: indie developers have a presence everywhere. The more that presence gets augmented, the more games we'll all have to choose from and, essentially, the better off the market as a whole will be. There's very good news to be had here, and plenty to watch for in the future. The key take-away, though, is that indie developers are vital to the future of gaming, and their contributions to the field should never be underestimated.
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