Indie Games Are Saving Gaming

With Hollow Knight: Silksong coming out tomorrow, there’s no better time to make this post.

Indie games nowadays are a staple, they’re the games everyone talks about, it’s not just about the big AAA titles now. And for good reason, indie games have come to rival AAA titles in scope, graphics, complexity and overall enjoyment. It’s not a surprise that games like Sifu, Hollow Knight, Balatro, Dead Cells—Celeste, Blue Prince and so so many more have come to be so critically acclaimed and loved by their fans.

I think the reason for their success is simple: they are made by people who play games and who have a passion for games! Without pesky investors and big company executives and bosses pushing the devs to add more and more micro transactions… make the game more profitable!

Without those people and the greed they bring—games can thrive—under good creative leadership—and when made with a passion and love for games, that’s when a masterpiece is created. That’s why these games are so loved.

On top of that, besides all that, indie games are so popular due to their accessibility. Now I get that most of the games I listed above are older, but this even applies to new indie games. Not everyone has a beefy computer or the newest and greatest console to play these games, yet most indie games will run decently on a lot of modern computers and some, though unofficial have even been ported to mobile, very successfully at that.

Indie games are so goddamn cheap too!

You can get Terraria on steam for like five dollars on sale, maybe even less!

Hollow Knight, a game I’ve sunk hundreds of hours in and could sink hundreds more hours in, is 15 dollars and often goes on sale. And despite the fact people would gladly pay double, triple the price—TeamCherry have confirmed the price of Hollow Knight: Silksong to be… 20 dollars. For a game such as Silksong, one that’s been in development for 7+ years and all that without a second crowdfunding campaign (money for the Hollow Knight one was used for Silksong as well), it’s baffling.

Yet Nintendo charge $80 for Switch 2 titles.

You can get, The Binding of Isaac Rebirth and all of its DLC for half that price and you get a game that’s still being updated, and will continue to get updates for the foreseeable future, on top of the backlog of 11 whole years of updates that the game has gotten.

And you can play that game for thousands and thousands of hours. Isaac is like the ultimate indie game.