Remember that cliché, “Fake it ‘til you make it?” In some contexts, that is useful advice. If you’re trying to sell a product or service to a giant corporation, they may not need to know that your entire company consists of you working out of your home. As long as you can give them what they need, that’s all that matters.
The temptation to carry this idea over anytime we try to sell something can be strong. Being bigger is sometimes conflated with greater legitimacy, reliability, and other desirable qualities. Why would you want to let people’s prejudices against the one-person garage dev shop get in the way of hitting it big?
Of course, you wouldn’t want that, but the values big businesses wants in their vendors is not the same as those desired by the typical consumer of indie games. Here’s what they want:
Indie Gamers Want Risky
They understand that big developers are risk averse. The more outstretched hands a developer needs to place cash into, the less likely they are to try unproven ideas. These are the ideas people who play indie are looking for.
Indie Gamers Want Bold
The average game in the previous console generation was mostly brown. It had big burly dudes with five o'clock shadows toting firearms. The player was tasked with placing a crosshair over the head of some enemy and pulling a trigger to save some person, planet, or ideal.
Indie gamers went looking for something that wasn’t that and found a whole spectrum of options that were way different. Not everything had to be violent, macho, brown. Use color. Put in a female character or two. Make people read dialog. Don’t feature violence as the primary means of interacting with the world. Indie games were the Galapagos Islands of the games industry: a cornucopia of diversity in the middle of stale familiarity.
Indie Gamers Don’t Care About Photorealism
Dwarf Fortress is one of the most complex games ever created, and it was created by two individuals. Beneath its grid of colorized ASCII, it hides more depth than every AAA game of the last five years combined.
Big games are about looking and being more like movies. This means tons of artists working ‘round the clock for many months to generate high fidelity art that looks like video. This would be impossible to do for a game with as many possibilities as something like Dwarf Fortress.
Indies Love the Auteur
Indie gamers enjoy games that come from the brain of an individual, games in which the developer’s entire vision permeates every aspect of the game. Maybe this was possible because the developer made the game alone or maybe they just worked closely with a small team exacting a level of control that big studios can’t possibly manage.
Why Should I Care?
I’m telling you what you already know here, but I have a point to make: when you try to act like you’re the head of a big team, you’re making people who play indie games care less. Your game probably was made by you alone or by a small team, and your messaging is only alienating the players who would appreciate those qualities.
Besides that, you’re probably not hitting the channels that would care about big budget games. Are you running ads for your games in prime time? on mass transit stops in major cities? Do you have a custom Doritos flavor to promote your launch? If not, the people who want to think your game had a $40 million dollar budget and was built by a team of 200 spanning the globe aren’t listening anyway.
You can’t compete with big game developers by trying to be like them. When you’re talking about your game online, talk as a person, not as a monolithic studio. Strike up conversations with individual gamers online. Be candid and honest. Be attentive.
These are the things that make you indie. Embrace them and your fans will find you.