brian dump
i wonder if it's ever been easier to make indie games without even feeling like you're engaging with a subculture.
and maybe that's fine since as a subculture it's never been exactly "good". i support anyone making art who doesn't see why that has to mean their being instantly conscripted into arcane forum wars. but it kind of connects to something else i've been feeling, that there's no longer even an idea of unconventional success, anywhere - there's conventional success, which occasionally happens to unconventional things, and nothing else.
stuff like the hauntii dev and that weird cardgame ripoff thing have been on my mind. it's not like indie games themselves have ever not been adjacent to fash shit and prosperity gospel scammers, it's more like, it's odd how naked that stuff is here - the people doing it don't need to be crafty about it to slip under the radar of their peers, as part of using the infrastructure of a shared space, bc their 'peers' are just the steamspy gurus and marketing grindset conference guys who don't give a shit and the infrastructure is a set of commercial platforms. anyone who might have other priorities gets gradually filtered away by a decade's worth of freemarket churn. friction between these spaces is not new - you used to see indie devs whose whole style was bitten from either pirated snes games or older hobbyist software complaining about how freeware devalued the market - but it feels like the balance has shifted even harder. and it's a general thing, it's not something an appeal to some set of (wholly imaginary) scene values can fix. but it still feels like it's worth marking the event somehow, this first glimpse of the sweaty, grimacing face of Indie Unchained from even the vague memory of any old obligations.
(incidentally i will say in passing: it's very funny to see a revulsed divestment from old hobbyist culture go hand in hand with the ever more fawning and indiscriminate reappraisal of a commercial games tradition it was once normal to regard as - dare i say it! - rather paltry)
