kuraine

a pixelated entity

  • she/her

idk some girl or cat or panda that does music


๐Ÿฅ twitter
twitter.com/kuraine
๐ŸŽน radical dreamland (studio)
radicaldream.land/
๐Ÿ•๏ธ bandcamp
radicaldreamland.bandcamp.com/
โ˜๏ธ soundcloud
soundcloud.com/lena-raine
๐Ÿ˜‡ ANOTHEREAL (new dev blog home)
blog.radicaldream.land/blog/?q=ANOTHEREAL
๐Ÿ”ธ Dispatch from the Radical Dreamland
blog.radicaldream.land/
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in reply to @MOOMANiBE's post:

Oh wow, a reference to The Outer Worlds! Even so, I definitely think more could have been done to make it as difficult as possible to distinguish from Outer Wilds. (Maybe use more similar-looking screenshots?) Just thinking creatively about how to upset more people.

If a studio (say, Mojang) starts out small and self-funded, and makes a game (say, Minecraft) before growing and getting bought out (by say, Microsoft) and continues to push out updates for that game as a much larger team funded by their new ownership, is the game indie or not?

I think this is the point where we enter the theory of Game Dev Studio Of Theseus; if everyone leaves a game studio and is replaced by new employees but it has the same name, is it still the same studio

A studio is a philosophy of how to make a game, as boiled down into a dozen phrases like "the player tells the story" or "a feature isn't finished until it's been tested" which are recited as mantras to ward off the production hell demons.

... What's an indie publisher?
Are Devolver or Team17 excluded because they're public companies? Or is it okay because they mostly publish games from indie studios?
Is any publisher publishing an game made by an indie studio an indie publisher? Are EA and Nintendo indie publishers??

time to make a second chart for what is an indie publisher

I would argue Devolver was an independent publisher before 2020, when it was entirely dedicated to publishing games by other small companies. Now it's more of a hybrid studio/publisher that still holds enough willingness for risk that's important to publish indie games.

Private Division is merely a publishing label for Take-Two, who absolutely are the AAA-est of AAA, and thus as far as I am concerned are an indie publisher only in the sense that they claim they are

yeah, private division is take two trying to seem hip and cool and with it. and any studio that works under them tends to be absorbed into them and brought in house, see Roll7 of Rollerdrome or Star Theory formerly of ksp2 before they were brought in-house under the name "intercept games" (that story was messy and awful, schreier had a good piece on it). at which point i think they cease to be indie when it's no longer an independent company producing the game, and it's merged into another awful tendril of the colossus

I mean I think the interesting irony IS that there are beloved "indie" games like Ori and the Blind Forest that would fall into that column yes

Thats why everyone gets into these arguments