The Indie Gods Must Have Blood.

@Alan Jack: Can you explain what you mean by “sub-par”?

The “sub-par” thing is a bit biased on your part, no? If by “sub-par” you mean “not hip hop, country, oldies, or 90s rock,” then sure. In any case, one thing that’s surprising is that indie games are getting absorbed into gamer culture much faster than indie music did (probably because it was around well 20 years before most people had access to the Internet).

The downside of the analogy is that many indie bands, when they end up getting signed, end up making their music conform to the standards of agreeable listening for a radio audience. Most recent examples would be TV on the Radio, Animal Collective, then going back a few years Spoon and Modest Mouse. I wouldn’t want to see this happen to indie games. Luckily, games already have a tradition of independent release over the Internet. The problem is how to get money into the indie developers’ hands without watering down the artifact.

It’d be interesting to see if, through the continued support of independent gaming, it can reach where indie music has gone. Game developers getting picked up through MySpace? College kids exclusively playing sub-par homebrew games because “they’re more real”? We can only hope …

Also, I’d never seen this video or it’s title before. Yet on seeing my blogroll read “If You’re not Indie…” I kind of intuitively knew exactly what followed.