The dominant culture in video game culture was mainly based around the production of game consoles and games for those consoles before the paradigm shift that allowed indie games to be produced all across the world. During the late 70s and early 80s companies such as Atari and Coleco succeded in selling hundreds of thousands of consoles, while PC games were still simple and not very widely played. As the 90s came around PC games saw a marked improvement in graphics and gameplay mechanics, and really hit off with development of first person shooter and real time strategy genres. Games like Quake and Age of Empires became increasingly popular, and web browser games became easier to make with advancements in Java and Flash.

Quake, one of the most influential first person shooters

This set the stage for users to “mod” already existing games – some of the most popular games today were mods of older games. Team Fortress 2, a mod of the original Quake game; Defense of the Ancients, a mod of Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos; and Counterstrike, a mod of the first Half-Life game, have been extremely sucessful with huge playerbases and popularity associated with them. As online distribution over the internet grew, it only made sense that independent game makers would be able to reach a wider audience now that they no longer had to burn games to discs and physically distribute them. An increasing number of niche games were able to be made because the risk of production was much much lower.

Defense of the Ancients Gameplay

As the internet grew, so did the abilities of indie game makers. Plug-ins such as Adobe Flash allowed developers to easily create, and open source libraries and game engines would serve as a basis for people to start from. To make the process of making a game even easier, software such as GameMaker Studio, Unity, and Unreal Engine allowed anyone, even those not so familiar with programming, to make a game.

Anyone can use Unity software to create something cool

Additionally, digital game store platforms such as Steam allowed indie games to gain further awareness, especially with the creation of Steam Greenlight, which specifically highlighted indie games and developers. Crowdfunding through sites like Kickstarter also benefited indie game development as the community would be able to remove another barrier to developers looking to risk creatively driven projects.

A good pitch can lead to ez funding

Barriers to indie games at the start were mostly technical in nature. Nowadays, many indie games have come to be successful, from Minecraft to Fez to Braid, and many more are being created every year. While the sales of indie games still pale in comparison to AAA games produced by huge companies such as Rockstar, BioWare, or Blizzard, the industry is still successful and it inspires others to follow in their footsteps. There is no societal attitude that exactly opposes the making of indie games, but instead technical, monetary, and time factors preventing the creativity of individuals from being realized. As indie games are generally less marketed, they get less of the spotlight, and developers generally use a decent indie game as a career stepping stone to get into the mainstream industry. Overall however, the idea of indie games has gone from completely impossible to common and relatively popular.