Question Of The Week [July 23rd 2025]

Q: What's A Genre Name For First Time Indies?

A: There is an indie boom as of late in the gaming sphere. Where games are being developed by a single person in their spare time. Their budget is basically nothing, and these games might develop over several years and when released they are nothing more than a copy of one of their favorite games growing up. Everyone has to start somewhere right?

I applaud the developer of these games, but at the same time it has inflated the entire gaming industry and ballooned games out to where they aren’t held with the same expectations as a AAA budgeted title with multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars. Nor should they be. But, at the same time, these games are getting a lot of traction and being released in such a feverish state that it’s hard to quantify exactly what they are. And that is where the problem arises.

These games need some sort of classification, not to downplay them necessarily, but to help set expectations and also help them be seen. A big issue in software development, is that you can’t control who actually purchases your product, and if anyone who is reading this, has ever released something to the public, you know all too well the pitfalls and having to deal with people who just don’t understand things, or misinterpret things.

A lot of customers will outright refund a game simply because they couldn’t get it to start. They clicked play, nothing happened, and they refund it. They didn’t try clicking it a second time, they didn’t try restarting the machine, they didn’t see that it actually opened up in the background and just needed to bring it to the front, they didn’t notice it opened up on a different monitor…  And these are bigger issues, but all too commonplace for these types of games. It’s not always the customer’s fault, as these games are becoming more complex, and most just can’t spend the time or resources to test all possible scenarios. But this is just one part of the entire issue.

A lot of these games, like I said, are developed by a single person, and are mostly inspired by a singular game. The mechanics, the setting and atmosphere, even down to the sprite work (most of them are 2D sidescrollers or RPGs). The names have been changed, and it usually has some ultra generic title, but it’s basically either a Castlevania or Final Fantasy rip off. So what do we call these games?

Indie is too broad at this point. The majority of game releases are “indie” and it’s propping up the entire industry. If it’s not a AAA Multi-hundred thousand dollar budgeted game, it’s an Indie. So we need something else, I have a couple suggestions…

Homage Games would be a fairly accurate genre title, and I’m always a champion for descriptive and accurate genre titles, but that might not be enough. They are also starter games, where it’s the devs first title, it probably is very clunky and not branching out beyond the scope of a few simple mechanics, and it might just have a massive amount of filler content to pad it out to make it an actual “game”.

The other term I think might fit better, as a more descriptive genre, without focusing so much on pulling too much from a specific game, would be “Micro Venture” as it does allow the person to understand that it’s a much smaller game in scale and scope, and also it’s more of an entrepreneurial nature to it, a single solo dev or a very small team trying their hand at the game development scene but not becoming a full blown studio just yet. While the “Venture” part might seem a tab bit more wordy, I think it’s a great term. I thought about Micro Core as well, but I think core is already implied in the Micro part of it.

So that’s my suggestion for a new term for something we as a gaming industry/community need to differentiate, as I think Indie just has lost its meaning now, since it’s so ubiquitous.