When people talk about their favorite indie game, they're talking about the few good games like Pizza Tower or another title that their favorite publisher/youtuber brought up. They're not talking about the titles with less than 1000 steam reviews that you have to hunt for.
Because word of mouth means those 1000 player indie games tend to get lots more players.
For example. Scritchy Scratchy, which is like Digseum with scratch cards. And Digseum itself. Balatro is likely more famous. Eventually, they go from obscure to a large enough critical mass that a YouTuber covers it, then it explodes.
That ties nicely to a tax: I disagree with the idea that once an indie game goes mainstream, it should do the mainstream AAA thing. I've seen complaints about Schedule One that it should've started doing weekly content drops to drive YouTube traffic and stay in algorithm. That seems like a horrible idea for that game, and tells me that those YouTubers only see it as a way to farm content, not as a game they enjoy.
You had games which were woke for their time, shitting on what was acceptable in the eyes of polite company, and yet they still became classics or did well enough to warrant sequels.
Because those targets had it coming. eg. The 90s conservative fuddy duddies saying GTA and Doom would turn people into killers. The key difference is they weren't blacklisted from the professional industry for doing so.
Something's been bugging me for a while so here it goes: Vidya "Analysis" is fucking gay. For almost two decades by this point Halospergs have been taking note of every single little thing from the games. The ammo count, the velocity of the player how certain elements had certain sandboxy characteristics. The same happened with the Soulsborne fags. They go into extensive detail of every little hair follicle on every single character's ass and end up with nothing in return but with a messy wiki article in video form. When good videogames are good because there's this esoteric quality to them than makes them worthwhile. That's why gaming today is fucking gay, the retards that grew up with this shit ass videos are now old enough to be in the industry. That's also why most indie games are just as shallow as the next AAA sponsored by doritos thing.
It has a purpose. The problem is idiots using that language and ideas for the wrong reasons.
I remember a Halo designer once said his approach to combat design is to think of it like designing a puzzle. A game journo took this literally and said that he doesn't like Halo single player because he "solved that puzzle already". Or the other extreme, Crowbcat using the Halo vidoc about how much work they put into the aiming system to get it feeling good on console as an insult, framing it as dumbing down FPS games.
That's assuming it's even true. I still remember one Silent Hill 2 video (that is either lost deep in YouTube, or deleted) that talked in depth about how each characters outfit what a representation of their personality and inner blah blah blah. Only years later for it to turn out the characters were dressed that way as a Con Air reference.
