What’s a developer got to do to be indie? Strike out on their own? Be poverty-stricken? Say no to big publishers? The definition of indie will differ from person to person, but for the creator of Minecraft, Markus “Notch” Persson, not being a millionaire helps.
Speaking to PC Gamer, Notch said that he no longer considers Mojang to be indie by conventional standards.
“We have other stuff which influences what we do other than trying to focus on the games,” he said.
“We make sure me and Jakob [Porser] are only focusing on game development, so the founders are still developing. But as a company, I don’t think we are indie in the sense that I used to mean it. But in the other sense of indie — as in we make games we want to play without having any external dependencies — then yeah, we’re indie.”
Notch told PC Gamer that the meaning of “indie” has changed since the days of the garage programmer who made games and released them for free — there days, money is often involved and it’s considered the norm.
Do you think that studios bringing in as much money as Mojang are still indie? What do you think characterises an indie developer/development team? Let us know!
[PC Gamer]
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