Does anyone else find the modern indie gaming scene extremely overrated?

[InsufferableCynic]

As AAA gaming has gotten worse (which it no-doubt has), I've been finding that more and more people are flocking to indie games, especially as AAA games become more and more formulaic. I was watching someone play Assassins Creed Shadows just yesterday, and it looked like every other Ubisoft game released in the last 10 years. This is expected and healthy, and I fully endorse people abandoning AAA games to seek out more meaningful experiences elsewhere.

At the same time, when I look at which indie games are getting the most attention, I get the impression that it's almost always ultra-simple, mindless and sometimes even predatory games with very little gameplay but very flashy visuals. Games like Vampire Survivors and Balatro have become extremely popular, despite both games essentially being idle-games where you watch numbers go up with very little control over what happens. Balatro especially, to me at least, feels like a slot machine - as a player you have very little control over your run outside of Jokers (which are also heavily RNG dependent), and the main appeal of the game seems to be watching that magical round score number go up - which it does in an extremely flashy way.

I feel like a lot of indie gamers are falling into the same gambling traps as AAA gamers are, the only difference is that AAA gamers are being expected to gamble with real money - spending it on loot boxes, in-game currency, etc - while a lot of indie games essentially have gameplay that operates like slot machines, which I still feel is a problem because it ends up being a huge time sink for games that don't end up feeling fulfilling, almost like the gaming equivalent of empty calories. Roguelikes especially seem to operate this way in more and more cases, where runs can frequently be determined by RNG and other mechanisms outside of the players control, where the gameplay can easily boil down to repeatedly trying runs over and over again until you hopefully get something good enough to win, completely independent of your skill level.

While not all roguelikes are like this, and I can recommend a few good ones (Dead Cells, for instance), I am finding increasingly more and more that indie darlings (the sorts of games that win tons of awards and are surprise sleeper hits) are becoming more and more simplistic slot machines where the gameplay boils down to making a number go up as fast as possible, but the extra flashy effects and presentation value usually keep people engaged, at least until it doesn't anymore and they stop playing forever.

I am getting the impression that more and more indie games are being made as small, byte-sized experiences with overly simplistic gameplay and high presentation values, which is a shift from the older indie model where games would be extremely rough, barely polished and buggy messes that had heart and soul behind them.

I don't like a lot of the indie puzzlers or walking sims either, I find most of them boring and tedious, but I chalk that one up to them just being not for me - I only really take issue with the games designed like slot machines or overly polished but overly simplistic experiences.

I don't think we're going to see another Minecraft, Selaco or Factorio anytime soon. Especially since Minecraft was the last of these types of games to really have huge mainstream success. Don't get me wrong, games like this will continue to be made, but as the indie industry moves in this negative direction, I feel like these sorts of games are less likely to be made because there's more appeal in making something people are more likely to play in droves.

This thread is coming off the back of Balatro winning a ton of awards in the 2025 GDC awards show, so I apologise if it feels like a rant. I am increasingly feeling like Indie games just aren't that good anymore, and I have no idea where everything went wrong. It feels like indie developers aren't trying anymore, a lot of "indie" games are being published by indie publishers who popularize and reward these sorts of games, and the whole indie scene is becoming it's own sort of cookie-cutter industry. Be honest, how many times have you played the same pixelated platformer with puzzles, a wacky lip-smacking protagonist, and barebones gameplay? I would say for me that number is in the hundreds.

I feel like as long as gamers keep rewarding these types of games, the indie scene will never feel a need to improve. I also feel like, quite often, these games aren't engaging enough to hold people's attention for long, so they become hugely popular for a few months, then disappear. When was the last time any of you played vampire survivors, among us, or PUBG?

I understand that there are always great indie games, with a few masterpieces released every year. My issue isn't that these don't exist - they clearly do. It's more that the indie games I see reaching heights of popularity are always these overly simplistic slot machines, and I feel like this popularity is driving the industry in the wrong direction, and making indie games worse over time.

How did this happen? There's no concerted marketing campaign to sell people slop, and I doubt the majority of indie developers are purposely making overly simplistic gambling-machine games for the sake of raking in easy money, so is the problem just the general addictive and shallow nature of gamers? Are players just not interested in complex, deep game experiences anymore? Am I out of touch and the industry is actually totally fine?

 

[Obake]

10+ years ago there was a very good indie scene. There were lots of great games, and typically if you found something it was probably interesting to some extent. But these days the indie market is flooded and most of the games are literal garbage.

Even worse, corpos also dipped into the indie scene, so a lot of the games aren't even independent.

 

[InsufferableCynic]

So it's not just me then? I was a bit afraid that maybe I had just developed nostalgia goggles.

 

[BlackControlBoxer]

I think gaming in general has dipped simply because there is no "new" games. All games are a pre selected genre where you can only refine the product and you will always compare it to the best in its class. Until we get a brand new technological advancement in gaming all games are gonna be rehashes of what's been. indie games were also never meant to compete with AAA games they were made to compete with new grounds flash games and other things you got for free before. When flash games died the quality of indie games dipped because they had no competition. balatro and vampire survivors would've been front page newgrounds games back in the day not 20$ purchases.

 

[InsufferableCynic]

I hadn't considered that.

I guess the only real competition now for indie games is mods. Unfortunately, because of gamer entitlement, mods have to ALWAYS be free (to the point where modders can't even ask for donations without being labelled as greedy scum), so some really good content is always permanently locked out of the market.

 

[BarnSwallow]

How did this happen? There's no concerted marketing campaign to sell people slop, and I doubt the majority of indie developers are purposely making overly simplistic gambling-machine games for the sake of raking in easy money, so is the problem just the general addictive and shallow nature of gamers? Are players just not interested in complex, deep game experiences anymore? Am I out of touch and the industry is actually totally fine?

It's not that people have bad taste or the market is slopped up. It's just as Boxer says.

I think gaming in general has dipped simply because there is no "new" games.

Or specifically, on average, people have a set rotation of "comfort" games that they keep returning to. Games that they are familiar with and already bought into. For normies it's the CoD's and FIFA's, for ebin gaymers it's genre defining classics. What this creates is a situation where a couple of old (5+ years) video games make up a large majority of a persons play time, leaving little else for new contemporary experiences. AAA game devs square this circle with slavish devotion to IP's, cranking out endless sequels, clones, and remakes. Indies chase that rare filler game, where the demand is weighted torwards quick singleplayer games that simulate depth. That means the big winners will feature lots of repetition and lots of slot machines. Think of Diablo 2, but condensed into 10 minutes. It's supply and demand.

Coincidentally, the mobile game market made this transformation ages ago, but nobody really noticed because of predatory microtransactions. Why do people play mobile games? Was it the $20 gem packs? Or was it because the mobile games were quick and cheap time killers to play on the train inbetween work and home?

 

[InsufferableCynic]

Coincidentally, the mobile game market made this transformation ages ago, but nobody really noticed because of predatory microtransactions. Why do people play mobile games? Was it the $20 gem packs? Or was it because the mobile games were quick and cheap time killers to play on the train inbetween work and home?

I wouldn't think that would happen to Indies, though, because generally when people elect to spend time doing "real" (ie non-phone) gaming, they are sitting down and committing time to a session, so quick filler timesinks wouldn't work anywhere near as well.

If you're committing your time specifically to doing something, then low-quality filler isn't good enough, surely?

Personally I think it's more about the dopamine hit. People feel good when the number goes up. I feel like a lot of modern indies follow that design and it ends up basically duping people into liking them because they provide some repetitive dopamine in a controlled form. This is also why these indies get forgotten quickly - eventually that particular hit stops working, and they move onto the next thing. AAA games do the same thing, but they have a profit margin to maintain so they are after your wallet, which rings alarm bells in people's heads and makes them realise they are being manipulated.

 

[evenlymatched95]

Back when MMOs still had market relevance, calling a game a skinnerbox was a common insult. Basically, saying that it's a boring huge timesink in exchange for regular artificial dopamine spikes. That style of game has never really went away, and roguelites are just the latest version of it.
These games are in the right place at the right time. The AAA bubble is popping, and the people playing AAA games want a similar experience.
I doubt that most of them are even consiously aware of this, but they want games that are just barely interesting enough to not induce total braindeath. An experience provided with gambling simulators like Balatro. They can even holler like apes when they get the good item, just like they did with the lootboxes!
If you want somebody to point the blame at for this situation, it should be these people first and foremost. If it's 2027 and we're swimming in Balatro clones and even more revived old game series with extra RNG mechanics sloppily shoved in (bastards), it'll be because these people wanted it. They want indie games to be like that, and they're voting with their wallet to make it so.
The consumers always get what they deserve.

 

[InsufferableCynic]

For the record, I don't think Balatro is actually particularly bad, it's just kind of bland and flawed. It's a fun little game when it's firing on all cylinders, which admittedly is not too often, so it just ends up being disappointing. There's potential for a fantastic game there, but it's executed so poorly and is so unbalanced that it just so often feels like the game is playing itself, and all the excitement is gone outside of watching the number go up. The reason I pick on it so much is because it's the current indie-darling (which will probably make this thread age horribly in a month or so when the trend dies down and everyone moves onto something else), and because it's hugely in the public eye despite not really being that good.

The fact that it won a bunch of awards in 2025, after it became popular, and won nothing in 2024 when it was released, shows how fickle the whole industry is. The game didn't magically get better between those times, it just got more popular.

 

[evenlymatched95]

I find Balatro terrifying. It absolutely solidified roguelites as the new cash cow for indie games. How can an up-and-coming developer look at that game and it's success, and come to any other conclusion than that a roguelite prints money?
I was really, really hoping that this genre was going to fade out after the Survivors craze, but it looks like there's going to be an even more severe wave of roguelitification in the future.
There have been countless tales of possibly great media being ruined in development because a higher up would say, "Hey, we should remove our central artistic goal and shift gears towards this fad that's been working for other people!" And most of those fads weren't even half as conceptually malleable as roguelites are.
This process has probably already started with several games.

 

[knowyouareloved]

I'll play devil's advocate here. I have witnessed enough Balatro discussion among my coworkers for me to be convinced there is real strategy. As I understand it, for the introductory difficulty levels you can indeed just keep playing until there are randomly items in the shop that work well together in obvious, easy-to-use ways. From what I hear from my coworkers, the fun is in making do with what is available when you don't get what you want, and most runs are actually winnable if you are sufficiently skilled, until you get to the highest difficulty levels. Personally, I have no tolerance for RNG in video games, so the entire genre is unappealing. When I lose a game, I want it to be obvious and indisputable that I lost due to my own mistakes. If you have a similar mindset, then rougelikes being in vogue is unfortunate, but I think roguelikes being the current hot genre does not necessarily represent a trend upwards or downwards in quality.

 

[Some_porcupine]

Indies like "2048 (blocks)", floppy bird, zynga-types bubble poppers, grow nano 1 2 3, then- tetris, or city skylines 1, 2 (those that biffa and RCE = real civil ingeneer, among others) play?

There is kinda difference between (blantly) strategy-adjacent games as (of) above, and MMOS, MMPGs, battle-team-arena-armor type games. You play them for whatever reasons.
Most of people nowadays play (or watch others play) first type, mobile games, in browser... then there are WOW-type, wizard101 etc. Gaymer nerd type games who iirc do it for "bobux" when they reach god-tier levels to sell something (idk what now but I know guy who do, in some Czech metin2-clone, that's whole strategy of it)

Aaaalso. Is this likely 3rd such thread?

 

[Melmoth]

You're just talking about algo-bait games. There's games on actual, fundamental genres made by one or more guys that don't qualify for that category. Just look at Unreal World or DF.
The entire purpose of algo-bait is to talk about algo-bait, it's, as that fat nerd from the fat nerd forum coined, a basilisk. It is the equivalent of village gossip made perpetrated by the town idiot, it's a meme.

 

[Pliskin]

On top of what everyone says, I'd like to add that in the shade of the 2013-2017 independent gaming explosion, some people began (and still are) swearing by the term "indie", to the point of rendering it almost a substitute to "good" when referring to games. There is even a hint of judgement whenever you play a game from a well-establishes studio, as if indie gamers had some sort of intellectual high ground. It's kind of like how cinephiles act shoving their 3-dollar, unexplainable ending, "artsy" movie in your face and gasping when you admit preferring The Godfather.

 

[RisingThumb]

At the same time, when I look at which indie games are getting the most attention, I get the impression that it's almost always ultra-simple, mindless and sometimes even predatory games with very little gameplay but very flashy visuals. Games like Vampire Survivors and Balatro have become extremely popular, despite both games essentially being idle-games where you watch numbers go up with very little control over what happens. Balatro especially, to me at least, feels like a slot machine - as a player you have very little control over your run outside of Jokers (which are also heavily RNG dependent), and the main appeal of the game seems to be watching that magical round score number go up - which it does in an extremely flashy way.

They are not idle games, but they do go hard into the "number go up, I receive dopamine" camp of games. Cookie clicker is an idle game. The challenge in these games is often about managing risk. It's fair to dislike them, I'm not a fan of games like Vampire Survivors, but they are still better than AAA games.

To me the biggest issue with Indie games is exactly as you identified. A lot of it is aesthetic. When you peel back the aesthetic, there's not a whole lot of interesting game design going on. Look at how many liminal space-themed "horror" PSX games there are out there. I won't say much bad about them, because making a game as it is, is pretty hard, but what I will say, is even when they are good implementation of an idea, a lot of the time imo, the fundamental idea behind them isn't that interesting to begin with.

I also think if you've played Indie Games for a long time, you see trends and patterns in how they are designed, the same way as AAA games often end up formulaic. I think a lot of this is due to a lot of meh advice on YouTube and elsewhere on how games should be designed. The people sharing this advice, often don't even have a single game underneath their belt. A good example of a youtube channel like this is Gamemaker's toolkit which until recently didn't have a single game under their belt they had made from start to end, yet has been sharing game development advice for the last decade or so. Multiply this out by however many youtube channels are like this, and you can now see part of the issue.

Further multiply out the above with the average time(1 month-2+ years) to make a game, and you'll see how with crap advice, people don't learn because the iteration cycle on each game is long compared to other things.

How did this happen? There's no concerted marketing campaign to sell people slop, and I doubt the majority of indie developers are purposely making overly simplistic gambling-machine games for the sake of raking in easy money, so is the problem just the general addictive and shallow nature of gamers? Are players just not interested in complex, deep game experiences anymore? Am I out of touch and the industry is actually totally fine?

I agree with it not being about indie devs trying to get easy money. If you want easy money and you have the skills for game development you can go work for tons of software development companies or consultancies.

Personally, I have noticed what you say, but I'm unsure if it's just online sentiment, or real. I don't have issues finding complex and deep gaming experiences that are enjoyable to me, but then again, I don't have all the time in the world to spend playing videogames.

 

[turntableToothache]

Balatro especially, to me at least, feels like a slot machine - as a player you have very little control over your run outside of Jokers (which are also heavily RNG dependent), and the main appeal of the game seems to be watching that magical round score number go up

"The game that is Poker+ feels like gambling"
Real deep insight there.
There are plenty of things to criticize the indie scene for, such as most of them being trend chasers (the over abundance of fake retro games, such as boomer shooters is one such example), it being full of fart-sniffing sycophants posers who think every single indie game is the next Citizen Kane of gaming (Johnatan Blow), the lack of variety (where are the RTS, Halo-like or Deus Ex indie games at?), and "there's RNG and they gamble with fake money (unlike AAA games where you gamble with real money)" is what you go for? I was expecting something more thoughtful than "Balatro is like gambling but not real"

 

[Dead Star]

There are plenty of things to criticize the indie scene for, such as most of them being trend chasers (the over abundance of fake retro games, such as boomer shooters is one such example), it being full of fart-sniffing sycophants posers who think every single indie game is the next Citizen Kane of gaming (Johnatan Blow), the lack of variety (where are the RTS, Halo-like or Deus Ex indie games at?), and "there's RNG and they gamble with fake money (unlike AAA games where you gamble with real money)" is what you go for? I was expecting something more thoughtful than "Balatro is like gambling but not real"

On the lack of variety, this is my criticism for "Boomer Shooters". They all play like mods to the games they were influenced by. DUSK feels like a Quake mod that we could've downloaded for free 20 years ago. This is similar to the point BlackControlBoxer made how Vampire Survivors wouldn't be selling for $20 back in the flashgame era.

 

[Ross_Я]

I think gaming in general has dipped simply because there is no "new" games. All games are a pre selected genre where you can only refine the product and you will always compare it to the best in its class. Until we get a brand new technological advancement in gaming all games are gonna be rehashes of what's been. indie games were also never meant to compete with AAA games they were made to compete with new grounds flash games and other things you got for free before. When flash games died the quality of indie games dipped because they had no competition. balatro and vampire survivors would've been front page newgrounds games back in the day not 20$ purchases.

I think writing in general has dipped simply because there is no "new" books. All books are a pre selected genre where you can only refine the product and you will always compare it to the best in its class. Until we get a brand new technological advancement in writing all books are gonna be rehashes of what's been.
The second part is also bollocks, because no one stops you from making free games, here and now. It's just reality. If Newgrounds were still alive, I bet your mom they'd be paidwalled by now. Or at least had an option for the creators to set a price for the games, just like itch.io, which, by the way, has plenty free games. Damn, even Steam has some free games. So the "free competition" is still out there.
In two words: don't blame the medium, blame the talentless devs, or market and economy, or whatever. But definitely not the medium.

As for the indie games, I cannot really comment, since I'm not anyhow tied to the modern games, and I'm still cooking in my retro stuff mostly, playing old arcades or whatever. So I truly cannot say if it is overrated or not.
My opinion though is still simple: if I want a good modern game, it would be easier to find one among indies rather than among the big names. I do not think the presented notion overrated, but that one is mind, and hell I know what other people think about indie scene. Though I'd say I haven't seen people parading indies that much to say that the opinion is overrated. Even Balatro doesn't seem like that much blown out of proportion, for there's still much more talk about recent Assassin's Creed: Big In Japan, rather than about Balatro.
Albeit I still think Balatro looks like something truly fucking awful, and I can't wrap my head around the fact that this particular game has become anyhow popular at all, but then... it happened again and again. Angry Birds, Minecraft, whatever - it's all been massive, and I haven't played none of it and not going to. Still, I do not think notions of general population about any particular game - be it Balatro or whatever - can anyhow be seen as notions about scene in general.
Make of it whatever you want: once again, I do not really play enough anyhow modern games to be able to comment on the issue.

 

[ark]

They are not idle games, but they do go hard into the "number go up, I receive dopamine" camp of games. Cookie clicker is an idle game. The challenge in these games is often about managing risk. It's fair to dislike them, I'm not a fan of games like Vampire Survivors, but they are still better than AAA games.

These type of games are a thing at least since Diablo was released and people seem to love it, so it is only natural that indie developers would try their hand at similar games. Indie games are not the antithesis to AAA games, they are not this counter-cultural thing that brings culture to the uncultured. Things that work well in AAA will also work well in indie games, which is why the indie game trends look the way they do. At the end of the day, indie games (and their devs) are subject to the same market forces as AAA games.

However, I do believe that indie games are better than ever before, even if there are a lot of trend chasers and iterations of current thing. You have a shitton of talented people who produce unique and niche games on a professional level in their spare time, people who revive genres thought to dead or just make weird but interesting stuff. People don't seem to remember the indie games of the late 90s and early 2000s if they really think the state of the indie scene is bad today.

 

[Tom Cotten]

10+ years ago there was a very good indie scene. There were lots of great games, and typically if you found something it was probably interesting to some extent. But these days the indie market is flooded and most of the games are literal garbage.

Even worse, corpos also dipped into the indie scene, so a lot of the games aren't even independent.

Indie horror is great, now. So many people have wonderful idea. They all look fairly similar but the stories they tell are unique and interesting, even if most of them are lovecraft inspired. Voices of the Void (unofficial sequel to signal simulator) for example. Excellent game. AAA games are coming back in quality, too. KCD2, RDR2. I wish Ubisoft was still making AC games the old way. AC4 was peak gaming, I think. If you're looking for a laugh, Kyle is Famous has got you. 2018 was a good year in gaming.