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Re:Microsoft to Acquire Activision Blizzard by DrBazza on Tuesday January 18, 2022 @10:36AM (#29980695)
I can think of several recent releases without even searching: Melkhior's Mansion was released this week, Slipways earlier in the year, and Midnight Fight Express coming soon. I don't know if that's representative of indie games or not.

There's so many platforms to build for, and on some (xbox/ps5) a high(er) barrier to entry, vs. low on the PC, or mobile. I'm not surprised that there's much indie action on the xbox/ps5.

Re:Microsoft to Acquire Activision Blizzard by krajzeg on Tuesday January 18, 2022 @11:27AM (#29981514)
As the author of Slipways, it warms my heart to see it mentioned randomly in a HN comment!

As an indie game developer (hard to get more indie than me, I think, since I'm doing this mostly solo), I can attest that it's never been easier to get your game on Steam or a console platform. On Steam it's mostly a matter of a $100 fee and filling a form. Consoles are a bit harder, but still dramatically more open to indie titles than say a decade ago, and all of them are possible to get on even for small developers.

I also wouldn't say that "the group of indie dev studios is dwindling". It's just a matter of the old indie studios "growing up" to become bigger enterprises, but there is tons of other people replacing them on the lowest rung, with teams of several people and true labor of love projects.

Re:Microsoft to Acquire Activision Blizzard by DrBazza on Thursday January 20, 2022 @08:13AM (#30008425)
Unfortunately, I'm not a gamer, and run a weird version of linux which I don't think you support anyway, but I have played Slipways (a friend purchased it) on the PC, and it's a great game!
Re:Microsoft to Acquire Activision Blizzard by karpierz on Tuesday January 18, 2022 @06:54PM (#29987923)
Slipways is an amazing game! It's so nice building little galactic empires without fussing with spreadsheets or war.