Capybara Games’ Nathan Vella argued that the indie community will win against the “mainstream” developers and publishers due to the spirit of support and collaboration upheld within the indie community.
“Mainstream folks are driven by competition, where the indie folk are built on love,” said Vella. “The difference between competition and love is that everyone here is trying to drive overall quality up and attempting to create solutions to problems, rather than trying to make problems for others.”
Vella concluded that time was already proving him correct. “Each year indie games get higher and higher quality.”
Ryan O'Donnell of Area 5, however, argued that in turn video game journalism was going in the opposite direction. “Quality processes and copy editors have been set aside in terms of immediacy and 24 hours coverage,” he said. “I want an industry that has space for real critics.”
O’Donnell’s request was that journalists “treat games equally.” “Triple A games, indie games, iPhone games. They’re all competing against each other for one thing: time. And they’re all important to our medium.”
But Craig D. Adams of Superbrothers opinion was that less “talk” about games was needed and more “rock”.
“The native language of video games can be neither spoken or written,” claimed Adams. Showing an image of a “dude” in the Superbrothers art-style alongside the word “dude,” Adams continued, “these two things are doing totally separate things in your brain. The word ‘dude’ you read from left to right, where an image you view completely. Art, music, video games, they can speak to your whole mind.”
“Older video games weren’t telling you things all the time. Talk equals noise,” said Adams. “Miyamoto’s game about plumbers; the revolution of that title was that the art, sound and design was all tied up together and didn’t need text tutorials or cut-scenes. That’s the language of video games, and what we need to focus on.”
Team Meat’s Tommy Refenes’ rant was more specific.
“I fucking hate the App Store. I think it’s fucking terrible. [The iPhone] is the new Tiger handheld game. I used to have a Tiger Megaman 2 handheld, a Mortal Kombat. They didn’t look good, they didn’t control well, they were LCD crap.”
“Compare to the App Store,” he continued. “Who has beaten the iPhone version of Megaman 2? Or Sonic? You can’t play Street Fighter IV on a touch screen any more than you can experience it on a Tiger handheld.”
However, Refenes noted that there was at least market for App Store games, relating his experience offering the title Zits and Giggles on the App Store. Originally selling it at 99 cents, he began to raise the price to see if people would still purchase. “At fifteen dollars three people bought it. At one hundred and fifty dollars, fifteen bought it,” he announced to laughter. “Now every time someone buys it I raise the price. It’s now three hundred and fifty dollars, and I had stopped paying attention to it for a while. Fourteen people bought it at $299.”
Robin Hunicke (thatgamecompany) broached the subject of women in games, expressing extreme dissatisfaction with the fact that the number of female game developers (roughly 5% of the workforce) has remained steady over five years, followed by Brandon Boyer (BoingBoing) who claimed “Seanbaby has ruined Internet games journalism for everyone.”
“Entertaining has trumped informing, and it’s helped create a cult of personality that has given the press a false sense of entitlement. Your job, which you presumably get paid for, is to inform your readers. Provide information and context.”
“I want 2010 to be the year we sunk snark,” he asked.