Mike Bithell, the creator of Thomas Was Alone and Volume, sees plenty of life in the bustling indie landscape. Sony has doubled down on smaller games with the launch of the PlayStation 4, and Xbox One is slowly becoming another avenue for smaller creators to release their projects. It’s a great space to work in, and Bithell argues that – mostly be sheer volume – indie games will be more successful than bigger titles in 2014.
“We make games, and we are making increasingly… I don’t think it’s silly to say there will be more successful indie games this year than there are successful AAA games,” he told VG247 in a recent interview. “That’s a given purely by numbers; it’s not a knock on AAA, it’s just that there’s more of us.
“That’s interesting. When that happens that changes a lot. It means that we become a focus, I guess, for the platform. Every Christmas – if you’re Sony, Microsoft or Nintendo – you know you’ve got a Call of Duty, an Assassin’s Creed, you’ve maybe got a FIFA,” he continued. “You’ve got all these big AAA blockbuster games, but for the rest of the year it looks a bit cold, a bit empty and I think that’s where we can find an audience and spaces to kind of fill in those gaps, and be the games that help those platforms through the fallow months.”
Not every new indie game is going to be a smash hit like Minecraft, but the audience seems more welcoming to projects that take creative risks than ever before.
