IGF Chairman: We have a responsibility to support indie games

Brandon Boyer, chairman of the Independent Games Festival, said today at GDC Europe that gamers have a responsibility to buy games that attempt to push the medium forward.


He said that we need to be supporting developers who are attempted to "color" the medium. "We should appreciate what a game is trying to do, whether we like it or not," he said.

He likened games to move and remarked that nobody would ever complain that an album was only 30 minutes long. He said that people tend to appreciate an album on its own terms, yet think of games as products that owe them a certain amount of entertainment.

He also took the opportunity to encourage developers to "make a stand and go make the games you really want to," encouraging them to strike out on their own. He offered the example of Craig Adams who formerly worked for Koei Canada but went on to create Sword and Sworcery.