Monaco dev: indie scene now continuous with mainstream industry

Monaco creator Andy Schatz has said it's hard to see where indpendent development and the mainstream games industry machine diverge.

Speaking with GamesIndustry at GDC 2013, Schatz said it's no longer easy to define what "indie" means.

"It's not so much that indie culture has changed, but the industry has moved in the direction that we've been trying to push in, which is really cool. Like I said in the IGF intro, we're not The Clash anymore. We're Green Day," he said.

"So it's harder to be counter culture because the whole industry kind of likes us.

"What is nice is that with indie, you used to be able to constrain it and draw lines around it. But at this point, there's no line of division between indie and the rest of the industry. It's just a continuum and there's overlap. You can't draw a line around us anymore."

It's certainly getting harder and harder to decide what goes in our indie category, I can tell you that much. As Schatz said, indie culture itself hasn't changed so much; he acknowledged a continued tension between more business-minded crews and those who went independent for creative reasons.

"I don't think we've been one big happy family since I can remember. I went indie from a career in the AAA industry eight-and-a-half years ago. Even back in the early days, there was a community of people that was approaching things from a more business perspective, and a lot of casual game designers came from there. And then there was the TIGSource crowd, the artistic, young, pixel-art, sort of obnoxious, internet-type kids over here. And the two of them clashed from the beginning," he said.

Schatz's Monaco won an IGF prize in 2010 and is due for release on PC and Xbox 360 on April 24, with a Mac version to follow.