"indie" is a worthless terms and should be thrown in the trash

it means nothing in an industry where the route to success for many indies is to sign with a publisher that will basically pour hundreds of thousands of dollars of VC funding into the dev's IP

not that there's anything necessarily wrong with that but like, basically selling your IP to a publisher for a chunky round of VC funding while expecting no return on your game beyond that funding just doesn't strike me as very "indie"

also the fact that this is how publishing works for indie games is like, some weird open secret that you're not supposed to talk about in public or something? ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

i mean i get it i suppose, talking openly about how a sizable chunk of indie games is really kind of like the gaming equivalent of tech bro startups probably ruins the marketing image and street cred "indie" has

anyway this industry sucks hahaha

also don't think i'm kidding here we've had some publisher interest and they absolutely consider 300-500k in funding small scale funding

the reason devs who take that kinda funding don't expect to see anything more than the initial round of funding is because those publishers take large percentages but also because they will write themselves blank checks for recouping "expenses" as part of the deal

anyway i just really feel like if you sell your product to venture capitalists you should maybe stop billing yourself as one of the little scrappy guys

i would like to say that you should value your IP rights. being able to maximize the long term earning potential of your games is, imho, key to a healthy business and making games as a free agent and not slowly slipping into the morass of big industry deals and contract work

once you're stuck chasing funding deals and contract work for bigger entities in order to keep your studio's doors open breaking out of that cycle becomes very hard, not just based on my own experience but also my brother's who worked for a medium indie

for the record i'm absolutely not telling people to not take the deal. absolutely get dat bread

it's just incredibly difficult for me to reconcile the image of an unconstrained independent developer and receiving a bunch of VC funding, that's all