Grad Student's Algorithm Answers, "What is Indie?"

[Encaen]

Grad Student's Algorithm Answers, "What is Indie?"

[pullquote]Our goal is
to use an expectation-maximization algorithm to learn the parameters of a model that we will then use to forecast, without
peeking at the tags, whether a given game is likely to be considered by Steam users as "indie", or not.[/pullquote]

A recent Masters graduate from the school of Aerospace Engineering at Colorado University at Boulder decided to use his years of advanced maths training to answer the question that really matters: What is an indie game? The debate about how to define "indie" has been going on for years, and talking about it has put us no closer to a conclusive answer than we were before. Jackson Wagner developed a learning algorithm, fed it metrics about a whole slew of Steam games, like Tags, Scores, and Pricing. Eventually, the algorithm learned enough to be able to spot indie games about 2 of 3 times based on those metrics, having removed the "indie" tag, which is obviously cheating.

I'll spare you my hazy recollections of Gaussian mathematics, but if you're interested in the nitty gritty, the entire paper available for download here [http://cdn.themis-media.com/media/global/images/library/deriv/1406/1406529.pdf]!

Generally speaking, it seems these metrics act like social demographics, or internet advertising, which takes some data about a person, compares that to the data of millions of others, and makes an educated guess about how that person will behave, based on empirical data. Just think of Steam stats as the browser cookies of game genres.



Permalink

 

[Silentpony_v1legacy]

The second something is labeled 'indie' is stops being so. Like calling something an untold story.

 

[hermes]

That is a pretty cool grad students project, but I wasn't aware there was such debate about what is indie or not...

 

[Zenja]

How does "Indie" not mean "independant"? I always seen indie as a tag for a developer without publisher backing.

I don't really understand the project here.

 

[Chaosian]

The second something is labeled 'indie' is stops being so. Like calling something an untold story.

Sounds like a fancy way of saying indie developers don't exist.

How does "Indie" not mean "independant"? I always seen indie as a tag for a developer without publisher backing.

I don't really understand the project here.

It's a little bit more loose than that.
Is Amnesia an indie game? That didn't have a publisher.
How about Warframe? No publisher.

 

[DoPo]

How does "Indie" not mean "independant"? I always seen indie as a tag for a developer without publisher backing.

I don't really understand the project here.

The debate comes from people who, as far as I can tell, don't know that and try to divine what "indie" actually means. To them it's something like "a small scale game, made by a small team" and then they try to actually quantify what that means. Apparently, at some point a game stops being small enough to be independent. Or something.

 

[Vigormortis]

How does "Indie" not mean "independant"? I always seen indie as a tag for a developer without publisher backing.

I don't really understand the project here.

Me neither.

"Indie" is shorthand for "independent". As in, a game that was developed and published[footnote]Marketing and distribution are different matters.[/footnote] by the same development studio.

I've never understood where the confusion comes from.

It's a little bit more loose than that.

To some, but why? Seems like a pointless convolution of the term.

Is Amnesia an indie game? That didn't have a publisher.

Yep.

How about Warframe? No publisher.

Yep. It is, too. As are games like Portal 2, Terraria, Dota 2, Grand Theft Auto V, and The Witcher 3[footnote]These latter two are technically debatable, but the dev teams were part of the inhouse teams at Rockstar and CDProjekt, respectively. As such they can be viewed as 'independently developed'.[/footnote]

The debate comes from people who, as far as I can tell, don't know that and try to divine what "indie" actually means. To them it's something like "a small scale game, made by a small team" and then they try to actually quantify what that means. Apparently, at some point a game stops being small enough to be independent. Or something.

Which begs the question: At what point do we draw the line between a 'triple-A' team and an 'indie' team?

What arbitrary number of team members do we choose as the divider? Would fifteen be considered 'indie' or 'triple-A'? What about thirty? Would a game with ten team members go from 'indie' to 'triple-A' if they suddenly hired two extra artists? What about non-dev-team members? Do we count translators, marketers, distributors, etc?

And that's not even going into the fact that, at times, not ALL members of a dev studio are involved in the game(s) the studio releases. Quite often the members of that studio are divided up into disparate groups, each of whom is working on a different project.

I'm baffled by the need some people have to overly complicate the definition of 'indie game'. It feels like some (those who wish to maintain their 'hipster' status by decrying the 'triple-A' industry) wish to draw some distinction between the games they like and those they don't.

 

[DoPo]

Which begs the question: At what point do we draw the line between a 'triple-A' team and an 'indie' team?

Honestly, I don't see why they need to be different, either. CD Project Red published The Witcher 3 themselves, so that game would be classed as "indie". It also has high production value and can be classed as AAA.

It's the term "AAA" that is way vaguer than indie, yet I hardly ever seen it discussed - most times I do, it's in a discussion about "what is indie" and it's put up as the polar opposite. Yet as far as I know about either of the terms, they aren't. "Indie" is just "independent" and "AAA" is "high production values". Nothing in those makes them definitely opposite. Sure, most of the time an independent dev does not have the resources to pour into a project to make it triple A but that doesn't mean you cannot have both.

 

[josemlopes]

Yep. It is, too. As are games like Portal 2, Terraria, Dota 2, Grand Theft Auto V, and The Witcher 3[footnote]These latter two are technically debatable, but the dev teams were part of the inhouse teams at Rockstar and CDProjekt, respectively. As such they can be viewed as 'independently developed'.[/footnote]

I know you have the footnote, but just to point out that Rockstar is a subsidiary of Take-Two Interactive Software, meaning that it isnt independant. Just for you to know, meh

 

[RJ 17]

How does "Indie" not mean "independant"? I always seen indie as a tag for a developer without publisher backing.

I don't really understand the project here.

It's a little bit more loose than that.
Is Amnesia an indie game? That didn't have a publisher.
How about Warframe? No publisher.

The reason there's still so many things wrong with League of Legends is because Riot Games is a small indie company, please understand.

 

[CaitSeith]

Congratulations, Mr. Wagner! You created an algorithm to predict how current Steam users react to a game name 2 out of 3 times! This surely won't be abused at all... /s

 

[DoPo]

So...I decided to have a look at the paper and I would say it probably isn't entirely serious.

I?ve been having fun with the gag of trying to be scientific about a ridiculous videogame-related debate

Methinks, a joke is getting a bit more publicity than it probably deserves.

 

[Vigormortis]

Honestly, I don't see why they need to be different, either. CD Project Red published The Witcher 3 themselves, so that game would be classed as "indie". It also has high production value and can be classed as AAA.

It's the term "AAA" that is way vaguer than indie, yet I hardly ever seen it discussed - most times I do, it's in a discussion about "what is indie" and it's put up as the polar opposite. Yet as far as I know about either of the terms, they aren't. "Indie" is just "independent" and "AAA" is "high production values". Nothing in those makes them definitely opposite. Sure, most of the time an independent dev does not have the resources to pour into a project to make it triple A but that doesn't mean you cannot have both.

Which is kind of my point.

The budget for Dota 2 or League of Legends are colossal, yet they are, by definition, 'indie' games.

I feel that if people want to differentiate between big budget games and small budget games they should find better terminology than 'triple-A' and 'indie'.

I know you have the footnote, but just to point out that Rockstar is a subsidiary of Take-Two Interactive Software, meaning that it isnt independant. Just for you to know, meh

Right, but check who actually published the game. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Theft_Auto_V

Rockstar did it themselves. Take-Two took a back seat on that one.

GTAV and W3 are about as independent as any given Ubisoft, EA or Activision developed game. Any claim of being indie flies out the window when divisions and subsidiaries come into play as descriptors.

Do they, though?

I'll get back to this, but first...

Shit, GTA is the least indie thing possible, once you look at the entire Take-Two pyramid.

See the link just above. Rockstar was the publisher.

And the funny thing about Witcher is that it was never indie, as CDP started out as a distributor and publisher in Poland, CDPRed, their development division, came a lot later. (unless you count poverty as being indie, which is the exact opposite of your sentiment)

Only a portion of the entire team of designers at Re-Logic are working on Terraria 2, while the rest are split between updates for Terraria and development of Terraria: Otherworld. Do we suddenly consider those to no longer be indie games?

If not, why then do we consider, say, The Witcher to not be independently developed and published, just because only a portion of CDProjekt is making it?

Seems like you're arguing more for a division between 'indie' and 'triple-A' based on team size or budget. In which case, League of Legends isn't indie while something like Portal is.

 

[Jamcie Kerbizz]

This is really cool article! Escapist needs more of news like that

And on OP, this student doesn't answer what is or isn't 'indie'. He just compares how well simple data mining algorithm fares in assigning 'indie' tag to a game given its: price, count of owners, count of users which run it last 2 weeks, time spent on game and avg. length of play session. Results were well medicore (66%) but lets be honest given available data quite nice (above random).

I wonder how xgboost would fare here.

BTW Valve probably uses 'similar' approach to determine which games you would like in your featured and discovery queue.

 

[Xorph]

Personally, I think "indie" has evolved to be a term completely different from just being shorthand for independent.

At this point, as people have stated, it generally means a smaller-scale game made by a smaller-scale team, though not neccesarily self-published. Of course, with how hard it can be to define the line of what is and isn't "small scale" I think it tends to fall on general community consensus whether the game is "indie" or not.

Worth noting on the prospect that a game doesn't need to be self-published to be "indie", I'd like to point you towards Devolver Digital, who are flat-out considered an "indie game publisher". That'd be pretty impossible if the main metric for indie was being self-published. Top that off with the fact that if you ask someone to name some big indie games from the past few years, you've got a strong chance that Hotline Miami and Broforce (both published by Devolver) will both be on that list, and it becomes pretty clear the term has evolved beyond simple shorthand.

(Point of note, of course, is that Devolver and other "indie publishers" like KiSS are generally 100% hands-off with the development process of games they publish, just taking care of promotion/distribution, which is a big part of what IDs them as an "indie pub" in the first place.)

(Also don't even get me STARTED on how we now have "AA Games" as its own subset to fill in the vauge area between indie and AAA.)

 

[DoPo]

And where in the name of blue fuck did you get that I was saying that 'team size' and 'budget' are the separator between indie and otherwise?

Maybe because you complained about team size and budget.

Would you kindly reply to the contents of my comment next time, and not the interpretation you want to argue.

Actually, you know what - how about you actually decide to make a point first. Because otherwise all interaction will devolve to you trying hard to find flaws in what was said. Seen it a thousand times, so let's try to break the cycle early - how about you describe what indie is and why that is, instead of just trying to poke at other explanations.

Because this is why there is such a "debate" - a bunch of people just go "no, it's not this" without actually offering any alternatives. It is not that people can't agree on what is indie but it's like an endless argument on what isn't.

 

[DoPo]

respond to something I don't give a fuck about

And yet here you are. If you really didn't give a fuck about it, why respond at all. And why are you trying hard to "posture". Funnily the same thing you're accusing me of.

You still don't seem to have a point, just trying to disagree with other people.