ABSTRACT
This chapter draws from over 40 interviews conducted with Australian videogame makers based in the state capital of Victoria, Melbourne – where a combination of established skills, state funding, and cultural support have birthed a rich and dynamic game development environment – to highlight the tensions, experiences, skills, ambitions, and identities at play in localized videogame development. Through these interviews, a multitude interlocking indie videogame scenes are identified to exist in Melbourne, each with its own practices, intermediaries, and values. One of these scenes prioritize building sustainable companies and producing commercially viable indie videogames, while the other is constituted primarily by videogame makers who receive their primary income from other means. However, as this chapter shows, this is more complicated than a simple ‘art vs commerce’ divide. Instead, across these two distinct but interconnected indie scenes, different value regimes of indie-ness are at play that produce complex and ambivalent relationships to labor, markets, and aesthetics. Through its analysis of these scenes, this chapter builds a more complex, contested, and localized notion of what it means to be an ‘indie’ developer.
