Last week, I spent a few days at the DIGIAGE 12th Game Development Camp and the DIGIAGE Global Indie Game Summit.
I had the chance to meet some great teams, play some interesting games, exchange ideas, give feedback where useful, and briefly show what we’ve been building at Rapsodo Studios.
It was interesting to see the platform choices. Steam was a common target, but for different reasons. Some teams had moved away from mobile because the market has become too crowded and getting noticed is increasingly difficult. Others simply thought their game belonged on PC. At the same time, there were still some interesting mobile games and applications, so I wouldn’t call this a simple shift from mobile to PC.
Horror was still quite common among indie teams. Unity and Unreal dominated, as expected, but there were also a few interesting projects showing the capabilities of Godot.
What surprised me most was the mindset of the younger teams. They are more entrepreneurial, more willing to take risks, and very comfortable using AI as part of development.
That last part is both exciting and risky. Generating code is becoming much easier, but if a team doesn’t really own the architecture, understand the dependencies, or know why the system is built the way it is, today’s speed can easily become tomorrow’s maintenance problem.