True :) But if we consider 90s as an example then most games were easy to classify. There were exceptions like the original Dune. I may even admit that there were quite a lot of them but those were still exceptions. Nowadays the proportion has changed significantly. While there are still pure games which clearly belongs to one genre there are so many hybrids that I wouldn't dare to call them exceptions.

To be honest, I do think you need to have all the shit there to be able to find the occasional diamond in the rough, and I don't think anyone really disputes that the vast majority of indie games really are shit (bearing in mind, of course, that many of them don't even make it to Steam, GOG or indie bundles).

If it wasn't for this kind of open market though, many of these stand-out titles probably would never have made it to market - they would have failed at the publisher end. I do think publishers are essential to a funktioning gaming market (you only have to have seen first-hand how bad some of the self-publishing devs are at dealing with distributors to realise this).

FTL and LoG probably would never have seen the light of day with a traditional publisher.

On the flip side of the coin, however, there are plenty of games out there - especially more ambitious ones - that wouldn't see the light of day without the involvement of a publisher to provide financial support.

It is not my definition, they specifically marketed the games as roguelike-like, meaning it has some elements of roguelikes, but isn't one. Sorry I was rude. Eador has those elements as well, don't think anyone would call it roguelike.

Well i can not understand the hype over Minecraft. Not sure if this is an indie.

Anyway, i hope that i will find one day a game like StarFlight. FTL is somewhat in that line, but not really.
Is there anyway such a game? I like the exploring part with some casual fighting, but i think the exploring was really the best aspect of that game.
FTL is great to play, unlucky for me i think i suck at it.
But it gets you hooked and you spend easily a lot of hours just to learn the game.
Did i mentioned i am old. Yeah, so it takes me time to get into a game but it really is a great waste of my time in a good way.

One of the indie games i really enjoyed was Shadow Complex. I so wished that there would be a follow up but it never came to that.
Also, there was oldstyle gamebox game where you controlled miniature soldiers and planes from the great war. I was so hooked on that. Sadly i actually forgot the name and i sold my xbox.

p.s. it was Toy Soldier

FTL is not a roguelike. It's a roguelike-like, which is a ridiculously broad category that basically means permadeath and randomisation. +1 to counter the low rep you have for some reason.

Yeah, I reckon you're right.

Still, I suppose consider 'optimization' as the jump from serviceable code to excellent code, rather than the jump from clumsy code to serviceable, if that makes any sense. I have 2.4GHz and 6 Gig of RAM, and a decent graphics card from a few years ago. The menu screen from Capsized lags. It's a static image scrolling behind another static semi-transparent image. Ittle Dew lags on foggy screens, Pid lags tremendously, though it is admittedly very pretty and when I change the settings to low, it runs fine with no perceptible difference in appearance. Other similar scale indies, like Unmechanical, Waking Mars, and Unepic run beautifully.

Ah well, there are enough cleanly-done indies available that I can't really complain. Just something I noticed.