Oh, that's why the Triple-I showcase felt like that

Originally posted Apr 13, 2024 on Cohost.

Note: For clarity, as pointed out in a post by @lotus, the blogpost with this definition in it was only linked to in Thunder Lotus’ newsletter, no other studios involved with the Triple-I Initiative have specifically cited this definition.

A few days ago I wrote a post about how the people selecting games for the “Triple-I Indie Showcase” must have a bizarre definition of “indie,” but I deleted it as I felt like I was being a little rude about something that didn’t really matter all that much, and because I wasn’t quite able to articulate what I didn’t like about the choices beyond “these feel like the sort of games that wouldn’t even consider releasing on GoG at launch, let alone Itch.io” and “why is there a Ubisoft game in this???”

After seeing what their definition actually is, I kinda regret deleting it, because it’s utterly ridiculous.

We have fewer issues with the traditional definition for III than for AAA as it’s based on quality, something each person can judge for themselves without having to sleuth through investment calls and press releases. (…) In order to count as III a game needs to score 7 or more points out of a possible 10.

  1. Have no more than 50 employees in the core development team (Required)
  2. Have a budget for development and marketing exceeding $1M (2 pts)
  3. Receive a Metacritic score of at least 70 (2 pts)
  4. Exhibit a “high level of polish” and “few bugs” (2 pts)
  5. Have at least 20 hours of gameplay (1 pt)
  6. Make use of the latest technology and push technical boundaries (1 pt)
  7. Use hyper-realistic graphics at launch (1 pt)
  8. Not owned/funded by a large studio or publisher (1 pt)
    9. TinyHydra

“I want longer games with hyper-realistic graphics that cost at least $1M to make” is pretty much the antithesis of what I personally think of when I think of “indie,” lmao.

@johnnemann put it well here:

All of the problems of gamer consumerism are on full display here - ‘quality is an objective measure that we can all easily agree on’, ‘quality equates to fidelity and hours of play’, and ‘numeric scores are a good way of evaluating art’. I hate this so much that my respect for the studios involved has dropped significantly.

@lotus has a good article going into more detail about this, which you can read here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/triple-i-101678378

Also, check out @bruno’s reply to this for a much better critique of this than I was able to put together: https://cohost.org/bruno/post/5566284-yeah-a-lot-of-the-l

Blog mirror of Bruno's reply

Yeah, a lot of the language these dudes were using kind of crosses the line for me from being “annoying but not worth commenting on” to being something that I think has negative externalities for the rest of the industry. I think as game developers we need to start recognizing the ways in which we talk about our work or the products of that work in terms that reinforce the worst impulses of the audience… This direct correlation of ‘quality’ to visual fidelity and playtime is, to my mind, very exactly harmful.

Like, I’d love to just ignore this and say “well you do what you wanna do to promote your game or whatever.” But it’s hard for me to not characterize this as a group of developers choosing to promote their work by engaging in something that I think makes life harder for other developers.

And completely unnecessarily, to be honest.

I don’t think that what they characterized as ‘III’ really seemed like a stable or readable category. There was stuff from first-time studios, there were follow-ups to very successful indie games. There was a Prince of Persia game which I believe gets in on the technicality that it’s not being made directly by Ubisoft, just using Ubisoft IP under license? Kind of the same type of arrangement as Cadence of Hyrule?

It feels very much like basically any game could be on this list, just as long as it’s:

  1. Not from a major studio
  2. Still not too small, too rough, too experimental, too weird, too foreign, or too queer for what these organizers consider a ‘mainstream’ audience.

Which, frankly, leaves a bad taste in my mouth when you’re presenting it as being based on some notion of ‘quality.’

I don’t think this idea of a ‘quality rubric’ makes sense as a marketing tactic either, and I don’t think this idea of creating ‘triple I’ as a product category does. To me the whole thing comes off as tone-deaf; about the state of the industry, about the realities of most game productions.

And especially tone-deaf about the responsibilities we really ought to be taking, as game developers, when we talk to or cultivate our audiences.