'Indie is bigger than ever and also it is dead,' says Vlambeer's Rami Ismail

The indie scene is busier than ever, and as such has become increasingly difficult to define. Speaking at the Develop conference in Brighton, Vlambeer's Rami Ismail said "indie is bigger than ever, and also it is dead."

As reported by MCV (via PCGamesN), Ismail explains this is a good thing—during his keynote alongside Mike Bithell—and that the "best thing that has happened to game development is that somebody took a sledgehammer to all those big concepts and then shattered them into a million pieces." He reckons indie game development, as it's perceived today, echoes the foundations of punk rock.

"Indie is bigger than ever and also it is dead. It is both those things," says Ismail. "The beautiful thing about indie is that it has grown beyond any proportion we could have thought. In 2010, the whole idea of indie was like a punk rock kind of a culture, like 'fuck these triple-A assholes', which obviously is super immature, I love triple-A and all of that, but we needed something to kick against, to start something."

Ismail says the devs involved at the time weren't necessarily aware a 'scene' was unfolding—"at first it was a very small, very coherent scene, like 30-40 people"—but that they "needed something to be loud with."

Read MCV's report from Develop: Brighton in this direction. And it'd be pretty remiss of me not to link to our indie channel here. Job done.