Today’s Indie Games Are Tomorrow’s Nostalgia

The Guardian’s Keith Stuart ran a piece this week asking whether gaming is having its own version of 1990s indie cinema — the Miramax/New Line moment, when a wave of scrappy independent studios revitalised an industry the majors had let go stale. It’s a good question. But there’s a connection sitting underneath it that’s worth pulling out on its own, because it explains something this site has been circling for months.

The State of Play

The big publishers are, by Stuart’s account, in genuine disarray. EA’s been bought out by a Saudi-led consortium, which tends to mean more cautious, hit-driven decisions rather than fewer. Microsoft bought Activision and Bethesda and followed it with waves of redundancies. Ubisoft has cancelled multiple titles and is posting losses. Development costs keep climbing, so the response across the board is the same: circle the wagons, lean on legacy brands, freeze anything that isn’t a safe bet.

Meanwhile, a genuine counter-economy is forming underneath them. Boutique publishers — Kinetic (founded by Phasmophobia’s creator), Outersloth (Among Us’s InnerSloth spinning off funding for idiosyncratic concepts), Kepler Interactive (behind Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, 2025’s most acclaimed release) — are stepping into the space the majors have vacated. Digital distribution and social platforms have made it cheap enough to actually compete, the same way cheap equipment and indie distribution let 90s filmmakers bypass the studio system entirely.

The Piece No One’s Quite Saying Out Loud

Here’s the connection Stuart’s piece gestures at without quite stating directly: those two trends aren’t really separate stories. They’re the same instinct, running in opposite directions.

Look at what the big publishers have actually been backing while they retreat from risk: a Star Fox remake, a Halo remake, an animated Golden Axe series, a decade-spanning Atari film deal built on Pong and Centipede and Missile Command. None of that is really about creative bankruptcy. It’s risk management, the same as everything else those companies are doing right now — nostalgia has a proven return, so lean on it hard while the balance sheet is fragile. Concord got cancelled and Astro Bot got funded for exactly the same underlying reason. The difference with a Golden Axe cartoon or a Star Fox remake is that the safe bet is old IP instead of new.

So the industry isn’t choosing between “safe” and “risky.” It’s outsourcing the risky part entirely — to the boutique publishers Stuart’s piece is actually about.

Which Raises the Obvious Question

If that’s where the genuine creative risk-taking lives now, then the games coming out of that scene today are the ones with a real shot at being someone’s Golden Axe in twenty years. Every legacy franchise currently getting a nostalgia-driven remake was, once, exactly what Kepler or Kinetic or Outersloth are backing right now — a strange, unproven idea nobody was sure would work. Today’s safe bet is yesterday’s gamble that happened to pay off.

Worth sitting with, next time a boutique publisher’s name shows up on a game you’ve never heard of: somewhere in that pile is a future Looking Back entry. We just don’t know which one yet.