For better or for worse, massive companies are fully able to acquire your favorite indie titles, whether it’s from buying the IP rights, buying out the entire indie studio, or an indie just growing into a Triple-A.
There is quite a bit of debate to be had over what an indie game even is, considering the Game Awards saysDave the Diveris somehow indie, but seeing a small studio go so big is both inspiring and terrifying.
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On one hand, you get to see your favorite game that started out as a tiny passion project blossom into a massive brand with widespread appeal, but that’s only in the best-case scenario.
Most times an indie gets bought out, the fanbase will be there to complain about anything the new owners do with their favorite game, and with some of these games, that’s completely justified.
For this list, I’ll be considering any game made by small teams, usually from self-declared independent studios that aren’t owned by big corporations, to be indie games, with publishers not playing a factor in it. We live in an age whereAmong Uscan overtake triple-A’s in popularity despite being a self-published game made primarily by three people, so I don’t see having a publisher being relevant.
8Five Nights at Freddy’s
Scary Growth
Five Nights at Freddy’s
Five Nights at Freddy’sstatus as an indie or not is pretty debatable, so I figured I’d throw it at the bottom of the list, since it undeniably started as an indie and blossomed into a massive franchise.
It was a series born of one Scott Cawthon’s frustrations, with his kid-friendly 3D models constantly called terrifying, he decided to use that to his advantage, creating one of the biggest breakout hits ever.
This one success very quickly turned into a huge franchise with10 sequels and terribly confusing lorein the span of 6 years, and Scott Cawthon announcing he would no longer be making the games around 2021.
That said, he’s still the sole owner of the rights to the franchise, but licenses it out to game companies and film studios that are most certainly not indie. I believe the franchise itself is not indie, currently, but feel free to argue about that.
Too Big To Fail
Palworldhad an incredibly troubled development, and it’s not even finished yet, with Pocketpair starting development on “Pokémon, but with guns” while only having 10 employees working at the company.
The size of this little company grew as Palworld’s development became more and more demanding, with an engine switch, scope creep, and a massive delay making them bleed even more money.
It paid off, though, peaking at over2 million concurrent players on Steam, and the sudden surge of income means the company now has over 50 employees, a partnership with Sony, and millions of dollars at their disposal.
Palworld’s success made Pocketpair grow so fast that Nintendo decided to try and sue them on the basis of infringing on patents they only created after Palworld’s release, which is a sure sign of making it to the big leagues.
6Fall Guys
Not That Epic
Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout
Fall Guys' success could not have come down to a more perfect storm, as it was released in the summer of 2020 to massive praise, and since people had nothing better to do, everyone started playing it.
The battle royale genre was sorely needing a shakeup, and a party game platformer was the exact thing it needed. It seemed that Epic Games, owners ofFortnite, wouldn’t let someone else get such a big foothold in their genre.
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Epic Games bought out Mediatonic, and immediately, changes were noticeable,with abundant outragefrom the dedicated community over the battle pass, requiring an Epic Games account, and taking the game off Steam.
At the very least, Epic could’ve landed the Switch and Xbox ports when the game went free to play, but the update made the game incredibly buggy, far less polished, and nowadays, I can’t even launch the damn thing.
Falling Into Place
Tetris (1989)
Tetrishas a massive, storied history behind it. I won’t go into detail on all of it here because, for one, there’s a full-scale movie you can watch on that, and secondly, the point is that it was a solo-dev release.
It was initially solely developed by Alexey Pajitnov in the Soviet Union, on a computer with no way of displaying graphics, every piece being comprised of two brackets.
And yet, the core game design was developed from that basic prototype, from the simple idea of stacking tetrominoes, into a game for IBM computers that spread through Soviet Russia like wildfire.
Skipping over quite the insane series of events, Tetris would eventually end up being published on the Game Boy and NES, becoming one of the best-selling games of all time, with the massive Tetris Company still paying Pajitnov royalties to this day.
4Risk of Rain
More Bank than Ghor’s Tome
Risk of Rain 2
Risk of Rainis one of the biggest indie success stories, with two buddies and a composer forming Hopoo Games and being almost solely responsible for the first game, then revolutionizing an untapped genre with the second.
There was only one issue with Risk of Rain 2, though, and that was the lack of console versions, which is when Gearbox Software came in and offered to port the game to consoles, while Hopoo could work on the main PC version.
Only one issue with that, though. These console versions suck, are constantly buggy, inconsistent, laggy, and have dipping frames. No one liked them, yet they somehow agreed when Gearbox offered to buy the IP rights off Hopoo.
Gearbox continued to develop Risk of Rain 2 with Hopoo getting less involved overtime, and they createdone of the messiest updates ever made. Ironically, Hopoo has now disbanded, as everyone there now works for Valve, a way better triple-A studio.
3Rocket League
Hit Their Goal
Rocket League
Incredibly similar to how Fall Guys ended up,Rocket Leagueis an interesting story to tell. Psyonix started as an incredibly small company but grew to a reasonably large team as a studio that remained independent.
They achieved this growth, namely through a great partnership with Epic Games, which made one of theirUnreal Tournamentmods official. They also worked onGears of War, making enough money to buy some original titles.
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They found their footing with Rocket League, an incredibly fast-paced and unique competitive game in which cars with jet boosters hit soccer balls into goals. It was made by around 12 developers, and Epic, being best buddies with Psyonix, worked on buying them out.
In 2019, 4 years after the launch and incredible success of Rocket League, Epic successfully acquired the now pretty damn large studio.
And, of course, they removed Mac and Linux support and made the game free to play, among a bevy of other maligned changes.
2Crash Bandicoot
Surprisingly Small Mascot
Crash Bandicoot
You might know Naughty Dog currently as the studio behind massive big-budget titles likeThe Last of UsorUncharted, mainly because they haven’t done anything else in the last 18 years, but they started incredibly small.
They began with two dedicated devs and one rather flaky one, and quickly grew, starting work on a little game calledCrash Bandicoot, with only around 10 people on board for the project and 14 months of development time.
They showed it to Sony, where they decided to publish the game, and it seems they were so impressed with the 7 million copies the game sold that they decided to buy Naughty Dog out entirely.
This had them making the Jak and Daxter series, and in 2007, shifting work entirely to the Uncharted series, as Crash went from a PlayStation mascot to a Microsoft property nowadays, as funny as that sounds.
1Minecraft
From Dirt to Diamond
Likely the most infamous indie buyout ever,Minecraftstarted as a solo-dev project, with Markus “Notch” Persson heading it and quickly creating a studio called Mojang, which sought to develop Minecraft and very little else.
Minecraft got to massive levels of popularity, so much so that hosting a pay-to-win server would be incredibly profitable. But given that putting pay-to-win mechanics in servers targeted towards children is kinda awful, Notch was having none of it.
Notch had already quit developing the game in 2011, but was still the majority shareholder in Mojang. This meant when Microsoft offered him 2.5 billion dollars for it, he quickly accepted as he became disillusioned with the fanbase.
After a series of rather unsavory tweets - as it’s necessary for all billionaires to randomly become assholes - Mojang and Microsoft chose to heavily distance themselves from Notch. And now, for better or for worse,Minecraft is entirely different.
