Games awards and the rise of the small developers

The annual BAFTA games awards were held earlier this month and one category in particular produced some surprising results.

While Playstation 5’s Returnal was the biggest winner of the event, the EE game of the year award, decided by a public vote, were Unpacking, a game about moving house, and It Takes Two, a co-operative multiplayer and original property game.

Indie games also did very well. The Artful Escape, a video game rock opera, won the award for artistic achievement, and the heartfelt adventure Chicory: A Colourful Tale won in the family category.

These results seem to bear out what Wired magazine has called a shake-up in the games industry. You can read the full article here https://www.wired.co.uk/article/games-industry-shakeup

In the magazine’s lengthy analysis, it seems that after two years of pandemic lockdowns, the Indie games industry is on the rise.

Indie tends to mean small budget, freelance developers and having creative control, being generally outside the corporate structure of the bigger games studios.

Since game developers are arguably creative artists as well as technically proficient it will be interesting to see whether what comes out from their ideas in the future will lead to more creativity and a bigger share of the games BAFTAs.