The following was made with a budget of $5000 – a true Indie.

The film should be seen in its full quality glory directly on YouTube.

Indie Developer Positech Games is releasing an incredible game called “Gratuitous Space Battles“:

Positech developer Cliff Harris made big headlines on SlashDot when he wrote an open letter to pirates asking why would they steal from a small indie developer. He got some surprisingly frank answers and posted them on his blog. He took many responses to heart and made some changes to see how the pirate community would better receive and actually buy his product.

Unsurprisingly, many pirates didn’t.

After all that trouble, I certainly hope that he makes some gratuitous amounts of money with this beautiful game.

In my last post, I cited Blizzard as being “indie” because they have the independent spirit of not bowing down to anyone, preserving their integrity and doing things right – even going against the wishes of their fan-base and not releasing games they deem as mediocre.

Recently, Blizzard announced that modders could sell their maps on a service that they will launch with the new Battle.net 2.0 that is releasing with Starcraft 2.

At first blush, I thought that it was silly to let people release and sell yet another derivative version of “Big Game Hunters” on Battle.net until I saw what could be done with the game editor and scripting language:

My jaw hit the floor.  Starcraft 2 has just become a viable indie development platform and distribution service all-in-one.

If people thought that 2009 was the “Year of the Indie“, they haven’t even considered what we as Indies can do in 2010.