Status and Issue Analysis on Indie Game through Big Data Analysis

Abstract

Along with the explosive growth of the game-market size since the 1970s, the game scale has been continuously expanding, including the growth of online games, based on the development of hardware. In addition to the right function of having increased the market size of games, the so-called AAA game, into which large-scale capital and manpower is injected, also came to serve as the adverse effect that has brought uniformity to the game-play. On the other side of such a market, indie games developed by small-sized or single developers are gradually gaining attention and thus growing at present. In this study, through the big data analysis method based on the 'indie game' keywords from 2020 to 2022, we intended to extract the issues of the indie game industry intended and to investigate the current status on the game, related to the issues, and the future direction of indie games. As a result of the study, it could be found that the market expanded along with the distribution of indie game platforms in 2020 and that there was the phenomenon in 2021 that the support policies which could support the distribution of indie games were diffused. It could be also recognized that in 2022, thanks to the support policies based on various overseas platforms, the games are continuously being produced and attempting to advance to overseas markets at the same time and that the fostering policies are being enforced to revitalize the indie game industry.