If you have been around for a while, you may remember this article. It was written in 2000, right about when games were getting to be really big business, but long after the age of shareware, and long before the indie explosion (which I would put at starting around 2008 or so). It is basically a screed against the state of the emerging AAA industry, much of which is still true if not even worse, and a call for smaller teams making cheaper, smaller games.
The term scratchware never caught on, but I think a lot of modern indie and hobbyist works fit into it. On the other hand, some of what we call indie projects are now as bloated and expensive as the AAA projects of twenty years ago.
The central summation is this:
The phrase scratchware game essentially means a computer game, created by a microteam, with pro quality art, game design, programming and sound to be sold at paperback book store prices. A scratchware game can be played by virtually anyone who can reach a keyboard and read. Scratchware games are brief (possibly fifteen minutes to an hour or so), extremely replayable, satisfying, challenging, and entertaining.
I think this is a little too confining, but it was written 23 years ago, when games were almost solely distributed at retail. A broader definition would be more suitable for the digital distribution era.
The underground games manifesto reminded me of scratchware. How do you think the two compare? What ideas do you agree with and disagree with?
Good find! The Home of the Underdogs is a great resource :).
Its noteworthy that there are different voices within the Scratchware Manifesto. Some of the claims they make ("We want to play good games, and we want making games to be an art, not an electronic sweatshop. This problem, also not unique to the gaming industry, is as old as Das Kapital and as new as The Matrix.", the critique of damages to people and environment through exploitation, and the maiming influence of market-streamlining are the major ones I did notice) are fully compatible with Underground Gaming.
The major difference is that they seem(ed) to believe that through some improvements (mainly the avoidance of publishers and big companies, who they call "vampires") the capitalist system could not only be improved but also work in their favor (see their claims about small productions that landed big hits or their citation of "Lord British" and some others), whereas Underground Gaming sees these problems as inherent to the capitalist system - it doesn't aim to create another B or C-market but to establish a parallel working society that tries to discard the basic rules of capitalism (even if only within a limited space for now, but adding to the "large picture" within our possible means by doing so). It doesn't assume that competition creates better art, even if the consolidation of power within the competition would be removed.
Seeing that the people who signed the Scratchware Manifesto were seemingly professionals working within the industry it is understandable that their aims and direction are less ideologic and more directed toward allowing them to make a practical living from their doing in the long run. This is another big difference to Underground Gaming, that is much more directed to be a hobbyist movement.
I don't want to pan them, as it is always easier to be the clever one afterwards: But imho their idea proved to not work out. "Indie"-Gaming, "Social"-Media and the Internet in general opened up channels to avoid the publishers and big conglomerates, but the structures that they criticized where mostly just replicated in a weakened form as the rules of the market still apply (you already pointed this out in the OP).
Hope all of this is comprehensible - when it comes to questions of political theory, I sometimes suffer more from my language barrier.
Something that frustrates me about the discussions around indie game development, both in the community and in published articles, is that a lot of it focuses on money and marketing and on development primarily as a business venture. If you just search for "indie game cost", the first results will ludicrously tell you to expect to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars making one. The games media in general is guilty of conflating "indie" with "professional," partly because articles about glossy, pretty games get the most attention from readers, but also because games that have 800 square foot booths at PAX take a lot less effort to find and cover than obscure freeware on Itch. It's basically in their interest to push hobbyists out of the conversation, unless it's some viral streaming hit that they can similarly exploit.
It is upsetting to see so many stories of people quitting their jobs and living off of their savings to develop and release a game, hoping to be able to make it into their new full-time job. I sympathize with the people who don't make it, but I don't think it's a wise decision. Designer R implicitly cautions against doing this ("They are made at night, on weekends, during vacations or whenever one can... in essence, it costs little or nothing to make a scratchware game"), though Designer X might be romanticizing subsistence living a little too much.
The scratchware folks didn't really seem sure how their work could be distributed; maybe they were hoping to sell it in ziploc bags in local bookstores, like some of the very early pioneers did. I think though that they definitely did not foresee indie games exploding as much as they have. There are literally hundreds of thousands of them, of varying quality and states of completion, and the underground manifesto points out that this is a huge problem for discoverability. The scratchware people wanted to sell their work as an alternative to AAA productions, but they were not anticipating nearly infinite competition in their space. Indie developers still ironically rely on the loudest media voices to make themselves visible, whether that be streamers, the traditional gaming press, or even just favorable storefront placement. The people with the biggest platforms still have a lot of power to dictate other peoples' success, and they use that power to further grow their own platforms, not spotlight deserving creative works. If they didn't prioritize expanding their own brand over everything else, they wouldn't have large platforms to begin with.
I get it; if you make a game, you want people to play it. And I don't begrudge people wanting to make a little bit of money from their thousands of hours of hard work, any more than I begrudge people selling handmade jewelry on Etsy. But most of us will never be lucky enough to make a living solely from our personal art, and even established professional independent studios are often only one failed release away from shutting down. I think it is a mistake to go into this hobby (or really any hobby) with a primarily commercial mindset.
Yeah, it is frustrating. I remember a thread where small "Indie"-Devs shared the losses they produced, some where deep in the red. Sometimes I found people who lived on the cost of their partners or family to go into game development. Its indeed not a wise thing to do, but there is a whole industry (book authors, marketing people, asset sellers and especially those who run the asset market places) that prey onto people who try to realize the dream of living from game development.
At least some of the scratchware guys seems to had internet distribution in mind - and while they couldn't foresee the "Indiepocalypse", it would have been possible to foresee that the problem roots deeper. But thats spilled milk. It is - in every case - true that Indie devs rely on the powerful players within the curation segment to gain visibility. It might be noteworthy to point out that the amateurs in this segment suffer from the same problem - amateur streamers, bloggers, reviewers can hardly get any audience, they are also cut out from visibility. It would be great to get some of those who are into this but don't aim to go commercial on board.
About the last paragraph: You are right, if you want to make money making indie games is a bad idea. When I ways younger, I occasionally made some bucks with street music - my average wage per hour easily outweighs the money I made with my online game and music projects combined (I'm defacto slightly in the red here: Paying for Steam and Server costs is easily more than my revenue - not that I regret it). Going in a direction that would be commercially rewarding (might work, might not work) isn't interesting to me: I want to be a game dev, not a entrepreneur - and I'm quite sure many others feel the same way.
I hope that we can establish a place or places where people play the games other people made without the commercial mindset - even through the road seems to there is surely rocky.