ShareThis
Yesterday was Day of the Devs, a large gathering of independent game developers who put together an exhibition of their upcoming games and projects for people to come and sample. More than 60 games were on display at The Midway in San Francisco yesterday, with throngs of attendees flooding the halls. This was my second time attending the show, and I found myself quite enamored with a number of different projects.
It’s remarkable how, in today’s development landscape, the line between AAA productions and indie projects has become more blurred than ever. Powerful tools like Unreal Engine and Unity, which can be downloaded for free, allow anyone with a powerful enough computer to run the programs to produce games utilizing the exact same tools that major companies like Square Enix and even Nintendo harness for their own software. This is a far cry from the days of hobbyist devs producing software line by line in code.
Nintendojo was at Day of the Devs 2025—what was your favorite game that you got to try out? pic.twitter.com/CXdwAVBgIq
— Nintendojo (@Nintendojo) March 17, 2025
The result is projects that look nearly as polished as the ones coming from the premier game houses in the industry. At Day of the Devs, the games on show were coming from solo devs and small teams, yet the quality would have you thinking that bigger teams were responsible for their creation. At the same time, there’s also a more experimental quality to the games at Day of the Devs than the bulk of what comes out of the mainstream industry.
The quirky, even weird nature of many of the projects I saw would likely never find a home at the bigger companies, especially these days. The market has become too glutted with annual releases like Call of Duty, and formulaic sequels that rarely, if ever, manage to do anything innovative, groundbreaking, or memorable. It’s the indie scene where developers with vision can go to escape corporate shackles and take risks that would otherwise not be allowed.
Yesterday, Day of the Devs was a nice reminder of how much still remains to be tapped in terms of possibilities when it comes to video games. While I of course have a fondness for the shooters and sports titles and battle royales that are so prevalent in the industry, it’s the stuff at Day of the Devs that really gets my gears turning. Whether it’s unique combo-focused (yes, really) farming games like Super Farming Boy, street-level surrealism like the action-platformer Star Fetchers, or the mix of SRPG combat and school drama in Demonschool, the types of experiences I had during Day of the Devs were the sort of thing that reminds me of the projects my game design students come up with every year. It’s something the industry needs as much as the big AAA hits, and I hope that Double Fine Productions and iam8bit continue to maintain this event and help offer exposure to up-and-coming talents.
