I race to crank down the volume, but it’s already too late. My teammate screams into his mic. “No! Don’t go down there!” We break into a run, darkened industrial corridors closing in around us, no flashlight to light our way.

And then the laughter begins.

As my teammate races ahead of me, we scramble to find the scrap we need to make company quota and avoid being ejected from the airlock keeping us alive. Yes, this is fun. For those unfamiliar, it’s de rigueur in Lethal Company, a standout year-end hit last year released by the gaming firm Zeekerss.

Mixing proximity chat, retro-arcade style graphics, and dynamic challenges at each ingame location, Lethal Company boasts an over 95% positive user rating on Steam. It’s a coup on a shoestring budget, trading high fidelity graphics for highly social co-op horror with a modern-classic theme: romp amidst eldritch horrors on the job for a faceless and merciless corporate overlord.

In 2024, indie games—projects made with smaller budgets or with crowdfunding and published outside the big three of Tencent, Sony, and Microsoft Gaming—are popping off. Even now, as a smaller, not so AAA game studio, Arrowhead Games makes out like a bandit with its overnight success with Helldivers 2. Gamers like myself are turning to boutique studios and developers to experience the future of the industry.

Unless you’re living in the woods, you’re probably aware that last decade has seen explosive growth across the whole of the games industry. From the near-ubiquitous availability of game engines like Unity to Steam Early Access, more and more individuals who have a passion for game design, narrative, and gameplay have tried their hands at building their world, their game, their homage to their inspiration. At the time of writing this, for example, the YouTuber Iron Pineapple, best known for his Dark Souls content, has made over 23 videos of what he calls “Steam Dumpster Diving”—playing, reviewing, and critiquing games in the Souls-like genre, all while highlighting indie games and student projects along the way.

The blowup comes against the paradoxical backdrop of a rough year of studio layoffs. According to PC Gamer, 15,000 employees were laid off industry-wide between January 2023 and January of this year. Countless games and projects were scrapped, with Activision-Blizzard seeing the cancellation of a survival game that had been in the works for the past six years. The layoffs over the course of the last year, not just in the gaming industry but throughout the large tech firms, give the indication that a bubble is either slowly deflating or just beginning to pop.

In the midst of the layoffs, certain consumers might feel a sense of schadenfreude. The AAA Games Industry has had some notorious stinkers these last several years – from Bethesda Games Studios’ disastrous launch of Fallout 76 to Starfield’s failure to match the Steam player count of Skyrim: Special Edition. Or perhaps the culture war flare-ups of “millennial writing” with games like Forespoken—or a deliberate decision to have Joel, the beloved patriarch in The Last of Us, brutally murdered by a musclebound female character giving transgender vibes. GamerGate has certainly left a long shadow on gaming, which still remains ground zero for the Culture War.

Pixelated Nostalgia

This isn’t to say that the state of gaming is all bad. That’s where those indie titles, developers, and modders come in. The success of Crowbar Collective’s Black Mesa has given an updated and high-fidelity twist to Valve’s breakout 1998 title Half-Life. Various modders have breathed new life into classic games as well, as Steam Workshop Support for Mods has given dozens of new campaigns, remixes, and game variants for players of Halo: Combat Evolved, which came out in 2001. At the same time, a popular genre of retro-shooters (sometimes called boomer shooters) has been released as well over the last several years, giving one the feeling that they’re playing something that could have come out during the time of Quake or Doom in the late 1990s. Games like Dusk, Hrot, and Ultrakill have taken inspiration from the early days of gaming to create stories and games that take advantage of modern technology and marketing. Indie developers and modders have used their own projects and talents to either grow their own companies or join larger ones. One technical advisor on the fan-mod Fallout: London accepted a role at Bethesda Softworks in 2022.

New studios and projects are also born out of dissatisfaction or desire to focus on projects that designers just can’t get done at their current jobs. Some of these sagas reach back decades. John Romero, famous for Doom and infamous for Daikatana, founded Ion Storm in 1996 after leaving id Software.

While the studio would eventually die off, its most hailed project would emerge from Warren Spector and Deus Ex. Amid round after round of layoffs, splits in management, and DEI entrenchment—both inside and outside the gaming industry—the recently laid off and the inveterately creative have a golden opportunity to make their own games, projects, and even studios. Their experience, as well as that of players who have grown up on video games, tells us that the indie gaming scene will be the place to keep a close eye on for future hit releases.

GamerGate has certainly left a long shadow on gaming, which still remains ground zero for the Culture War.

The provenance of Lethal Company itself tells the tale. Zeekerss isn’t even a team of designers. It’s one dude. The 21-year-old got his start making minigames on the kid-dominated Roblox platform Roblox. As people look for their entertainment outside the bigger corporate conglomerates, I can’t help but picture waves of pixelated wagon trains following the ancient call to go west.

The Prudentialist is an essayist, YouTuber, cultural commentator, and contributor to The Old Glory Club. He can be found most often on X @MrPrudentialist, or singing in his Orthodox Church Choir.