“… So I am pretty down on people who take the sort of creative auteurs’ perspective. It’s like ‘Oh, we’re not being creative.’ But we’re creating value for people – that’s our job! It’s not to do something that nobody’s ever seen before. It’s to do something that people love so much they’re willing to give us money for.”“So I do get pretty down on people that – you see some of the indie developers that really take a snooty attitude about this. It’s almost as if it’s popular, it’s not good. And that’s just not true.”

Much like indie musicians, indie developers are happy to cop a hipster attitude about how cool and unique and misunderstood their products or their colleagues’ products are right up until the checks start rolling in. Then they’re only too happy to cash out. It’s easy to be smug when you’re poor, because that’s all you’ve got. But John Carmack is right – first and third person shooters will continue to evolve and be refined, because people love to play them and developers still need to innovate the genre.