The State of NYC Indie [First Post]

First post of the new blog...

I first met all of my fellow panelists nine years ago, when I was a freshman in college. It’s an incredible honor to now share the stage with them as peers. These are people who shaped the landscape I came up in and who showed me what community could look like in games. Being part of this conversation feels less like a professional milestone.

The truth is, things haven’t felt quite the same in NYC since the pandemic. The momentum we once had-- monthly meetups, spontaneous collaborations, packed basements and scrappy showcases-- was deeply disrupted, and things still haven’t fully recovered. Some of it is gone. Some of it’s scattered. A lot of us are still figuring out what rebuilding could even look like. EGD was born out of values of mutual support and collective growth. I’ve never really been interested in competing with anyone for the sake of it. But I am willing to challenge systems and institutions when they create barriers to access or harm the communities I care about. Waffle Games, for example, wasn’t just a fun idea-- it was a direct response to borderline exploitative exhibitor pricing that made it nearly impossible for small studios, students, and first-time developers to be seen. In that case, I wasn’t just building an alternative; I was building resistance. Corporate greed lost in the long run... though I doubt they’d call it a loss. Profit was always the goal, not longevity. Meanwhile, I'm still here, because breaking even is fine with me.

Building for others means you don’t build with an exit strategy in mind. Communities aren’t something you “cash out” of. But when corporations run community programs, sustainability is only measured in dollars-- not in impact, not in relationships, not in care. The community isn’t the priority, the bottom line is. That’s why EGD was intentionally structured as a nonprofit. We’ve seen time and again that corporate-backed initiatives will disappear the moment they’re no longer “worth it.” That’s not surprising, that’s what corporations do. And that’s fundamentally incompatible with the kind of long-term, people-first work that real communities need to thrive. I think this reset can give us a chance to rebuild in a more collaborative way. We have a chance to be honest about what was broken and what we might build differently this time. I don’t think we’ll answer everything in 90 minutes, but I hope this conversation opens the door for more dialogue.