Since its inception in 2012, Digital Dragons has experienced impressive growth, increasing from 300 to 2,300 participants in 2025, coming from 53 countries. This conference, held annually in Krakow, stands out for its focus on creating a professional space for the video game industry, prioritizing the quality of content and networking among developers. An event that has allowed the Polish industry to grow One of the highlights of the event is the Indie Zone, a space dedicated to independent developers where they can showcase their work. This zone has become a place […]
Since its inception in 2012, Digital Dragons has experienced impressive growth, increasing from 300 to 2,300 participants in 2025, coming from 53 countries. This conference, held annually in Krakow, is distinguished by its focus on creating a professional space for the video game industry, prioritizing the quality of content and networking among developers.
An event that has allowed the Polish industry to grow
One of the highlights of the event is the Indie Zone, a space dedicated to independent developers where they can showcase their work. This zone has become a key place to foster creation and innovation in the sector, offering small and medium-sized enterprises the opportunity to capture the attention of the industry. Among the games presented were promising titles such as Deep Sleep: Labyrinth of the Forsaken and Bumpkin & Sprout.
The importance of the video game industry in Poland cannot be underestimated; it is considered one of the country’s main cultural exports. Since the fall of communism in 1991, Poland has been working to strengthen its identity as a nation of technology and creativity. The conference also served as a platform for young developers, with awards given to emerging studios that reflect the community’s commitment to supporting innovation.
A touching moment of the event was when 11 Bit, known for Frostpunk 2, donated their award to another winner, highlighting a strong spirit of solidarity and support among developers of different sizes. This gesture underscores the essence of Digital Dragons: a space where the developer community, whether large studios or indies, can celebrate their achievements and share experiences in a collaborative environment.
In a landscape of constant changes in the industry, Digital Dragons 2025 reaffirms its position as a stronghold for creativity and collaboration in video game development, indicating that, despite the challenges, the future for Polish video game culture is promising.
Xbox ends the year with controversy, and the culprit of such controversy is none other than the one responsible for most of the controversies of the year: AI and its use.
The point has come where if a company uses AI, they know exactly what they are doing. Generating images with AI when you know what the public thinks about it is bad. When you do it as a big company with more than enough resources to hire a human, it’s even worse. When you are a big tech company where one of its subsidiaries has created at least one AI and you are fully aware of the ethical and legal problems it entails, it’s time to consider things. And yet, Microsoft has done it without thinking twice.
To celebrate the end of the year and the games we have been playing, the ID@Xbox account decided to ask its followers what their favorite indie game of the year was. A candid and commendable question that has nothing wrong with it. But accompanying it was a corporate image with a more than suspicious style that many users quickly dissected and verified what it really was. It was generated by AI.
How could you know? Children controlling sleds with levers connected to nothing. Children fishing in the snow. A man playing with a laptop whose upper lip is replaced by teeth. Strings going nowhere everywhere. Small details that might make sense if it were a surrealist work, but we don’t believe it was the intention of any commercial illustrator to wish Merry Christmas on behalf of Xbox. Not when we know that those are the kind of things that AI does.
Of course, Microsoft has already deleted the image of shame. Furthermore, they have done so without responding to the controversy, wanting to let it die in irrelevance. But it is another demonstration of the misuse that can be made and is made of AI. Trying to replace the work of qualified professionals through an automated process without added value. Something that, in the case of Xbox, is particularly problematic as a company that works with technology and artists.
The world of indie video games is vast, but critics have sifted through to determine the best ones, and we bring you a list of them for you to enjoy.
It is undeniable that during 2023 an obscene amount of great games have been released. That’s why it has been impossible to keep up with everything. Even more so if we talk about such a complex space to navigate as the indie scene. That’s why we made this list. To tell you which are the best indies of the year, in our opinion, and the reasons why you shouldn’t miss them.
Indonesia is far away from us, but A Space for the Unbound does the impossible: it makes us feel like we have lived there in a rural area in the late 90s. With fabulous art, beautiful music, and a story that touches delicate themes with immeasurable grace, A Space for the Unbound is one of the games that has gone unnoticed the most and deserves all its accolades. A small masterpiece that proves that gems are made in every part of the world. Not only in Europe, the US, and Japan.
Cocoon
Jeppe Carlsen, designer of two authentic wonders like Limbo and Inside, decided to take his time to make his magnum opus. And it has been worth it. Cocoon is a delicate, intelligent and extremely polished work. Its puzzles may seem simple at first glance, but they hide multiple layers and extreme delicacy behind them. And like the other great puzzle games of this year, a narrative much deeper than it seems.
From Tetsuya Mizuguchi, creator of Rez and Tetris Effect, we expect nothing less than excellence. That’s why we weren’t surprised when Humanity offered us exactly that. Putting ourselves in the skin of a shiba-inu, we must guide humanity through its destiny, giving them directions on the ground so they know where to go. Easy to understand, not so easy to complete, and very difficult to fully conclude, it is a prodigy of puzzle design and, although it may not seem like it from the outside, one of the most heartfelt games of 2023.
Mediterranean Inferno
Visual novels have an unjustified bad reputation. Mediterranea Inferno proves it with an adventure about millennial anxiety, the consequences of confinement and the pandemic, and what it means to grow older in a society obsessed with youth. All with excessive imagery, heavily inspired by Dario Argento’s giallo, and LGBTQ+ culture. Do you need to be a millennial or gay to enjoy this game? No. Because even those who are not, will find something true resonating in the heart of Mediterranea Inferno.
Pizza Tower
Intense, complex, and for a very specific audience, Pizza Tower is the spiritual successor to Wario Land that we were all waiting for. As if a cartoon character were having an anxiety attack and decided to avoid it at all costs, everything in Pizza Tower is aggressive and hilarious. And at the same time, it is perfectly designed. An example of prodigious design and how a great game can be made that simply isn’t for everyone.
Although platform games are still being made, a certain type of games in this genre were only made for a very short period of time. For example, Super Mario 64-style games were only made for a few years. That’s why it’s amazing to see a game like Pseudoregalia, which rescues that kind of design and takes it to a level where we break it with combinations of insane jumps. A prodigy that no lover of the early 3D platformers should miss.
The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood
The latest game from the Spanish developers Deconstructeam is probably their best game to date. Playing as an exiled witch on an asteroid, we will have to predict the future of other witches using tarot cards that we design ourselves. All of this leads to a stunning story, accompanied by amazing art, writing, and music, which speaks to both the game and the player.
Void Stranger
What starts as a simple game of pushing boxes to reach the stairs and keep going down, soon becomes something more. The puzzles become stranger, the narrative becomes obscure, and everything we took for granted becomes complicated. Throw away all the expectations you had before playing Void Stranger. Do you like puzzle games? Then play this game without knowing anything else. You won’t regret it.
The anniversary edition of a cult game that once caused a sensation has been announced, promising many changes and new content.
Whenever an old game is re-edited, it’s good news. Preserving video games is something we shouldn’t take for granted, especially when the industry doesn’t always have its best interests in mind. But it’s particularly exciting when it also brings something new. Not a remake or a remaster, but the classic game with new content that sheds light on the game itself. Like the extras in movies when they come out in physical editions, something we rarely see in video games. Because that’s what Braid Anniversary Edition offers us.
Originally released in 2008 by Jonathan Blow, Braid is a puzzle platformer that allows us to manipulate time in unusual ways to rescue a princess who has been kidnapped. A deconstruction of classic fantasy stories, in addition to Super Mario itself, it was exceptionally well-received at the time, considered one of the first great indie games in history.
Now the game is set to receive a new version from Thekla. Called Braid Anniversary Edition, this edition of the game aims to offer a version as close to the original as possible while adding substantial enhancements. Among the promised features are improved sound, redrawn graphics, animations with extra frames, and the ability to switch between the old and new versions with the press of a single button. However, what has drawn the most attention is a 15-hour audio track where the game’s director, Jonathan Blow, along with various experts, discusses the game’s design and how it was developed.
Braid Anniversary Edition promises to be the best way to experience Braid today, but we still have to wait a bit to enjoy it. The game will be released on April 30, 2024, for PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series S, Xbox Series X, PC, iOS, and Android, via Netflix. A golden opportunity to discover or rediscover a video game classic.
The president of Capcom has said that video games are too cheap and the truth is that he is right; In this article we explain why.
The price of video games is a contentious issue that is rarely discussed in reconciliatory terms. They are a luxury product, but one with a value that has been extremely distorted by a series of questionable market decisions made over a decade and a half. That’s why every time an executive says that video game prices are too low, we react with surprise. But what if that were true?
All of this comes in the context of recent statements from Capcom’s president, Haruhiro Tsujimoto, who believes that the company’s video games are priced too low. He explains this by pointing out that the cost of development has grown exponentially, while the price of games has not followed suit, suggesting that increasing game prices would be a “healthy option” for the industry.
According to Tsujimoto, development costs are a hundred times higher than in the 80s, while software prices have hardly increased. And while it’s true that the recession is something to consider, he believes it’s not something that affects the industry, as demonstrated by the 2008 financial crisis.
Up to this point, it may seem like the discourse of someone completely disconnected from reality. However, he’s not saying anything that is untrue. Since 2004, the video game market, particularly on PC, has kept the base price of games practically unchanged. This means that prices have remained virtually the same for 20 years, even when there has been double-digit inflation that may well be approaching three digits rather than just one. This has recently changed for most AAA console games, increasing the price to 70-80 euros from the previous 60-70 euros, even though on PC, prices largely remain at 50-60 euros for base games.
How is it possible that these prices have remained until relatively recently? Essentially, it’s due to the constant influx of players. The increase in players over time has been exponential. Starting with the arrival of the PlayStation, but particularly with the PlayStation 2 and the complete democratization of the PC, the internet, and mobile phones, the number of players exploded. This allowed them to continue maintaining prices even as margins became increasingly marginal. They made less money, but they had more buyers.
That’s the problem. Big companies like Capcom, EA, Sony, Microsoft; they can afford to do this. But it creates a suffocating situation for small and medium-sized companies. A situation where it’s practically impossible to create games beyond a certain point without underselling your product.
Small companies, indies, have to sell their games well below their market value because between the prices set by big companies and constant sales, a too-high price would result in very few full-price sales. This makes the viability of a small studio entirely dependent on creating a game that sells in the six-figure range, something generally exclusive to large companies, or creating moderately successful games consistently, with none of them failing, to keep the company afloat.
In fact, this explains the near-complete disappearance of AA games, those medium-sized games leaning towards the larger side, and with it, the disappearance of medium-sized companies. As their production costs have increased but the perceived value remains the same, they must sell them well below their cost. Therefore, they must either be a resounding success or a failure that questions the viability of the company, essentially making it impossible to take such risks.
Is it better, then, to create a large game? Not necessarily. AAA games are so costly in terms of production and marketing that even at their price point, they need to sell millions to break even. The difference is that big companies could scale them down and create less expensive games, in line with the prices they charge, to balance the equation, instead of constantly scaling up, seeking an unsustainable limit — of people willing to pay whatever, of a constant influx of new players. Something they won’t do because that’s the ideological foundation of capitalism: the physically impossible perpetual growth.
That’s where the problem lies. Big companies keep scaling up, relying on an infinite market of potential new customers, creating an entirely unrealistic value scale. This makes medium-sized companies unsustainable, unable to compete, and forces small companies to devalue their product, forcing them to subsist to ridiculous levels or take insane risks that no one should take. Such as mortgaging their homes, betting that the game will be a resounding success, as many indie developers who have succeeded have done, and many more who have not and have ended up on the street, and we haven’t heard about them.
That’s why Haruhiro Tsujimoto is right. Games cost less than they should. Specifically, indie games, medium-sized games, cost less than they should. But not the big games from big companies. A new Resident Evil could simply scale down to fit a realistic value scale. 70, 80, or 90 euros for a video game is a lot of money. Raising it even further, as if people’s purchasing power were infinite, is a gamble they shouldn’t want to take.
Therefore, what’s healthy for the industry is not for AAA games to raise their prices. What’s healthy for the industry is for indie and medium-sized games to raise their prices, and for AAA games to become smaller and less grandiose. Have worse graphics. Be made by smaller studios. What’s healthy for the industry is for the difference between a blockbuster and an indie game not to be measured in numbers equivalent to the GDP of a medium-sized country. Because as long as it remains like this, no matter how much they raise or don’t raise the price of games from big companies, the industry will continue to be on the brink due to an economically unsustainable model.
