NOTICE: All our homebrews are not ~real~ games

[whicker]

Looks like whoever's marketing strategy worked.
Would not have heard about this game if not for the "edginess", pardon the 90's term.

Good discussion tho.

[Jedi QuestMaster]

Or, if it LESS bad to hack an unlicensed game that was an illegal clone of a real licensed game. Like, I can't think of an example. Never mind.

Aladdin? Also, this game has been hacked: http://www.romhacking.net/hacks/2181/, http://www.romhacking.net/hacks/2107/

[GradualGames]

It didn't help, but the situation was already I think unrecoverable. The word homebrew is used in an extremely broad fashion in numerous contexts. I've seen people apply it to:

• Hacks
  Reproductions
  Original games
  Fan games on PC

And sometimes people use the word "homebrew" right alongside: "hack" as though it is almost synonymous. There's an air of illegitimacy, underground, or illegality when it is used. Most of the folks using the term are not technical. Some of them may have unspoken assumptions that ANY new game from an old console is necessarily a hack. Or homebrew. Or something. They don't know, they haven't spent more than a few seconds total of actual thought about the meanings of the words because they flat out don't care. Retro game fans just play the games and echo the words others used, and unfortunately the word homebrew, with the exception of the development community, is irrevocably tainted.

So in a way I don't necessarily blame folks for wanting to distance themselves from the word. Any original homebrew is also an indie game, so might as well call it an indie game, to help clarify for the masses it is a labor of love somebody spent years making, often with a professional mindset.

[nesrocks]

They could've called it officebrew(ed).

[tepples]

Ultimately, this is a definition debate. This is to be expected, as one way of stating Layne's Law of Debate is that every substantial debate goes through at least some phase as a definition debate. To resolve it, we need to suggest definitions and figure out which are most useful.

The proposed term "officebrew" would appear to describe one of the four situations that make up the Cartesian product of full- or part-time and age of platform.

• Original indie game on modern platform developed by part-timers: "indie game on Itch"
• Original indie game on modern platform developed by full-timers: "indie game on Steam"
• Original indie game on old platform developed by part-timers: "homebrew"?
• Original indie game on old platform developed by full-timers: "officebrew"?

I use "part-timers" here to reflect the criteria for inclusion on BootlegGames Wiki, which exclude games that are "made as a hobby and usually don't have a full-time development team behind them."

An "old platform" could mean either one no longer supported by its manufacturer or operating system publisher or a hardware platform whose patents have expired (which means 20 years).

As for the term "indie": User "ceoyoyo" on Slashdot argues that it means funded without access to venture capital.