Wikia

Forums (along with blogs and IRC) are a big part of the indie game community, and together those three are its main methods of communication. Currently the main forums exclusively dedicated to indie games are the TIGforums and the Indiegamer.com forums, but there are many others that deal with specific game making tools (such as Game Maker forums or O.H.R.RPG.C.E. forums, specific indie game companies (such as the Amarantia forums or the Introversion forums, or even specific indie games, such as the Dwarf Fortress forums or the Battle for Wesnoth forums.

History of indie game forumsEdit

Historically, the forums for a particular indie game or a particular game engine are larger and more diverse than forums about indie games in general. The oldest forum specifically dedicated to independent games (at least after they began to call themselves independent games) were the Dexterity forums, headed by Steve Pavlina. These started up around 2002, and eventually became the Indiegamer.com forums after Pavlina left the game development business to become a self-help guru. However, valuable archives of these forums still exist: http://www.indiegamer.com/archives/index.html

The TIGSource forums began relatively late, 2007, two years after the blog itself, but have quickly become the largest forums specifically about indie games. There was also a short-lived attempt by TimW of Indygamer (not to be confused with Indiegamer) to create forums, but those were never as popular as the TIGSource forums and quickly died out.

Besides these, the history of indie game forums is usually the history of the forums particular game making tool engines. ZZT forums are probably the oldest, followed by Klik & Play forums, RPGMaker forums, and O.H.R.RPG.C.E. forums.