Globalization and Heterogeneity: Locating the Malaysian Indie Game Production Culture

This article examines how globalization has enabled the emergence of a heterogeneous game production environment within the nascent Malaysian videogame industry. In this context, heterogeneity refers to the quality or state of a game production environment that allows for dissimilar productions or production routes. To this end, I contrast three high-profile indie games representative of the Malaysian videogame industry, namely Re:Legend (Magnus Games, 2019 [early access]), No Straight Roads (Metronomik, 2020), and Bake ‘n Switch (Streamline Games, 2020). Specifically, I juxtapose these three titles—including their production histories, their game designs, and the corporate histories of their developers—to reveal how these factors have shaped their developmental pathways, highly distinctive from each other despite the shared Malaysian root of these games, against the backdrop of an increasingly interconnected globalized videogame workforce.