Comment by atomicnumber3

They're also probably more used to the development process. With proprietary software, if you don't pay for a support contract, you basically can't submit a bug report - not really. You just ignore the bug and hope it's fixed in later versions.

This applies to big AAA games too, so games aren't necessarily special.

But indie games are in a weird spot where:

1. They're clearly artists. Nobody who want to make tons of cash becomes an indie game developer. If you have the aptitude to grind through the docs and make a game, you have the aptitude to grind leetcode and get a comfortable job somewhere that pays benefits and cash. And since they're artists, and they're making games, people empathize deeply with them.

2. They get a bit of a pass on the whole free software zealotry thing. I'm sure some people are still hard-line about it, but like, if I had to rank software in terms of freedom-threat-if-proprietary, something like Office or a compiler and towards the top, and Valheim is rather closer to the bottom.

3. They really have to listen to their players to survive, so they end up operating a lot more in the open.

So they end up looking a lot more like an Open/Free project than you would expect.