Why is 2D more popular among indie devs than 3D?

[Reactor]

Making music is also harder for 3D games. 2D games usually stick to the classic NES soundboard, MOD, MIDI, or various exotic formats, such as SID, XM, SPC and the likes. Your average free music makin' tool is more than enough to compose something for such engines, and even the more complex softwares (Anvil Studio for instance) are also easy to learn.

As for advanced and 3D games, the absolute minimal you'll need is Fruity Loops or Cubase. And of course, there are the heavyweight programs for the masochists: Reason, FL Studio.

[leileilol]

Additional dimensions don't change the demand for music. that's just ridiculously farfetched and carries a dangerous gamer-bred notion downplaying the efforts of talented musicians that happen to work on 2d games you don't like

[wildweasel]

Making music is also harder for 3D games. 2D games usually stick to the classic NES soundboard, MOD, MIDI, or various exotic formats, such as SID, XM, SPC and the likes. Your average free music makin' tool is more than enough to compose something for such engines, and even the more complex softwares (Anvil Studio for instance) are also easy to learn.

As for advanced and 3D games, the absolute minimal you'll need is Fruity Loops or Cubase. And of course, there are the heavyweight programs for the masochists: Reason, FL Studio.

For once I completely agree with leileilol here, you have a very, very twisted idea of what the difference is between a 2D game and a 3D game. For example, this song is from a 2D game, and this one is from a 3D game.

But I half expect you to reject these because they're from big-budget Japanese games. So this one is from a 2D indie game from within the last few years.

And by the way, the relative tech level of the software used to make the song has absolutely nothing to do with what the song sounds like. A talented composer could make something that sounds just as good on that ancient 80s home computer as it would on an advanced, complicated DAW. Yuzo Koshiro, for example, still finds reasons to boot up the NEC PC-88, like the Etrian Odyssey games, which were composed entirely on one.

[Nash]

Uhhhh lolwhat? That's like saying "making music for 3D CGI films is harder than making music for hand-drawn cartoon films". There's no correlation at all. Music is music.

[Rachael]

I feel like the original discussion has run its course, and this offshoot is, to say the very least, head-desking. For that reason, and before we have a lot more people ganging up to say "omg ur wrong and everyone else is right", I'm going to close this down.

@ Reactor: Take some time to do some research, before you make such broad and insane assumptions.