Rampant Games - What Does “Release” Mean?

The Rampant Coyote has a new post on blog that asks,"What Does “Release” Mean Anymore?" I find myself wondering the same thing nowadays.

I used to be able to keep up with what I thought was a sizable chunk of at least what I considered “major” indie RPG releases in a year. Major meaning … like, not something a kid wrote in a week of owning RPG Maker and “released” via link on some forum post somewhere. Now I’d estimate five times as many releases on just the PC alone as there were five years ago. I could focus all my efforts just keeping track of them all (a task which, thankfully, Craig Stern seems happy to attempt over at IndieRPGs.com).

As 2013 came to an end, I briefly attempted to reconstruct – with some searching – a partial list of games that:

1) Count as an indie release,
2) Count as a role-playing game, and
3) Were released in 2013.

In the words of Doc Emmett Brown dealing with his own comprehension of events occurring in a given timeline, “Great Scott!”