Return of the Independent Game Developer?

chromatic writes "Several of the trends that make open source development possible are affecting other programming worlds. I've written an article about independent game development. Perhaps the gaming industry is ready for the craftsman-team approach."

Comments

Aiiiight

[unformed]

I'm gonna plug the Independent Game Developer's Association

Read the Game Postmortens

[dolphinuser]

One of the regular columns of Game Developers Magazine, is a feature called: "Game Postmorten". In this column, different game companies talked about their experiences writing some of their games.

You'll notice that more and more games are resembling big hollywood productions, with multi-year engaments, and dozens of contributors. This has come about because users expect photo-realistic graphics, and true-to-real physics engines. A small group of developers have little chance of having this resources at hand.

For an example, check the Postmorten for Dungeon Siege Here.

John

How is this different?

[Chris Canfield]

Interesting overview, but how is this different than the current state of things? You'll notice that the title screen of all major releases contain at least two different logos... the big-name publisher and the unknown independent developer. The last game that I worked on was released by one of the Big Three as a Star-line title, but was developed 500 miles away at a little development house on the beach.

Publishers currently handle the printing of the manuals, the stuffing of retail boxes, distribution, advertising, and money. According to the article on Garage Games, the Independents would still be outsourcing printing and stuffing. They gloss over the problem of distribution, but imply that the independent would be well served by their services. Advertising they claim is a pittiance, though that could be simply because it is executed so badly by the major distributers. And finally MONEY... The article implies that every independent can become an Ambrosia if they just aim at an underrepresented market, but this, quite frankly, is unrealistic. Despite what the article says, you cannot hire real artists, sound personnel, video editors, coders, and testers for six months for 5,000 dollars. That budget should be more like 200,000... and that would be a lean and mean 4 person crew. If you can convince everyone to work pro-bono and can find a spare pair of rooms in someone's house, that will offset most of the costs but will put the talent into an even worse position than they started out in.

The dream of relaiming IP from the publisher, as well as creative control, is an alluring one. But the fact is the publisher serves several vital roles in this industry, most of which are underappreciated by veterans who have had several great ideas and a lot of bad projects canned by the major houses. What climate has changed? What power shifted to the independents? Doesn't the lowered entry barriers into game development, as mentioned in the article, make publishers a relatively rarer and therefore more powerful entity?

-C