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Can Independent Game Developers Survive?
Zanthor writes "Online Gaming - Comments and News has an interesting interview with Scott Miller and Larry Dunlap (Imperial Wars) about their up-and-coming game. While the concept has been around since the old Play By Mail games, their web-based client and world-class art pose the question: Can a small start up group compete with the big name publishers for the Multi-Player money?" EA employs how many people?
Introversion ended up quite successful with their simple hacking sim "Uplink".
It's a fun little game that started out as the guy's pet project, but ended up taking off and has sold many many copies since.
Heck I ended up buying a few copies for Xmas presents this year, and most of my friends agreed it was quite enjoyable. Runs on both Windows and Linux.
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www.llamasof.co.uk.
jeff minter was ultra cool at the alternative partys btw.. he even threw a special version of gridrunner++ to everyone who were there(no not actual physical discs/medium but download..)!
anyways.. he hinted that something 'big' is coming on 23rd day.. and this is on-topic on can indep. survive...
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
I have been working for four years at an indie development shop (~5 employees). We make war games (www.ezgame.com). About half-way through the development of our first game, we found out that a big publisher was making a game with the same setting and general approach to gameplay as ours. We did finish our game (and eventually got published), but it was very difficult to compete. It is important that your game has features that are different than those found in mainstream games. If two companies are trying to implement a game with the same set of features the bigger budget is much more likely to win out.
One good thing about working at a small shop, though, is that your costs are much lower so you don't have to make nearly as much money to break even.
Small indie developers generally don't want to stay indie. Usually, you will try and make a prototype for a game, then land a publisher to fund the rest of development (which kind of takes you out of the 'indie' category). If you weren't able to find a publisher, that might be a bad sign for your game.
www.ezgame.com/SNH
True, but they had early successes that made them a ton of money. Back in the days of Wolfenstein 3D and Commander Keen, competition wasn't as brutal as it is today.
These days id can afford to only have 17 employees because they only release one game every two years and a half or so. Like Blizzard, they can afford to work on a game for as long as they need to because they've got this cash reserve from previous hits. There are very few companies who can afford that - most need to churn out a steady flow of games in order to survive. That usually means larger teams.
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