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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?
and not by how big you are.
Remember Richard Garriot AKA Lord British? He used to sell his Akalabeth game with a plastic baggie and Xeroxed manuals. If the game is good enough, someone will buy it, no matter how bad the presentation.
My postings are informational and does not constitute legal advice. Act on it at your risk.
but the OS X market is virgin enough for the picking.
You have tons of users to a relatively new OS missing featured and games from before while unwilling to leave the new features. Make games for them if you need money, but don't quit your dayjob first.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
In some respects, indie developers can have a better chance as startups, since in theory their overhead is lower. The games industry is a lot like the movie industry, in that the big budget titles, even if they're very popular, can often end up not making a lot of money.
Of course, there's always the need to define 'indie,' a problem that applies to games as much as music or movies. Just being small doesn't make you independent; if you've got a relationship with a publisher or larger company, that makes a big difference, even if your company/studio is only a handful of people.
Whether a truly 'indie' developer can survive depends a lot on the market they're going after. If they're doing a niche product, especially something a little retro, they've got a chance to make it on the quality of their product (or sometimes even lack of competition, although that's rare). If they embrace an alternative business model instead of vainly trying to get shelf space, they've got a shot. If, on the other hand, they want to actually compete with major developers and big publishers, they rarely stand much of a chance.
At least that's what I've seen. There are exceptions. There are a lot of ways to approach the games industry, for those with the will to do so.
Bushi
The problem for independent game developers comes down to this: game creation is a massively labor intensive process, requiring more cash than most can acquire. Worse, many game developers are young and inexperienced making schedules and budgets neigh-impossible to control. When small start-ups begin to hiccup on the development, the end usually isn't far off.
My guess is if Imperial Wars is to last, it'll be picked up by a major publisher. It's interesting to note, the entertainment software market is narrowing down to 2 main publishers, EA and Microsoft, making the market less friendly towards independents hoping for publishing deals.
Independent Game Developers are developers of softwares.
And the term "softwares" does include things like MOVIES, MUSIC, WEB CONTENTS, ONLINE BOOKS, and, yes, computer softwares.
We all know how powerful is the Hollywood behemoths, right ?
But if we pay enough attention, we will see that there are still a large group of movie producers who prefer to work OUTSIDE of Hollywood's control and/or influences.
They are known as "independents".
Yes, the game industry is very competitive right now. The lifespans of game titles are in usually weeks, not months or years, like it used to.
But hey, in the world of movies, lifespan are in weeks too, and there is no lack of independent producers/directors keep churning out movies according to their own liking.
Yep, most of the products suck. But once in a while, we do have some real gems.
As the world of the movies never count out the "indies", we, in the software world shouldn't count out our own "indies" too.
It's the indies who work in garages or basements who often come out with ingenious notion of how things are done.
In the gaming world, we have largely two genre of games - Shoot-em-ups and race-and-flips.
Well
And perhaps this time, it'd be the indies who'd come up with it.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
I'm surprised that no one here has mentioned some biggy indie developments. Granted, they are not necessarily full-fledged games within and of themselves, but the modding community does have the ability to crank out some great games, including the ability to make and/or break a game.
... that's just the way our current (crappy) system is set up.
For instance, Half-Life. OK, it's a great game, good storyline, sold pretty decently. Then comes the Counter-Strike mod for it (created by an indie developer). Suddenly H/L explodes, and is still selling thousands of copies per year (don't forget that it came out many many years ago). From here, the CS team has since been "merged" into VALVe Software, and a new game (Counter-Strike: Condition Zero) is the result.
Other great examples of this are the original Team Fortress for QuakeWorld and Action Quake for both Quake I and Quake II. (Action Quake actually partially inspired Counter-Strike).
Independent developers are rampant in the RPG and War Simulation genres. Simple Google searches can reveal a surprising amount of good games out there, including ones that are sold on a per-download basis (thus eliminating the publisher altogether). Granted, they may not be making a tremendous amount of money, but almost no indie in any form of entertainment will make a lot of money
For a more corporate aspect, I would recommend taking a look at GoD Games, which started out as a collection of developers joining together to form their own publishing group. (Publishing is where the actual game is made/broken. If you don't have a publisher, your game, however good it is, will not go very far) It's since been phenomenally successful.
I see no reason that indie developers can't stay together and functioning in the big world of mega-hits like EA's (well, Maxis') The Sims. The form of entertainment is simply too broad for the big wheels to cover everything.
topreacher@signature.slashdot.org 1% rm -rf sig
Note the year. Yes, it's 2003. Games have become a lot more complex than they were in 1980. In 2003 game production is an extremely costly process, not unlike movie production. You need a whole team of programmers and artists, not to mention sales, marketing, distribution, and who knows what else. To say that an independent developer can compete on this level is simply insane.
A lot of independant game developers survive just fine. Depending on the game style you work with, a single person can do all the work - surviving then is a lot easier than a 40 person team. Most of my games have been single player puzzle games *. I have a day job, and do my game programming at night - it's trivial for my game company to 'survive' in that environment.
But when you get into monsters that require a team like Trajectory Zone (under development - have some sample screen shots), then things change a lot. As a single person development team, it's easy to make all the choices, do the job, and not have to worry as much about timelines, depending on someone getting thier job done (or, just as important - you getting your job done on time.) And that's just doing it 'part-time' - IE, keeping a day job, and working on games at night. Try and do it full time, and it gets even more complicated - where's the next infusion of cash come from? Or more importantly, where's lunch come from?
That's not to say it's so complicated that people aren't doing it as Indies - they are. Heck, after Trajectory Zone ships, I'll finally move to full time game development instead of part-part time. (Funny words actually - "part-time" doesn't describe living, breathing, eating, and dreaming game development in all your "spare time.")
I always like readin' about games like Imperial Wars - nice to see someone doing' it. When I spoke at Indie Games Con 2002 my co-speaker was a full time Indie developer. Really cool to spend some time talkin' to someone who was doin' it full time, and find out how they managed to pull of what they have done so far. David Michael wasn't the only person there doing it full time, of course - there were others too, and talkin' to them ended up giving me a lot of insight. If you are really seriously interested in Indie game development, hit the next Indie Game Con - there's a lot to be learned there.
Oh, and for those interested - here's a transcript of the speach. It's got a lot of interesting stuff in it - oddly enough, the title of the speach is "Can I Make Money As An Indie Game Developer?" - very appropriate to this particular /. thread :-)
Another place to go look around at when it comes to Indie Game Development - Garage Games lots of people there working towards Indie game releases at the moment, and some people who have already completed thier current projects and moving to the next game. Look in the business section and the general sections for some really good discussion on the subject (note - just like anywhere else, gotta sift a bit to find the good stuff from the crud.)
(*Yes, some shameless self-promotion there. Sorry, it's totally nessisary :-)
Davis Ray Sickmon, Jr - looking for something to read? Check out my three free novels at MidnightRyder.org