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Can Game Developer Unrest Lead to Revolution?
Bakajin writes "Greg Costikyan's blog article A Specter is Haunting Gaming speaks in coarse language about "despair" in the independent game developing community. He says that despite the fact that no Independent Game Festival title "has ever gone on to major publication and success... 10,000 geeks... would just love to do what the IGF guys are doing... work on something you believe in, not churn out the next big-budget piece of crap." I can't help but read that and think that it represents a huge opportunity for a new game machine that lowers the bar for entry and has a unique revenue model. However, is the story of Indrema a prophesy? Is Infinium just vapor? Is there any other solution?"
Despite the hype, there are an increasing number of "Garage Games" out there.
A good example is the recently beta-turned-gold "A Tale in the Desert". Its a non-combat online 'builder and skill' team-based egypt sim. No charge for the program itself. Free download, Free trial pay-to-play game.
Without even bothering with a retail presence, new games exist out there. I tend to keep an eye on http://www.betawatcher.com/
Seen it, played it, enjoyed it even. Yes, Iremember RuneQuest and Glorantha fondly. The game was kinda cool, BUT it had about as much chance of breaking into the big time as a comic book based on Glorantha.
Thier are numerious games being developed by small or independent developers, that self sell. Look in the area of stategy turn-based war games and text adventures for alot of them.
As alot of big name game are actually produced by small independant companies, they just use a big name company for production and distribution. For example look at Galactic Civilizations,Black and White, or Rise of Nations all developed by small companies.
The one thing I would agree with is the lack of new/original things, but that happens in everything. People are going to write stuff that they think will sell, good luck trying to find a murder/mystery written totally in poetry form.
In addition once you get big name enough to do what you want, you are generally going to write software in the same. The origins of The Sims, mentioned as original, can be seen if you look back at previous Will Wright games. What would be original is if Will Wright came out with a FPS shooter based in his genre of games.
There's plenty of 1st class stuff from independent companies. Steel Beasts and Combat mission come to mind. Also Space Empires IV. Latter is under Shrapnel games which imo is not a very good distributor at all. They want all of the pie, period. That means if a local chain wants to buy a few dozen copies.. No way, José!
What these things have in common is a good core game that lacks some polish. Eye candy plus retail availability tends to kick in with the sequel when the guys have some . Unfortunately most of the game magazines are very crappy.. About as good journalism as Ziff-Davis is known for. They'll give half a page max for superb game such as Arx Fatalis but run 8-page hype/preview about unreal II. Which turned out to be rather ho-hum experience.
Fortunately for us Finns, the local "Pelit" magazine is rather classy. Almost no hype articles, no exclusive reviews with pre-written script, not afraid to call a spade a spade. I understand the US edition of PC Gamer was their original role model way back when. Anyone heard of a semi-decent games mag in UK?
Making for a console is a whole different ballgame of course, since they're essentially completely proprietary embedded systems (yes, I'm counting the PC-like Xbox here).
This isn't entirely true. The Sega Dreamcast has a great homebrew community around it, mainly because the DC doesn't require a modchip to run non-Sega code. All it take is a binary burned to CD-R. Of course, the homebrew games aren't quite up to the standards of professional efforts, but the open-source KOS toolkit is getting better everyday.
As for the Xbox, all you really need is a $75 modchip, since it's just x86. And the Linux kit for the PS2 has opened doors for homebrew development on that platform.
The only system you're really SOL on is the GameCube. But I'm sure someone will find a way around its protection, too.
Quality or Quantity, don't tell me they're the same.
Look at what has happened to Serious Sam, what was an independant's development, has now moved into the realm of the big budget, proven product, follow-up.
My brother has been working on the sequel for months now, there are still many months to go, and he is just a part of the whole machine, there are several people who have been working all those months on just the artwork for the next edition, who knows how many people have been working on the project in total? (OK, the producers probably do). That certainly was not the case for the first game in the series.
Which all goes to prove your point about the maturation of the industry. lets face it, if you had to bankroll 20 artists/developers/directors/producers/whatever for 18 months - 2 years, then pay for the product advertising, you would want to be pretty certain that the money wuold be comming back in the end.
The industry certainly isn't fscked, it has just moved from the bedroom to the boardroom.
If people still bought games like 'Elite', it would still be possible to have two guys in a bedroom making the games. But consumers these days have sophisticated tastes, that require a team of artists to produce a look and feel, people to do level design, people to write graphics engines, and physics models, designers to do the design, testers to test, etc., etc. And the consumers expect more the next time, so the next job requires more effort, or the reviews are bad and the game does not sell and the MD has to sell his Ferrari
I'm not knocking the idea, I'm sure it is possible to do something like this out in the world of open source, I know there are people already out there developing platforms and engines for this kind of stuff, I guess we need more members of the Free Art Federation and the Free Level Designers Federation and so on.
If nature abhors a vacuum, why isn't there more dust in the world?
BlitzBasic has some great game dev tools specifically made for manipulating 2D/3D graphics on the screen. It is essentially a full-blown language with elements borrowed from both basic and C. Very easy to learn/use. You can do in a few lines what would take hundreds or thousands of lines in other languages. Plus, there is already a wide user base that you can get help and tips from.
Technoli
Indrema suffered from the same dotcom failures that many other companies at the time did. I can't find a timeline on the company at the moment, so I can't make specifics, but they advanced with thier project with the assumption that it was going to require a large sum of cash to just get it out the door, with the expectation that they would recover it later. This is great if you already have the product and just need the money to produce it, but it's another thing entirely when you're in uncharted territory with no idea of your market, no idea of your R&D costs, and no idea about how long it's going to take. And I'm not saying that the Indrema developers didn't have an idea about these things, but they clearly hadn't thought it out sufficiently.
Most successful businesses rely on the initial partners putting in lots of 8 hour nights working for nothing but sweat equity for upwards of years before they have a product that has a decent chance in the market. The dot com era got people spoiled to the idea that they could do all this initial R&D while getting paid $150,000 a year, because VC's were willing to live off the hype. The point is, its unrealistic, and it didn't last.
An open source gaming console isn't a stretch. It's just a matter of what dedicated people are willing to put into getting it out the door. At the minimum, it requires the following:
- A custom hardware platform. Even if it is based on x86 hardware, you'll need a design that gives a performance and cost advantage to a console system, otherwise people could just buy a PC, defeating the whole purpose of the console. Even the X-Box, mostly a standard PC stuffed in a tiny box, has shared memory pipelines and other features that give it an advantage over comperable computers at the same speed and cost. Sony develops their hardware from scratch, and gains a cost advantage as a result, but the R&D involved in doing that is out of the ballpark of any smaller companies.
- Games designed for the platform. Assuming it's not just a standard PC in a box, you'll need games. Some might get by with a recompile, but for the most part, you're going to need others to invest their time and effort with the hopes that you're going to have a successful platform. When Sony or Microsoft puts up their cash to make it happen, it's a safe investment. You know the system will be available, and you know people will be marketed into purchasing it, so the quality of your game is the only selling point you need to concern yourself with. When you don't even know if the console will sell, you're going to have a tough time getting others to invest in your dream. It's quite the chicken and the egg problem. Nobody buys the console without games, and nobody buys the games without the console. The best course of action would be to hope for a bunch of easy ports of already available games, so even if they don't take full advantage of the hardware, there will at least be a selection available to give some credibility to the system.
- A market. If people don't buy it, none of this matters. Linux people aren't the primary market here. We already have our linux boxes, and all things considered, would prefer more games available on that system before the effort is spent to put them on a vapor console. So you need to go after the console gaming market in general, which means you need to compete with the other consoles on the market. And you're not competing with the PS2 and Xbox, you're competing with whatever is available 3 years from now, because that's the minimum time its going to take to get a viable system out the door.
If enough individuals are willing to do the games on a small budget with the hopes of some future return, there's a possibility. But a company creating the console is going to rely on the sweat equity of others for the success of their own product. It's not out of line to think that way, but it's going to be an uphill battle.
And one of the quotes from the Indrema developers said it best. Wait until you actually have a product before you talk about it. Time spent talking is time not spent working. People love to drool at vaporware, but they can't buy vaporware, so your pre-marketing efforts are in vain. Even if you finish it years later, people will have gone on to drool at other things. To have any hopes of success, you have to sell your product while people are still drooling. That means, give them some pictures, give them some specs, give them a date, and STICK WITH IT. You can't predict hardware development, you can't predict software development. You can predict how long it will take to put it into boxes and fill said boxes with fuzzy foam peanuts. Market appropriately.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
Greg's post was good, but I think this is currently "conventional wisdom". He simply stated what everybody has been feeling for the past couple of years. The point that this kind of thinking will change the industry is correct.
I don't want to turn this post into a big sales job, but GarageGames IS a label for indies. If you haven't heard from us yet, you soon will. I was the founder of Dynamix, a Sierra label, and got fed up with large corporate control. Myself and a few of the best technologists felt the way Greg does three years ago, but we did something about it. We leveraged our position at Sierra to get control and ownership of the code behind Tribes 2, and started selling it for $100 per programmer as the Torque Game Engine. Eighteen months since we sold our first engine, we have amassed a very large and active development community, and have started selling games via ESD.
We do anything we can to help indies: be it cheap, powerful, cross platform technology with an extremely liberal license; team building; or publishing. We only created the publishing arm out of necessity, and give 65% royalties, do not take box rights, or take any claim on your IP. Of the first three titles that we published on-line, we have gotten box deals for two of them (even though you do not give us your box rights, we can help you get your deal).
Anyway, enough about GG. The point is, we are on the front line of change in the industry. It is my absolute belief that making a game is much more like being in a rock band than making a movie, i.e. three to five guys that are very good at what they do can make absolutley great games. You can make games that will change the industry. If you think you need to compete on the number of 3D models, or amount of non-interactive "movie" between interactive areas, or number of mo-cap moves, then you will fail. However, if you concentrate on pure game play, concept, and FUN, then you will win.
Distribution for these good games will appear. The big publishers are moving toward larger and larger games, leaving behind nice "little" niches and markets that others will move in to fill. Box distribution is not going away any time soon, and it will continue to look for good titles. Not all of the titles can be shovel ware from Russia published by highly controlling value publishers. The market will find a way. People want to play fun games, developers want to to make fun games, and it is inevitable that they find a way to meet.
Jeff Tunnell
www.garagegames.com Independent Games
Why does a game have to go to "Major Publication" to be a success?
It's because of the way game development works -- when you get a contract with a publisher, you're basically guaranteeing that you'll have funding for the duration of your project. The publisher generally takes a significant risk when signing such contracts, because the vast majority of games never even sell enough copies to cover their cost of development.
So if you don't have that contract, you presumably have to be getting funding from elsewhere. If you're planning on trying to run a business off of game royalties, you've got a death wish.
What's the solution? I think it's something we haven't seen yet. I'd love someone to start an organization that's like NPR/PBS, where a central group accepts public donations/membership and then distributes that money to select developers. These developers then have a responsibility to make games that are, above all, good, rather than games that sell. What's the difference? The amount of risk a developer takes. If you're not constantly worried about the pressures of the marketplace, about competing with this or that game that just came out, you're free to take more risks and... dare I say... innovate?
Mmm... probably a pipe dream, though.