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?"

Comments

Several new Garage Games

[Anonymous Coward]

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/

I have to disagree.

[will_die]

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.

Re:Not entirely

[chrisos]

"Games like Serious Sam and others show that small, independant teams can still produce a good game that sells well."

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.

Change IS Coming

[jefftunn]

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.