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Can Independent Game Developers Survive?
Thanks to Gamesindustry.biz for their editorial asking whether independent videogame developers can make it in the increasingly cut-throat games business. The article comes after the recent closure of respected UK developers Mucky Foot ('Startopia'), the latest in a long line of recent developer failures, and the author asks: "What's going wrong? Some of these casualties have been victims of mismanagement or poor quality control, but many were properly managed, fiscally sensible and extremely talented companies." The editorial continues: "Companies like EA, Microsoft and Sony don't really need [smaller developers] any more, as large publishers increasingly focus on internal development and suck much of the best talent into themselves. Smaller publishers aren't in a position to take risks on the kind of innovative games that small developers do best." Is the situation really as bleak as this implies?
IANAGD, but I think that as games transition to pure 3d modeled worlds (away from side scrollers or 2d sprite based games) thier complexity rises exponentially.
By complexity, I mean the amount of time making independent code objects to handle each and every interaction that could take place in the world. This involves AI scripting for the mobiles, interaction scripting for the static items and world physics for everything else.
No longer can people write one set of libraries that will apply to each and every level of a game. I guess what it comes down to is that things can't be re-used as much as in days past: independent developers rely on the fact that people want a fresh outlook on games, not the same rehashed EA clone and it takes a lot more work to create something like that now (without the $$$$$ middleware).
And do you know why? Because indie game developers haven't got it through their thick head no one wants another revision of asteriods or tetris. The graphics suck, the sound suck and the entire concept of most indie games suck. Give up now!!!
I think one way a small company can compete is to off their game up for anyone to play, and adopt a shareware model of distribution, much the same way id did for the original doom. Everyone had access to the first few levels of doom, and soon everyone was hooked and had to have the full version which they bought from id. Of course this would only work if the game as innovative and addictive.
interestingly, Microsoft supported a small Australian company which made small games and demos for them.
When there are 1500 pound gorillas like Microsoft and Sony, the goal is not to compete with them but find untapped markets. It isn't so much getting a slice of the pie, but making a whole new pie. Eventually, the gorrilla will eath the new pie, but, with some luck, enough time will have elapsed to give the small company some real revenue (hopefully enough to say "to hell with this" and retire).
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
I think Cyan has seen the trends and and will blow everyone away with Uru without sacrificing the quality they are known for.
why don't you go see the movie? it's not like you're going to get a comparable experience when your viewing field can be measured by inches as opposed to feet!
"Companies like EA, Microsoft and Sony don't really need [smaller developers] any more, as large publishers increasingly focus on internal development and suck much of the best talent into themselves. Smaller publishers aren't in a position to take risks on the kind of innovative games that small developers do best." Is the situation really as bleak as this implies?
This situation might be as bleak as implied, if not for the fact that it's just incorrect. Microsoft, for example, owns Zone.com, through which they run most of their PC multiplayer titles, and yet the majority of the content on that site comes from small developers who pump out shareware Java/Flash titles, many of which have become extremely popular (think PopCap Games).
Additionally, many small developers have come up through the mod communities in more complex game types, such as FPS games, where a handful of developers were picked up from various mod groups for Quake and Half-Life, either in new development houses or by companies like id and Valve (and Valve themselves formed a lot of the talent to develop Half-Life from mod developers).
It's a matter of knowing what a small team is capable of and finding practical methods of distributing and marketing your product. Many larger developers and publishers have tried many things to encourage and help this (again, Valve and id with their respective mod communities), while others pretty much strike off on their own (GarageGames).
-PainKilleR-[CE]
That said, there are a few well managed ones and/or developers with big enough hits that they can stay around a long time - Stormfront Studios is still in business I believe, and id Software isn't going anywhere any time soon. Some of the more successful developers deliberately decide to be absorbed into a big company, too, like Blizzard or Westwood - and didn't Valve do that also?
The other route is to keep expenses tiny, always, and just keep making games until they pry the keyboard and mouse out of your cold, dead, fingers. The fellow that did the Dink Smallwood games is still at it, at the Independent Games Festival I saw his teenage lawnmower game. I've been running my own Dragon's Eye Productions for over 10 years now, and doing better than ever. PopCap Games is doing really great (and their games are tons of fun, so they deserve it), and there's too many shareware, freeware, flash and java games and game sites to even mention. Yes, a lot of them suck, but there's some good ones too. There's a lot of interesting looking games at dexterity.com for one. I still hope that Garage Games will thrive, too - they're doing original game development using the Tribes 2 3D engine (which they made, at their last company). I don't think the development houses are dying any time soon - just some specific individual ones, which has happened pretty much every year, often with little fanfare.
Furcadia - A free online game with user created content, DragonSpeak scripting, & more.
Yeah, a lot of independents die out. More often than not, these independents try to fight toe-to-toe with EA, Microsoft, etc. This is how you lose; you can't use the same tactics as the 800-pound gorilla, or you'll get crushed.
What you can do, though, is take advantage of being a small developer. You can produce edgier stuff. You can try crazy new things. You don't have four levels of management to clear things with. You may not hit as hard as they do, but you can act with far greater flexibility and alacrity than a big game house can.
If you've got a Wal-Mart to compete with, you can't expect to survive a price war. They're geared for that kind of thing, and they will beat you every single time. You can, however, expect to blow them out of the water with excellent customer service or specialized services. Similarly, you can't out-'big' EA. You've gotta take a different approach. For all it's fearsome size, there's plenty that a small, independent firm can do better than a giant like EA.
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
but was then bought by Activision. It's a real shame to because I looks as if we won't get a Linux client now for Call of Duty. Please post here that we need a Linux client for this game.
Startopia still is a kickass game, I bought it when it was released and enjoy it to this day (it received barely a word of advertising and slipped off into obscurity).. If you see this game in the bargan bucket, buy it its fantastic (Humourous, sci-fi parodys, Hitchhikers references and hilarious things like the little-known karmagasms of happyness the Sirens take).
puts ("Python r0cks\n");
karma ho'
A lot of bigger game companies play marketing games with thier products and don't value supporting and fostering creative talented teams and giving them some decision power in the creation process.
To them it is sbout control, psycographic marketing, and deadlines. They can't fathom what makes a good game (lots of marketing right?), because the process is often run by "suits" with MBAs interested only in job portfolio building.
There are two things that small developers lack to make the gaming rennasaince days come back.
Let's assume their spouce can feed them for the 3-4 years it takes to actually code a decent games. Let's even assume they gang together and form tiny companies.
One problem is the enourmous amounts of artistic property needed to raise a modern-looking game.
Individual developers (or tiny dev groups/companies) don't have anywhere near the amount needed. Getting it isn't cheap, and getting competitive stuff is hard on top of expensive.
Sure, someone like Sid Meyer can throw out a marvelous design, a brilliant concept nobody has thought of, a whole new potential genre. But who'll pay for it? It'll just stack with the mountains of 15-year-old-graphic _freeware_ games that're up there. That word, "freeware", is a death-sentance for a game. No gamer, neither soft- nor hardcore, would allow himself to ever be caught playing freeware (except, that is, nethack).
The second thing small devs lack is the power to go 3D. Consider the following:
1. BUYING a modern working 3D engine SDK costs between 300K to around a million, depending on engine. Wrapping it costs a few developer years.
2. Alternatively, coding it costs a few developer decades (translate that to manhours).
3. While the amount of code increases in a linear form, complexity increases logarighmically, and the amount of QA needed increases with it. More resources that a small dev practically cannot muster.
The bare few small developers that actually managed to overcome this hurdle (Croateam - four devs - with Serious Sam for example) just found themselves up agains a second, even larger one - actually coding the GAME. Which, in spite of Sam having been endless hours of insane ammospraying at literally thousands of enemies, was neither a sophisticated, ingenuous, original or groundbreaking game. Face it, It barely kept up, and was nothing more than yet-another-shooter(tm). I'm not saying Croateam didn't do a tremendous job. I'm saying that the amount of resources these four guys had after going 3D to put on anything else was a plain zero.
And that goes for so many games I can think of.. So much energy has to go into getting the 3D to function, people forget to actually put a _game_ on top of it. How many 3D shooters can you name that were actually more sophisticated than mining ore in UO and doing the same repetitive things over and over? Practically none - Deus-Ex. Thief. I really can't think of more. Even long-selling sequels like M&M that decided to go 3D put so much on the 3D that the game itself got neglected to oblivion.
So no, individual or small company devs won't crank up what they used to 15 years ago. No more Star Control II's and Civilization. The few small companies that are left are having their games produced by (read: are being absorbed by) corporations with marketing and fossilized management that will only risk doing games that have already proven to pull in money (read: same old). With corporate management in charge, games are getting less technical and more casual to appeal to wider audiences, while throwing bizillions on washing the shallowness over with stunning visuals. It's been the trend since 3D kicked in, and I highly doubt it's going to change.
I only see corporations owning the future of gaming. Death, Darkness and Gloom. Anyone care to cheer me up a bit here?
-
Muckyfoot don't deserve this fate http://www.muckyfoot.com/startopia/startopiaprevie wsites.html
puts ("Python r0cks\n");
I work for Irrational Games, developers of System Shock 2 and Freedom Force. We are currently working on a number of titles including Freedom Force vs. the Third Reich and Tribes: Vengeance, and have an office in Boston (USA) and Canberra (Australia).
We've grown and prospered over 5 years, and all of us look forward to making great games that people enjoy. We also enjoy the freedom of making decisions that affect what the game will be, rather than being told how we should make the game.
In addition, I am a judge for the Independent Games Festival, where 112 independent teams of game developers have submitted their independent games that they have funded and developed on their own to be judged and presented at GDC 2004.
While there is a lot of recent setbacks for independent developers, especially in the UK, the people who want to make their voices heard independently will continue to do so, reguardless of their financial situation. Independent games will continue to be made, and those voices will continue to be heard.
I think an untapped market that has yet to be fully realized is the pro-gamer market. Not "professional gamers" -- a term that can apply to any person who has spent enough hours in front of a cathode ray tube -- but programmer gamers. A game in which a player can program the behavior of say, a robot, within certain constraints and then play online against other robot-programmers may well be the next big thing as "dumbed-down" and "kiddie" titles saturate the market. There are many (such as myself) who desire massive depth and interaction with the games, and this would be an idea that would satisfy this. In addition, objects in a world could be programmed. In the Elder Scrolls games, enchanted items are the precursor of programmable objects; they give the player constraints to work within, and the player tries to get the most bang for their buck. Taking this concept farther would be an exciting thing to see explored. And if marketed right, it could sell.
My partner and I run a small game house, TQworld.
We publish only one title, the offbeat (and often misunderstood) 3D game 'tranquility'.
Next January will mark our third year. Granted, our game didn't have the 'hit' impact that we
had hoped for when we were in development, but we've enjoyed a steady growth
in players. We're still in the black, mainly due to keeping expenses low and by not having
profits siphoned off by publishers, distributors and investors.
Another reason why we're still around is due to the design work within the game and it's
support system during the development phase. Because we use a client server model
for tranquility, we never have had any problem with piracy. We also offer so much of the
game for free that there hasn't been a big incentive for players to circumvent our system.
We keep scoring and game progress on our servers but all game play resides on the user's
machine. If they want to give out account information to others it's fine with us, it only affects
the user's score. We also only distribute the game online. We've tried working with publishers
but because of our unique un-cheatable commerce model, publishers can't run the show.
That seems to turn them off so we've never been able to find a publisher that can deal with us.
We also aren't greedy when it comes to profit. We give away lots of free accounts. Why not?
It's just a miniscule load on the servers and it's well worth it just to make somebody happy
to play our game. We also haven't been greedy when it comes to updates. Once somebody
pays for the game, they can run it on as many machines as they want. We've got a version
for Windows, OSX and Mac OS9 and they can run any or all of them. We also never charge
for updates. Somebody told me once that you should worry about the customers you have,
not the ones you don't that aren't paying you. We liked that approach and so we've ended
up using that commerce model. Granted, it's not the money maker model that Apple or
Microsoft uses, but when you sell a game called tranquility we want to keep our customers
as stress free as possible. Like the Golden rule, we treat them like we would like to be treated.
Another part of the game (that people never see) is the support structure that we built in at the
same time as the game itself. The servers let us know who's buying, who's playing, where
they are at in the game, what kind of hardware, who's visiting the web site and who is asking
for support. It's tied in with the game itself so once we brought everything up a few years ago,
it's almost self-supporting. This means that we can be responsive to users that need assistance,
we can quickly see the result of special promotions or potential compatibility problems with
new releases or new OS releases on the platforms we support, without having to hire a staff to
keep our customers happy. Although this was experimental and somewhat radical at the time,
because we were not beholden to investors and shareholders at the time, we could take whatever
steps were necessary at the time to build things the right way. It took 1 year for two developers
to build both the game and the support system and we released it when it was ready and hit the
ground running on day one.
Finally there's the game itself. Yeah, we know it's weird
and certainly not for everyone, but that's a large part of it's charm.
tranquility started out as a simple demo game that I wrote for the SGI boxes, especially the
Indigo ten years ago. I would get fan mail every so often asking for updates etc. so we knew
we had something interesting to use as a foundation. After kicking around ideas, when Apple
announced plans for OS X, it looked like there was a consistent enough target to write for, with
an eclectic enough audience that might enjoy the alternative experience that tra
Hm - you've missed how things have evolved recently:
1. BUYING a modern working 3D engine SDK costs between 300K to around a million, depending on engine. Wrapping it costs a few developer years.
Torque. Crystal Space 3D. There's more of 'em to. Personally, I licensed Torque. It cost me a whopping $100 for the license and souce code. If (and only if) the game starts to hit big (in excess of $500k in business for the company, or the publisher I deal with) then I have to move to the 'commercial' license - which is $10k. still pretty good. Of course, some people will say that CS3D is crap (gee, it managed to power an on the shelf retail game that's still on the shelves now - can't be that bad!), or that Torque is too dated (got look at the site, or check out screenshots of Trajectory Zone (still not a lot of content there, but, some pretty nice in game shots of the levels. The engine isn't very dated any more :-)
So, the myth of the quarter-million dollar engine is dead. There's plenty of options to choose from. And since Torque went to $100 to license it, a couple of other engines have done the same (but, truthfully, none of the others have impressed me yet. That could change in the future.)
Plus, using an existing engine cuts WAY down on the QA costs - you already know the engine runs on a diverse set of hardware, since everyone else who's licensed it makes it work (and in the case of CrystalSpace or Torque, everyone is highly likely to share information on quirks, enhancements, etc.) So now what you have to spend time testing is content and game specific stuff.
The game concepts are there - I can already tell ya they are. I was at Indie Games Con '03 (disclosure: I was a speaker there this year and last year. This year's topic: "Surviving Indie Game Development" :-) and talked with a lot of people about what they were working on, etc. There's both brand new concepts, and rethinking of old concepts. Not a single game there didn't have a unique selling point of some sort - something that makes 'em really stand out. (Well, that's not COMPLETELY true. There were a couple o' knockoffs there. But they weren't the promonent games.) Close enough to mainstream to get gamers attention, but different enough to make thier own nitch (GravRally comes to mind.)
It's far from gloom and doom for indies like myself - if you are smart, it's a good time to be an Indie. If you want to make Doom III - well, good luck on getting your day job back :-)
Oh, forgot to cover this: Art. Trajectory Zone was done by a team of 9 people grand total (I'm the owner of Midnight Ryder Technologies, the developer behind Trajectory Zone) So what DO you do to fill up a game like this? Well, in my case Eric Forhan (art director) found people who were willing to work for a percent of profits after it's published. That defrayed the up front costs, and a lot of guys get to see thier name on a box when it comes out :-) But for some of our other titles in the pipeline, we're doing things like licensing content from various places (Gee, I could hire an art guy to model a table, chairs, couch, and stuff for this room. Or, I could buy it all for $40, and reskin the couch to match the room.) which also (if done smart) reduce the overhead for the art budget considerably. Next time, we don't need a team of 9 people - two will suffice, plus our licensed content.
And here's what's cool... the Indie situation continues to improve. Suddenly, someone figured out there's a whole new market segment to sell to. So now there are products and services showing up that are less expensive, and aimed directly at Indie budgets. Heck, if I need to construct and entire city, I can buy all the parts for building, roads, street lights, etc. all in one package for $20! Indies are likely to save time, and reuse the content rather than build new - which means
Davis Ray Sickmon, Jr - looking for something to read? Check out my three free novels at MidnightRyder.org
The technical demands for mobile gaming are significantly less. That's were there's room for independant developers. Other than that, they should negotiate contracts whereby if the publishers pull out the developers still get paid for their time. Before now I've refused to sign a contract where the other party thought that they would be able to pull out at any time without having to pay me a cent. They were surprised that I rejected a "standard" contract, but they still re-wrote it.
Two examples come to mind. (1) The Combat Mission series and (2) Norm Koger games.
The Combat Mission games have been hailed as the best wargames ever developed, and even some of the best PC games developed period. It's a truly amazing achievement, considering that Combat Mission was started in a garage by two or three guys, and that the only place to get it was online.
Norm Koger, who's claim to fame was The Operation Art of War (another incredibly popular and well critiqued wargame), is truly an independent game developer. Not only did he design and code the game, he's also responsible for all of the artwork.
Of course, ID software needs to be mentioned. They not be an indie developer anymore, but that's where they started.
These are just a few examples of very well known and very successfull indie game developers, and I'm sure there are others. What everyone needs to realize is that indie game development is ridiculously hard work (but then again, so is developing any game).
Phemur
Torque. Crystal Space 3D. There's more of 'em to. Personally, I licensed Torque. It cost me a whopping $100 for the license and souce code. If (and only if) the game starts to hit big (in excess of $500k in business for the company, or the publisher I deal with) then I have to move to the 'commercial' license - which is $10k. still pretty good.
I notice this is an "if", call us when your game makes the 500,000 in gross. 500k/10 people/1 year is only 50k per year for one year. I am grossly unimpressed and you would be hard pressed to sell this as "success".
Call me when an indie engine is consistently used by an industry big boy. Until then its id technology and Renderware until the cows come home.
And here's what's cool... the Indie situation continues to improve. Suddenly, someone figured out there's a whole new market segment to sell to. So now there are products and services showing up that are less expensive, and aimed directly at Indie budgets. Heck, if I need to construct and entire city, I can buy all the parts for building, roads, street lights, etc. all in one package for $20! Indies are likely to save time, and reuse the content rather than build new - which means the game gets much more likely to hit the market (online or otherwise.) Art is just one example - sound, music, models, programming (and it's not uncommon to do programing-for-art trades, or vice-versa), etc....really this whole point
YAY! Games built by putting lego pieces together! That sounds way better than having all original content!!!111
Sorry, I do not feel for the independent and I am unimpressed by your points. The parent's post was 100% correct.
If you guys really want to see a good example of an indie developer with a great game out there with a somewhat original concept (FPS/RTS game).. oh yeah, and the fact that they released a Windows and a Linux AND a Mac client for the game side by side (No long waits for a port) go visit S2 Games . Oh yeah.. and you can buy their game online and download the full ISO of the game. 10 bucks cheaper than the store.
If small time developers wanna break into the market (at least fairly well) they need to do something absolutely outstanding/kick ass to catch the attention of gamers. Give us a Freedom Force or Moonbase Commander game! Give us a MMO-top down shooter game (like GTA2) where we can blast people away without the need of crack reflexes that would give a 60+ year old man a heart attack.
Apparently, this is a pretty regular cycle in the games industry. What happens is that the big fish get tired of dealing with small developers because they are out of their control and if they fold your investment is wasted and maybe they won't be on time and so on. So they focus more on internal development and their own teams. Then after awhile, someone notices "hey we're spending a lot of money paying salaries and benefits and keeping staff that we aren't always using," and so they start laying people off and outsourcing a lot becuase it's cheaper. After awhile, they get tired of dealing with small developers because they are out of your control and if they fold your investment is wasted and maybe they won't be on time and so on. So they focus more on internal development and their own teams. Then after awhile, someone notices...
Meanwhile, there are plenty of mon-and-pop games developers who are doing just fine. It's just that you've never heard of them. That's fine. You've never heard of John and Maria's Restaurant but I can tell you that the food is very good and the owners are doing better than they would be if they worked at McDonald's. Small companies can live on small revenues and small revenues don't make international news.
I have a lot of opinions about Cyborgs and Architects
IO Interactive. Hitman: Over 600,000 units sold. Hitman 2: Over 2 million units sold. 'Nuff said.
The big issues people addressed are that most big games are dumbing down games in an effort to cater to the masses and compensating by way of boosting the graphics. I agree this has been the trend since the emergence of 3d and it has come at the expense of gameplay. I remember the leap between Kings Quest IV to V and despite the awesome graphics, shuddering at the new mouse/icon driven interface.
Gamers in general (and developers) I think focus on building what they think is "fun" rather than counterbalance it with a healthy dose of business sense. Not all, but as a rule of thumb. A good gaming company will be run by an individual(s) that has a good head for business as well as a gamer at heart. They need to know not just what is fun, but how to find the right market, tap it, cater a product to it and develop a business plan to get it out there and maximise the profit. I think a lot of game developers really do not grasp it is a BUSINESS and not just a hobby and this I believe it the downfall of MOST indie developers.
There are several ways to address this I believe:
1) Focus on niche market. Do your market research. Find a viable untapped area of games. Develop a product based on tapping that market. If you want to develop your own game (surveys be damned!), fine - go for it! But just don't expect it to be successful.
2) DON'T compete with the big boys. Screw paying $300k to use a Quake or Unreal engine. Screw paying $20k for PS2 dev kits. You don't need to. Don't focus on tech. Focus on gameplay. Focus on the story. Focus on giving the players options. Focus on giving different reactions based on their actions. Gameplay largely consists of choice and replayability to explore those choices. Adventure games are good examples of games that can do well and don't require killer game engines to be successful.
3) Create a viable business model for funding and managing development as well as a way to market and distribute your product for maximum profit. Nobody argues with the likes of ID. If they can do it, so can you. And no arguments about those being different times either. A good entrepreneur will be able to exploit any situation or economy for profit.
4) Focus on business partnerships and alliances. Find people who are interested in your project or if you are interested in theirs and try to build strategic alliances which can boost both your businesses (either through extra funding, partnerships, development, etc). If you pick the right partners, you increase your business clout.
The problem is that games are "Big Business" now. Really big business. In the old days, people went into the industry because they either liked playing games, or liked making them. Now that the industry is so big, and so much money is being moved around, lots of people come into the industry for other reasons (mostly, money). So you've got one group of people (the gamers) and another group, (the bizsuits), and sometimes their goals will be the same. Many other times, that's not the case. The bizsuits care only about one thing: money. There are a lot of non-game related pressures on the business side. If it means releasing a game too early, so be it. If it means cancelling a game even if it's in beta, so be it. And if it means closing down game developer shops, so be it.
Another problem is that console development has increased in difficulty, exponentially. The hardware is very very complicated now, the technology running the hardware amazingly hard core (we're talking about technology that was in the realm of computer science professors just a few years ago). Very small teams will have difficulty just handling the hardware, let alone implementing 3D technologies/engines on top of that hardware. Therefore, large teams with people just specializing in one area are the norm nowadays, and that won't change anytime. And while the small team is barely finished reading the hardware manuals for the consoles, the larger teams are already putting the latest occlusion and particle systems on top of their engines.
Fortunately nowadays middleware is coming to the rescue of game developers, who are interested in making games, not engines. Unfortunately those don't come cheap either. In any case, entry costs to do *console* game development is huge.
Expect more small game developer studios to close their doors, and the big game companies (EA, Activision, Sony, etc) to hire the cream of that crop. If you want to work in the game industry, don't expect stability in your job.
More and more I think this industry is resembling the movie biz. Bunch of people come together for one project, work on it, get it released and everybody leaves for the next project...
Perhaps we need to take into account the changing definition of 'success.' These days, a successful game has millions of copies sold. But think back to the days when independent gamewriters were the norm: what was successful then? Certainly not millions of sales... perhaps thousands. How many copies of Sierra's most popular adventures games were sold, do you think? Or Wolfenstein 3D? Or the original Warcraft?
But with massive corporation behind games nowadays with their huge marketing budgets and distribution base, independent developers obviously can't compete. But they may still be able to attain success equal to that of the days of old.
Despite what it looks like, the independents that survive are the ones most ahead of the game(no pun intended).
Like in any industry, it's the small developers that will take the biggest risks. Simultaneously, they also get the biggest rewards, perhaps not financially but from an "advancement in development" standpoint. The games have to attack with new ideas and excellent design; they do not have a mature strategy or infrastructure to back up anything less.
It's interesting to note that all the big companies around today were small once, too. Activision, EA, and the rest, all once made games, that had the same mark of youthful innovation on them. Now they are large publishers, and it's very different. But there's always room for the new guys in a field with as many possibilities as video games. The new guys just have to do worthy work, both in the games they make and their methods of selling them.
Being myself a small-time game developer (programmer), we're having a big trouble here to find a publisher and finally publish the game - lots of requirements, most of them asking to change the whole idea of the game - how it will look like, the plot and gameplay. Usually, making the game worse with these changes.
Publishers don't want to take risks of releasing the game they don't know what impact it'll do, while there aren't any smaller publishers with any ability to publish the game at all.
That's a closed circle.
Eugene 'HMage' Bujak
Combat Mission is a great example of the good an independent company can do if they have the freedom to make a game how they want and don't have to deal with upper management, market researchers, etc. getting in the way.
"Armed forces abroad are of little value unless there is prudent counsel at home" - Cicero
Whatever happened to them? Why did they close? PS - They made System Shock 1 & 2
"My enemies hate me. My allies hate me. I hate myself."
I think it should be mentioned that this (very short) opinion piece is focusing on Indy game developers in the UK. The title of the Slash story leaves that out.
I'm sure things are somewhat different in the US or other parts of the world. What I couldn't tell you is exactly how they're different. However, there are enough cultural and economic variations between countries for me to say that there is some differences.
What would be truly interesting to see is how the Indy development approach differs from country to country. The most widely discussed approach here (I'm in the USA) is to go after a big publisher to get your game put in as many places as possible. Do developers in other countries follow a similar approach, or do they take a different tack, i.e. "Make a game and put it on the web and/or sell it locally by hand. If a big company comes and shows interest, great. If not, we don't care." If so, what countries and why?
Check out Spiderweb Software for a prime example. They (or more approporiately, he) caters to a small, hardcore niche of old-school RPGers, listens to them, and gives them what they want and abstains from what they don't want. An excellent business model for a small scale developer; give people what they are paying you for and improve yourself on their feedback. And any RPG fan would be a damned fool not to download the Geneforge 2 demo.
The poor fool will never know the joys of Monkey Physics. Hmm...I'm going to eat my pipe now.