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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?
"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's not really where the development time and money is going. The killer is the increasing complexity of the art assets. The 3D models with their ever-increasing polygon counts and their ever-larger textures. The ever-growing environments. Doing all the content creation to meet the eye-candy demands of modern gamers can take a lot of bodies and budget.
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?
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