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?

Comments

Complexity

[L7_]

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).

small developers, big publishers

[PainKilleR-CE]

"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).

Nothing new here...

[Doctor Cat]

The "independent developer" niche has always been crammed full of companies with short half-lives. If you want to "play the game" of trying to make A titles, or even B titles, with publisher funding, publisher distribution and marketing, and basically dancing like a puppet on the end of the publisher's strings, it's HARD to keep the cash flow to stay alive year in and year out, and very few developers build up the kind of warchest or royalty stream that will let them weather a project cancellation, abysmal sales of a title, or a six month drought between finishing one project and finally getting a contract to do the next game. So you see little companies come and go in the 3rd party development scene all the time.

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.

Of Course We'll Survive

[crombie]

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.

Games for programmers

[innowayelite]

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.

TQworld's game "tranquility"

[presearch]

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