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On The IGF Awards And Defining 'Indie' Gaming
Thanks to GameTunnel for its editorial discussing the outcome of last week's Independent Game Festival awards, as previously covered on Slashdot Games, and part of a comprehensive GameTunnel IGF section. The writer is particularly concerned that the relatively high-budget, but still publisher-less Savage: The Battle For Newerth won major awards: "IGF has this year shown that a team's ability to raise money is as important as innovation itself. Consider this, if Savage was done on a $50,000 budget instead of a $1.5 million dollar budget, how would it be different? Would things that are in the game have been left out? I believe that the clear answer to this question is yes." What defines an 'indie' game for you, and should there be a maximum budget for IGF-entered games?
I believe that as the market for games matures we will see companies act more like major Hollywood studios. With large media empires doing most of the work and a small core of big companies but not connected ones publishing the gems. In the same way that Miramax was considered indi before Disney bought it.
IMO, an "indie" game would have to be self-published. In other words, you couldn't buy it in box form at your local game store; you'd need to get it directly from the developer. A small (or one-person) team is also typical of such games. I have to plug my favorite shareware developer, Spiderweb Software. Jeff Vogel writes some awesome old-style RPGs. Try out Avernum 3 and Geneforge 2 if you like open ended RPGs and don't mind simple (but by no means ugly) graphics. I have no affiliation with Spiderweb other than spending about $100 on their games over the years.
LOAD "SIG",8,1
I think that there should be two different categories. Have one be a general best independent game award that has no barriers for entry. Then, there should be an award for independent games that had a budget below $100,000. I'd allow the ones below $100,000 to be potential winners of the general independent game award as well, because if they can produce a better game than people with larger budgets, they definitely deserve recognition for that.
I'd also be weary of calling a company like S2 an independent. Sure, they have no publisher, but they are able to do it in-house.
Remember, the video game industry isn't quite Hollywood yet. There's nowhere near as much of an entry barrier.
Until Slashdot fixes the funny modifier, use insightful or interesting. The poster knows your intentions.
Yeah, it's easy, but it doesn't make you look big. Though I was expecting this outcome, it still sucked. I always thought the IGF was there to 'help the little man', but it seems not. I don't see an easy resolution though: how do you define what we all know in our hearts to be 'indie developers' -small teams of 1-4 people living off next to nothing and working out of a spare bedroom.(usually) Check out these photos and these photos from diygames for the kind of thing I mean. Those guys are true indie developers!!
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This is a fake sig.
/obvious
I've always wondered how "small" moviemakers who get big name stars to be in their movies still count as indie. So it's not made by Hollywood, I am more likely to notice stars than the city it was flimed in. If some famous developer like Wright or Meier used his own money and had no help from anyone else and made the next big thing would it still count as indie?
Why don't you guys have friends or journals?
Seumas McNally defines indie game development, for myself, and obviously for the IGF. I don't know his background but from what I can gather it's like:
You've dropped out of school cuz you're so damn passionate about games.
Working out of your parents basement.
No financial backing, except savings from your part-time job and maybe love money from the parents.
Recruiting family/friends to do volunteer work until the game is done.
When the game is finally done, it's overlooked by investors/publishers because of your youth and inexperience, so you absolutely need something like an IGF award to turn heads.
It's absurd that an award in Seumas' name was handed to the Savage team.
I feel like I should comment on this.
First let me say I'm not here to argue with anyone. I'm not going to say anyone is wrong if they don't like that we won, but I want to let people know where we are coming from.
Savage was built over the course of about three years, with a total of seven people contributing to development. Three programmers, four artists at the peak of development. When the game started for it's first few months, it was two people. We're in no way big, and dealing with press, distributers, and the rest of the industry we were reminded of that over and over. A couple million dollars doesn't make anyone care who you are, and it still doesn't even begin to touch the average of budget of a big title. We used free/open source libraries every where we could, the only things we ended up licensing were Bink (for the intro movie) and fmod. We did make it into stores, but I only wish we were as ubiquitous as the article describes. When our release date was approaching, we combed the area hitting up every game store we could find, casually asking about the game and were met with puzzled looks, they hadn't heard of the game.
We answered to no one in the development process, our "publisher" was an equally small group of people assembled for the soul purpouse of releasing our game. Only one person on the team had ever had a development job at another game company prior to this project. I think there is no question that we fit the definition of independant, the thing that seperated us from the group was that we got paid, so we were able to work on the game full time.
We entered the IGF because we were proud of what we have accomplished, as an independant developer and hoped to gain some exposure for it. Our intention was never to stomp on anyone, we all have a lot of respect for other indies, since we all came from there ourselves.
The gaming industry has been working on defeating piracy in a different way then the folks at the MPAA. Have you not noticed all the FPS games now have internet play thru WON or in house browsers? Their job is to weed out piraters over the net. Its not the best way to do it but its a hell of a lot better then sueing your consumers into outright fear. Pretty soon all games will have some sort of internet feature even ones that you think would not need any.
It will not stop single players but it will give casual pirates a nice reason to buy the game. An add on to all this is a constantly better way to deal with cheaters as well.
i am wondering if flash games count as indie games? they take quite a while to write, and every now and then you get people like shawn mcgough putting out quality product, such as shawn's dance grooves and melting mitsubishi (a revenge on mitsubishi game).
also, there is a movie called fungicide (trailer) by troubled moon films that would make a great game. when you watch it you feel like you are playing a video game without a controller. it's pretty awesome.
Visit the Mother Site !
In about 5 more years, any game not published by EA Games would be an 'indie' game.
On a more serious note : a maximum budget? No way, no chance. There are a number of issues that come up when you try to put something like that in place. For one you have inflation/depression in money value. Another is the fact that some of these 'indie' games are developed by teams which literally span the globe. A $500,000 USD budget limit may seem low for an American developer trying to break into the mainstream, but convert that into say Iraqi dollars and that budget limit might not even be reachable after 3 years of development.
As somewhat of a software pirate myself I feel inclined to defend against your comment Lucius. Though this is by no means a reason, you must admit game prices have risen too high. I'm not just talking about dollars (though I believe that to be too high as well) I'm talking about value. Now I realize that value is a relative term, and what would hold great value to one may not hold any value to others. But the point I'm trying to make is that buying Max Payne 2 for $90CAD and getting ~ 20hrs of game play out of it with no chance of replay or multiplayer is not a good value to me! Temple of Elemental Evil ($65CAD) even though it has no multiplayer functionality, does hold two points for me; one as an old school gamer (read played D&D Basic set) I really like the mechanics of the game, they did everything right (unlike NWN but that's a discussion for another thread on another day) two it has alot of replay value as you go through the game with parties of different alignments! Thus I purchased TOEE and pirated MP2. As for the internet functionality helping to remove pirates, they've been doing this for a while, only they call it MMORPG's and they charge an unfair monthly fee for the privaledge. I would have no issue if they charge a monthly fee to play on their "premium" servers. But the fact that I can buy the software box and not be able to use it without paying their ridiculous monthly prices is what's stopping me from buying FFXI. If they would at least give us the option of a LAN server ... hell it could require internet connectivity so they could verify CD-Keys for all I care. But I digress.
Back to the issue at hand, while I do agree that it seems unfair that a game designed on $1.5M should compete with a game designed on $200 worth of coffee. Savage does fit all pre-requisites of the Indie definition as given by the IGF and therefore they did win fair and square. Just my 2cp.
Kleedrac
Sure we wang, can.
By promoting you and others like you, hopefully other financial backers will think about joining leagues with other indie studios and finally realize that amazing games can come from unassuming backgrounds.
I would love to see a bunch of indie games out there get the cash that they need in order to raise them to the level that they deserve. Not to mention the funds to allow those guys to support themselves developing, full-time.
The World's Worst Webcomic!
I write games as a hobby*, and it doesn't bother me one iota to see Savage win an award like this. I think S2 could reasonably be called an independent when they wrote Savage.
But they aren't any longer. I'm not sure how to codify this as a rule - but they've now "gone pro". Perhaps the best approach is the one the IGF has taken thus far - a list of companies that "aren't independent". Each year, they should add successful (even if not profitable) companies for whom new developments will no longer be considered independent.
*You can check out Jumpman Zero in my sig - it's fun, but it's probably not going to be winning any awards. Except maybe for music, which is the part I didn't do.
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
Congratulations on your awards, nice job.
Your story is almost identical to our story. Small group of guys working out of a warehouse in an industrial park - took 2 years and a lot of sweat to get ENIGMA: RISING TIDE out the door. Made it with our own money and what little investment we were able to scare up (9/11 made it nearly impossible). We currently have 7 different publishers distributing our game worldwide (and an 8th that we are suing) - an enormous amount of work to get it done. At our peak we had 12 people. Most of the development was done by just 5 of us.
IMHO An indie studio is an indie studio until they stop making games with their own money and start doing it with publisher money. I have no problem with the concept of making money from something you poured your heart and sweat into. There is nothing stopping anyone from doing the same as you or we did...just taking the risk and making the sacrifices.
Cheers,
Kelly Asay
Tesseraction Games, Inc.
www.warfleet.net
Saying that the price of cames has risen too high really doesn't make much sense, if you think about it a little bit. If you go all the way back to the days of the 2600, the price of games since then probably hasn't even moved as much as inflation, despite the orders of magnitude in change that has gone into content.
For someone who claims to be "old skool" you should be extremely happy that instead of paying $90 to watch two stick figures fire dots at each other like in Gunfighter, you get smooth, crisp graphics of actual people jumping and firing in slow motion with bullet casings falling to the floor and smoke rising from the gun barrel. Could things be better? Sure, there's plenty of room to improve and game design needs to catch up to the graphical side. But to defend your piracy because you're not getting "value"? Puleeze... you just like getting stuff for free.
...of Puzzle Pirates we should comment, also. Our budget was also high compared to others in the IGF (second highest, I think), and I am sensitive to the view that budgets do have a decisive role in what a developer is able to accomplish. That said, I don't think having a higher budget made us any less indie.
Personally I feel that the web/downloadable vs. open distinction was broken, and perhaps next year they'll try a budget-oriented category. We shall see.
20 hours of gameplay = $50. That's $2.50 per hour.
A 2 hour movie in the US costs $10. Most movies are actually closer to 90 minutes, but we'll assume 2 hours for simplicity's sake. That's $5 per hour.
You're getting double the value of a movie, which more than justifies the price. And that's on a single player, little replay value game. Take UT2004, at $40, and you get value that's pretty tough to calculate, once you take into account all of the extras, mods, and what not. And of course, that's not counting inflation.
Don't bitch about the cost. If you want to play the game, buy it and keep the developers in business so they don't have the sick their lawyer watchdogs on the rest of us. You aren't getting cheated; you're cheating.
Back when the Atari 2600 was first released it cost $200 and game prices averaged $39.95.
Whoa, were games that expensive in the US?
My first computer was a BBC model B. The computer itself cost around GBP 400 (USD 600 at the time), and games were - about GBP 2.95, maybe as much as GBP 10.00 for the really expensive ones.
Prices peaked in the mid-90s, with early CD games reaching GBP 60.00 or even higher, before settling back to around GBP 30 today.