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On The IGF Awards And Defining 'Indie' Gaming

Posted by simoniker on from the how-many-dollars-is-too-many? dept.

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?

2 of 28 comments (clear)

  1. Something like the major film studios in 30 years. by Lucius+Septimius+Sev · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  2. As one of the developers of Savage... by j450n · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.