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Is There a Future for Indie Games?
An anonymous reader writes "If you've been following Greg Costikyan's recent rants (such as Death to The Games Industry), you would have seen mention of one developer's attempt at breaking the traditional games publisher funding model. Well, their game is now in the stores, and whats more it has been getting some pretty good reviews, but has anyone heard of it? Judging by some
press, the marketing has been somewhat underwhelming. So the question is, is there still a viable space for good games developed outside the traditional corporate publisher model, or does E.A. already own the future of video games?" Moreover, when indie developers have to go up against the likes of EA and Steven Spielberg, what hope can they have for matching that kind of success? At least one company thinks they can do it by offering games for direct download. Is direct purchasing enough of an incentive for your average gamer to shell out money on something he's never heard of before?
There's always hope, as long as you can get your product mentioned on Slashdot...
i only ever car about fps but as far as i can see theres plenty of mods based on the complex engines which are the difficult bit to develop.
indie developers may need to licence an engine but theres still plenty of potential to do their own thing
And they'll be the wave of the future. There will always be some lonely game creator out on the fringest making something cool that everyone will lap up. When it gets popular though, they'll no longer be an independent though. They'll get bought out.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
stardocks galactic civ and also Ragdoll kung fu
thankyouverymuch
CJC
...there is.
If PC gaming continues on a decline, and the console oligopoly continues to give a cold shoulder to letting independent developers obtain console devkits and sell games on indie labels, then no, there isn't much of a future for indie gaming. All three gaming handheld systems sold in U.S. stores, whether chain or local, are officially closed systems. (These include the GBA SP, the Nintendo DS, and the PSP.) Phones don't count because for one thing, most phones have decidedly subpar D-pads, and for another, a lot of people are happy with land lines and unwilling to pay $960 for a 2-year mobile phone service commitment (or import a SIM-free phone) just to play a video game.
The, of course, there will be people like myself who only purchase games with linux binaries too...
The future of gaming is users becoming game masters, not just players, even supplying their own computer hosts to the network in which the game is running. Like when Doom really exploded its genre to capture the entire gaming scene by allowing anyone to make their own "levels".
I want to put my own GPL game server up on the most popular gaming network. With my own features running on the common protocol, so people who play in my "module" can play by my rules. Maybe that means possessions and attributes beyond the universal ones can't transfer, because some modules are built for "Monty Hall" style cheats, just pumping up characters without restriction. Maybe such a network will have a "web of trust" where changes to character state are tagged with their origin, which must be accepted by an automated system elsewhere, or not apply. It's a little complex, but once we work it out, we'll have a canvas on which players and masters of games can all exercise our imaginations on one another. Where's the most popular, featureful GPL MMORPG running right now? I want to take a crack at it.
--
make install -not war
Considering most "gamers" today don't know the difference (and probably don't care), who makes the games they play, I think it all comes down to how indie games compare to big corporate games. If the games are fun to play, people will buy them, period. I doubt anyone really cares who made the game. For example, I wouldn't see a movie just because it was made by universal studios, I simply would see it because it was entertaining.
public class null extends java applet { System.out.print ("Tabula Rasa"); }
Was Pitfall. Did they remake that recently or something?
:)
I loved playing that game years ago, they don't make em like that any more.
On the real subject of indies, I am finding Linux to be a wonderful world of shareware from way back when.
Looking around finding decent gems hidden away in the repositories and distros.
Sooner or later these will be polished and will become the must have games of tomorrow.
The bedroom coder is up there right now making the software, give it time
liqbase
I had never heard John Carmack until he started giving away the first few rounds of Doom. EA's vaunted marketing can't compete with a very good game getting good word of mouth.
Cell phone and flash games are much cheaper and easier to make. A few of them, like zuma and bejeweled, also make rediculous amounts of money.
Religion for nerds. Stuff that really matters
Especially as the games market gets older and more discerning. I used to buy every console that came out, and spent at least $100 a week on games. A lot of that was crap, but I was immersed in game mags and sites at the time, getting a full blast of big name promotion. Nowadays, I might buy a game once a month, and my collection is entirely devoid of sports games, GTA et al, car games, and whatever the hell else passes for mass market entertainment these days. I only buy interesting games, that (are at least trying to) do something I've never experienced before. I would love to have a wide selection of games like that at my disposal, and I know for a fact I'm not going to get them from EA or Steven fucking Spielberg. I know I'm not the median publishers are looking to hit, but I'd like to think the segment I occupy is growing.
"You know why you do not see me styling wit my homies? Because I have no homies!!" -Mojo Jojo
Year after year art and hard work are ignored for sex and cheap thrills. I wish it were different.
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
I'm currently playing the mac shareware version of GeneForge from Spiderweb Software http://www.spiderwebsoftware.com/ Will soon become my first computer game purchase in over five years, the last one being the original Quake.
Everyone has played games that had marketing, names and that did suck. Do we remember them?
The future is interactive infotainment.
Books are too time wasting to consume.
TV isn't interactive enough.
Movies suffer from a quality vs. money vs. time problem.
Video Games are the arche type of interactive infotainment:
"Would you like to know more?" - Starship Troopers
And Indi-games will become/stay as successful as blogs.
End of Story.
Me though have found enjoyable games lately by clicking random at underdogs.
This is like saying "is there any hope for indie websites?". Yes there is, you make good content, and people will visit it. Same with shareware.
the sun is god
I have some friends who are doing alright making Java games for mobile phones. As I mentioned in a previous post, since graphics on mobile phones and other limited devices are so cruddy development focus tends to be on addictive gameplay rather than eyecandy. It is possible to be a small independent game studio, since there are a lot of free tools for J2ME programming and the APIs are simple (what is difficult is making them run well on all different phone models). There is also no need for a big art studio to render orchestral music, hours of CGI, etc. At least not yet.
It seems most of the money in that market is not trying to sell your game through a portal (though if you get a really big hit you can rake in the cash), or even worse trying to sell it yourself, but to make ad games that companies can make available for free as part of a competition. I think there is a big potential market for really innovative and addictive mobile games, as at the moment a lot is just re-releases of games for old platforms, with slightly updated graphics.
A few links if you are interested in getting started on J2ME programming:
J2ME.org discussion board
J2ME Gamer
Midlet.org
Being bitter is drinking poison and hoping someone else will die
Independents are just that, independent. Rogue commercial organizations will usually scrape out a living in a niche market or become/join a large company.
If a small company comes up with a really good idea in their industry it'll end up being copied by the big dogs. Look at everybody and their brothers selling single songs for some variation of 99 cent.
If a game wants my $19.99, it has to:
- have a good buzz on the blogs
- rekindle a past love of games
- be an interesting twist on an old idea (e.g. choose your own adventure story game)
- demo a new tech in a fun way (e.g. fractal graphics)
- be downright silly (e.g remember leisure suit larry)
~jennifer.k~
I, along with many other people (that will no doubt reply to this), have various concerns about a system like Steam, but it is hard to dislike it when it supports the publishing of excellent games like this that push game development into new genres.
Anything that allows independent game developers to bypass the highstreet, can only be a good thing. I just hope that ragdollkungfu is the first of many such lightweight games that can afford to be experimental and actually fun for a change.
Life's EULA: shit happens.
If an indie developer manages to create a game based on a innovative and interesting concept, he can live of it. An example (I'm just a player) for that kind of game is Clonk. Innovative and funny with great multiplayer support. Although it's closed source there's a linux version floating around the official boards. (Screenshot)
Introversion claim to be "the last of the bedroom programmers".
They've released two games so far, Uplink & Darwinia. I bought 'em both, and thought they were great - definitely not the sort of games a company like EA would release.
For the unitiated, Uplink is a "hacking" game, intended to replicate the experiences of hacking you see in the movies. It's also littered with references to movies, and other computer games (I particularly liek the Frontier-style bulletin boards!) Darwinia is a little harder to classify. It's sort of part RTS, part God Game, tied together with a stylishly done 80's-video-game feel. (That's a rubbish explanation - you'll have to try the demo to see what I mean.)
At the end of the day, I suppose it all comes down to acceptable risks. EA have got so used to raking it in from their annual updates to the NFL, NBA, NHL, FIFA (etc. etc.) series that they can't see the benefit in trying out anything that isn't a sure-fire-money-spinner (read, anything that isn't highly derivative of something they've done before). For the little guys to get noticed, I suppose they have to come up with something new/unconventional.
I know which I'd rather play...
The problem that people don't seem to realize is that marketting is the determining factor of how well a game will do. The art of a game is part of that marketting. Saying that people don't buy games on graphics is BS, which is obvious to anyone who looks at the sales of Doom 3, Half-life 2, Farcry, or any other top seller.
The big publishers have marketting budgets that rival the development costs of the title itself. For example, I worked on C&C Generals. The development budget for that title was ~25M USD. The marketting budget for that title was ~15M dollars.
Indie games simply can't compete with that kind of marketting, and word of mouth sales only grow the community that you already have. If you've only sold 10,000 copies of your game, WOM sales might grow your community to 100,000. But if you'd already had 100K sales, you would've hit the million mark instead.
I currently have no clever signature witicism to add here.
no, there is no future
I was hired as a consultant for a company that is doing some Xbox Live Arcade games for MS's new 360. They are a startup and don't want to go head to head with the big guns, but arcade gave them an outlet where they can start out and build a reputation, and hopefully get some good reviews about them.
I think this is an area where MS is helping the little guy, and increasing competition in the industry. I also think this will help MS targeted the "less sophisticated" soccer moms with simple cheap games. From what I've seen sony really doesn't have a viable strategy to compete with this approach. I don't know about Nintendo, but my guess is that the small guys will be able to develop for revolution and to ok.
If I recall, it goes something like this:
$49.99
- cost of boxes, CDs, manuals
- cost of shipping
- cost of shelf space
- publisher's cut
- cost of Hollywood voice actors
- other big budget expenses
===========
$49.99
Give or take, but I have yet to see an Indie game priced at an "impulse buy" level.
[PowerPoint] is a tool for capitalist presentation
web marketing just isn't powerful enough to compete. with tv and print ads *in addition* to web ads, big companies can drown most anyone out. however, with some clever viral marketing and a truly high-quality game, then enough buzz would be created to generate competative sales initially. that's why it has to be really good. so people will keep wanting it and talking about it. when the initial buzz wears off, you don't want it to die immediately. you need the goodness of the game to keep people talking and wanting, buying and playing.
great support, a good sales mechanism, and making product demos are all very important as well. if it's some new game and people can't tell you about problems they (and possibly many others) are having, then you can't fix the problem. if they can't buy it easily, most will give up. if they get to play a little for free, if the get a taste, then they'll want more.
with the right combination of marketing, you can achieve success. but the same level? ooo, hmmm... it would have to be a really good game. just like music sales for web-based indie musicians and video sales for web-based videographers.
With AAA titles consistently costing double-digit millions to develop, indie developers are pretty much the only ones who can afford (ironically as it is) to try out something completely new where nobody knows whether it'll be the next hit or just tank.
The next genre (not mix of genres, but completely new genre) will probably be started by an indie game. Of course, 5 years down the road nobody will remember that game, and everyone will attribute the fact to the first blockbuster game hopping on the bandwagon.
Indie games are where the truly exciting stuff happens. EA and Co. are tied up doing Random Game 2006 and Other Game Part 3.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
For an "indie" market in anything the barrier to entry has to be low. Clearly, video games are moving in the other direction and require more complex skills and larger teams to develop.
The possibilities for startups and "indies" and anyone with creative ideas are going growing fast and will continue to do so. However, the "indies" and startups of the future will become less likely to completely develop an entirely indepedent game as they did in the past.
One thing to note, I'm not sure how much the success or lack of success of "Heroes of the Pacific" could have to do with it being an indie game or not; it seems like the much bigger hurdle the game is facing is that it is a flight sim. From what I can tell, the flight sim genre seems to practically be on life support...... it seems like even the really notable and excellent flight sims that have come out in the past few years haven't really done well (I'm thinking that IL-2 was probably the most successful, and even then I don't know how well it sold).
enough, and the bigs can't go there. Of course most stores wouldn't touch it; just the thing for BitTorrent.
Uh... how is mainstream PC gaming going downhill *bad* for the indie developer?
I'm all for it!
Yes! Stop drowning the PC market with your retail FPSes that you would rather be putting on consoles! PUT them on consoles, and leave the PC market to us little guys! (well, girls in my case).
People will still have computers, and people will still want to play games on them. If the giant gorillas want to stick to consoles, GOOD! More room for weird little games and fun!
... Where have YOU been shopping? I've never seen an indie download priced like that.
I see them at $9.99, $15.99, and $19.99. Have you ever even *seen* a downloadable game?
Cool, there's a PC version. That means it'll run on Windows, Linux and the upcoming PC Mac!
Oh, wait...
Is direct purchasing enough of an incentive for your average gamer to shell out money on something he's never heard of before? Well, you may want to provide a free demo version. That's what I'm planning to do with my game. That way people aren't making a completely blind decision whether to buy or not.
What kinda chance does a guy working in a video store have creating a successful movie with a budget of 30K dollars, filmed by amateurs, acted out by amateurs(or Z-list actors) and filmed on old shitty cameras that make it look like barf. Pretty slim..
still it happens, and its not even THAT rare in the movie industry.
I think eventually, the same will happen with games. The problem today, seems to be that graphics are still
very though to make relatively good looking. The difference between the indie productions and the big software houses is simply too big still.
This will change in the future though, sometime 3D scanners and other appliances will make it possible for
hobbyist/amateurs to produce graphics that can be accepted by gamers. Not anything state of the art, just good enough to be accepted.
Just like movie viewers can accept less quality in indie movie productions. The problem ATM is simply the difference is to big, too compare it with the movie business it would be like if the independent movie productions was a slide-show of pictures with text underneath them.
Galactic Civilizations II is being developed and published by independent developer Stardock (www.galciv2.com).
how is mainstream PC gaming going downhill *bad* for the indie developer?
If mainstream PC gaming goes downhill, then the demand for video cards with TV-out and for cases that look good next to a TV will diminish, and people won't buy indie games that put four players on the same screen. This would only hurt someone who has the idea for the next Bomberman or Smash Bros.
Is direct purchasing enough of an incentive for your average gamer to shell out money on something he's never heard of before?
The best incentive for a gamer to buy something he's never heard of before is the search for a game that goes beyond the mass-produced flashy emptiness of today's games. Direct purchasing is just icing on that cake. However, I don't know whether the "average" gamer would do this.
I remember when I was 14 and I walked into the Electronics Boutique to buy a game for my 486/33. I didn't have a lot of money, and there were a lot of choices. Some of the games I'd heard of before and read reviews on, but in the corner of the store I saw a game called The Elder Scrolls: Arena. I'd never heard of it before, but I gave it a chance anyway. Over 10 years later, I still play Arena and get that feeling of awe and amazement when I step into the "virtual world" that they had created.
While that story is not a great parallel to the current situation (independent and smaller game shops had a better chance then and they were willing to actually create innovative games and not churn out sequels substituting pixel shader effects for gameplay and content), I just wanted to point out that there are certainly diamonds in the rough.
I think smaller game companies, or perhaps a small number of larger companies that listen to their fans instead of their marketing statistics, have a good chance of reversing this trend but it's going to be an uphill battle for sure.
Wow! All that and a bag of chips. No wonder the indie market is so difficult to break into.
--
The "are you a script" word for today is amateurs
If someone here hasnt heard of/played Gish, it is a wicked indie game that is a ton of fun to play.
Also for win/osx/lnx.
http://www.chroniclogic.com/gish.htm
(Disclaimer: Not affiliated with chronic logic..just thought the game was fun)
It's easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.
In Japan, indie games (also known as doujinshi games) is pretty big and has a huge following as well. Though most of the games are your typical Japanese dating sim games (mostly adult), other popular genre includes shooting (as in Ikaruga, Gunbird not the FPS games like Doom, Quake), console RPG and strategy games (similar to Advance Wars for the GBA).
These games are usually available for sale in shops specializing in Doujin stuff or by the makers themselves through the conventions and on the Internet.
With Dr. Derek Smart illuminating the path for those lesser lights out there, how can there be any doubt?
I realise there may be a handful of malcontents and nay-sayers out there, who claim he's not an indie developer (or a developer for that matter) but with the upcoming 30th revision of BC3K/BCM (tentatively titled Battlestar DDR) scheduled for 2008, we can all rest easy.
this is why there's Xbox Live Arcade. they're working with indie developers to allow people to download demos and buy them for the xbox and the 360...
Smells like desperation.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
"With AAA titles consistently costing double-digit millions to develop, indie developers are pretty much the only ones who can afford (ironically as it is) to try out something completely new where nobody knows whether it'll be the next hit or just tank."
The problem with being an independent is that they can least afford extraneous effects. e.g. piracy. And since pirate rhetoric is "No harm, because we would have never been your customer". An independent is hurt far more than say a big company, and is most likely to be discouraged from being "burned once, twice shy".* This is why there's IP law. To protect the little guy who can least afford the consequences of those who try to have dominion over them, be it via legal, or technological means.
*This applies as much to observers as it does the one getting burned.
Recent example: Fate, an excellent single-player Diablo 2 clone out of the blue, with 3D graphics and lots of nifty features that improves the game over its role model in many aspects. Instead of 3 CDs, you have a 27 MB download for the whole game (128 MB for improved graphics). Add to that an extensive modability, innovative features not present in D2 and, according to GameSpy, you get "what is handled as candidate for Game of the Year in some corners of the Internet". Glowing GameSpy review here. Try the game, it's great.
The grass is always greener on the other side of the light cone.
Books are too time wasting to consume.
Not to mention having little nutritional value. Taste like crap too.
That's why I just settle for reading 'em.
KFG
I just posted a write up on my blog about taking a different approach to consoles. I'm not the best writer but I think I generally get the point across. Check it out if you like. http://frommyheadtoyourhead.blogspot.com/2005/10/o pen-console-community.html
"Some of the games I'd heard of before and read reviews on, but in the corner of the store I saw a game called The Elder Scrolls: Arena. I'd never heard of it before, but I gave it a chance anyway."
What!? You took a chance on a digital good, instead of BT'ing it to lower your risk at getting a dud? What's the matter with you?
Yea, some of them will be the wave of the future. And some will always remain outside the mainstream, where they want to be, admired by those w/ (the?) taste.
Long before Manifesto has been Ambrosia. They make lots of fun games, and have a real cult following for Escape Velocity. And this programmer-controlled company has workers who really seem to enjoy doing what they do.
Lies about crimes
You seem to have your own issues will cell phones, but practically everyone owns one of those
I have a cell phone, but it has a character-cell screen and there's no menu option to add even the simplest text games to it. A lot of people will buy cell phones, but the "casual" gamer demographic will likely only be willing to pay for an entry-level phone such as the one I have, not one with a 160x160 pixel color screen and a J2ME virtual machine to run midlet games.
However, I am not sure that in the console market that independent developers really have that much of a shot to make a great game.
So if I want to get a little team together and make and sell a PC game with four players on the same screen, how should I go about developing and marketing it?
I think we can look to film for our answers here. The mainstream titles and blockbusters will come from EA sized companies just as the blockbuster movies tend to come from the big studios. However, there will continue to be a thriving indie community that produces high quality work on a budget.
And that's the reason why I plan on buying a GP2X.
Will GP2X handheld video game systems be sold in Wal-Mart stores in the United States? If I want to make and sell a GP2X game, how can I market it to enough GP2X owners that the investment of time and money into developing the game will be worthwhile?
... well, indie gamers can do their job out of sheer love alone and release it for free.
:)
Something that Electronic Arts will never do.
MoM++ - A Classic Expanded - [Master of Magic 1.5]
http://mompp.sourceforge.net/
Yeah, you corporate weenie knob-polisher, there is games after E.A. EA has the Sims. EA did not have Doom, Myst, Mario, the original Sim City, Tetris, Quake, Pac Man (scoff only if you never put a quarter into a Pac Man (or any of his relatives') machine in your entire life), or ten zillion other blockbuster titles that leap instantly to our minds when we think of popular games in history. And like any software gaming company, EA has had it's share of stinkers, too. (I have almost - after intense exorcism - forgotten about the one with the baby angel you fly around possessing people, which I purchased during one of those 24-hour brain tumors you get every year during flu season.)
Meanwhile, how's "free software" for indy? Truly, we may believe that there is only one kind of computer in the world and it proudly sports the bent-squares-in-Fischer-Price-colors logo on it's case, but I insist that non-Windows computers are not a myth - I'VE SEEN THEM! The truth is out there...running on an ext2 file system.
Now, while we're on the Sims, lemme just say that we played the Sims to death in our household for about a week, until we realized that the fun derived from playing the Sims came entirely from dressing up the little pixel dolls and downloading templates to draw precious little furniture pieces for them. Then we started mesh modeling instead. It's better because: (a) You can download it for free http://www.blender3d.org/cms/Home.2.0.html here, (b) It fits on a floppy instead of needing 2 Gigs to stretch out in, (c) It's all there, and doesn't need a $60 expansion pack every two weeks to keep current, (d) You can download some equally free starter dolls and furniture pieces to start playing with http://www.katorlegaz.com/index.php?a=download&c=B lender_3D_Model_Repository here, (e) You can make everything look like you want it too, even the naughty bits, and you don't need to wrestle with a transmogrifier to try to correct the blurry-pixels that appear when your model takes a shower, and finally (f) your models will never get so wrapped up in making breakfast that they forget they have to go to the bathroom and pee on the kitchen floor and then go take a shower because now their hygeine is red and leave breakfast to set the kitchen on fire, causing them to miss work and get fired over the telephone.
Yes, EA has had some home runs. No, they will not own the world. Now, don't you feel *better*?
What your saying is in a way quite a positive point, though a games may start small, they may grow to be much larger, if they stick around long enough. MSN messager server had a few games supported. If this was also implemented and widely used in open networks people could download games (or demos) to each other and play it immediatly, which is very effective word of mouth. There was an article about instant messaging earlier: It's Time To Take Back Instant Messaging
With indie games, you need to be able to overcome the fact that most gamers are not paying you the slightest bit of attention. To do this, you need to either get a ton of money together for a PR campaign, get a lucky break or have people naturally interested in the idea of the indie game market.
The latter is currently something where the Mac community has the advantage. The Mac community is somewhat insular due to years of neglect from major publishers. For many, many years, ports would be slow to arrive, of shoddy quality, poorly supported or simply never materialize. This worked to hurt the sales of what was ported, resulting in even fewer ports, and drove Mac users to look to their own neighborhood for software.
Ambrosia, Freeverse, GarageGames and others came in and said "We'll treat you well, please buy our stuff" and we did.
The Mac shareware market has never gone the way of the PC side of things. It is still vibrant and exciting. People still want to develop for it. Mac users still pay attention to it, and when a good indie game comes out, we spread the word. Mac news sites put it at the top of their list of stories, forums buzz, and hopefully the developers get the money that they deserve.
With the PC market, trying to get attention for your new game is like shouting for people to pay attention to you in the middle of a crowded stadium. You could be offering free money, but even then it is doubtful that you could get the attention of most people. With the Mac, people come up to you when you walk in the door and ask "What do you have for us today?" and if you have something truly interesting, then it isn't too hard for the news to spread far and wide.
So come on over, we'll reward you for the trip.
As for indie games in general, I'd like to see a few developers focus on long-underserved niches instead of developing more games in glutted categories (Puzzle). Non-shovelware sim games would be welcome as there have been very, very few of them in recent years other than "The Sims 2" and "Sim City 4". (wow, two whole games).
Which is why it's a good idea for indie developers to know their audience and advertise appropriately. Moonpod, for example, has ads for Starscape (a really nice shoot-em-up/management mix) displayed with gaming related comics like Ctrl+Alt+Del or 8-bit Theater - people who read those comics are likely to be interested in obscure and/or old-school-like games and having the advertisement on the site also serves as some kind of approval by the artists - after all, if they wouldn't like the game they wouldn't advertise it, right? (Actually, concerning how pissy web artists can get I'd figure that the probability of them knowing what games they're advertising for is quite high.)
Independent companies often produce stuff that is in some way superior what you usually get - one example would be Decker (Coral Cache), a graphically unimpressive freeware game for Windows that just happens to be the best simulation of breaking into computers in the Shadowrun world. Please don't click the link unless you really are interested, it's a private site and has a lot of images up front.
However, these innovative or otherwise extremely cool games need to be advertised to the right people. The usual gaming magazine reader will not be interested in games that deviate from the well-known genres like Uplink. But gaming geeks, "real" gamers and the like might want to know about it - which is where specialized advertising comes into play. If a company advertises with the bigger gaming comics it can reach a decent audience that is most likely more interested in their work than the average gamer. If they manage to get mentioned on Penny Arcade it's jackpot... And as Tycho is fond of letting the world know of obscure games he likes just getting PA to notice them might be a way of generating sales.
Indie game companies will always be able to reach an interested audience as long as there are internet celebrities who are willing to display their banner/discuss their latest game. It's not the megabuck business that mainstream gaming is, but there is an ecological niche for games that are just too far out for the regular gamer.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
Some of the future consoles might help indie developers. The new Xbox 360 dev-kit is supposedly some new version of Visual Studio 2005. The PS3 one apparently is expensive. The Revolution is, accoriding to quotes from Miyamoto, supposedly the same as the Gamecube one (which is supposedly "easy) and cheap to buy. Since there's no info on the Reveloution dev kits and little on the Gamecube ones unless you sign some contracts, I'd like to know how much it costs for the Xbox 360 kits and the Revolution ones.
Esp if Nintendo comes out with an on-line distribution system for games (large or small) for he Revolution, I have a few game ideas I'd like to sell for the Revolution. I can forsee even some people working remotely together to put a Revolution game together if its that "easy".
Than again, you can just make a shareware game on the PC or Mac and distribute on-line and save the dev kit costs.
EA can produce games that millions of people want. Indie teams produce games that thousands of people want.
There's nothing wrong with fulfilling the wants of thousands instead of millions.
Most of the people in my dorm are willing to play good games, regardless of graphics, voice acting, etc.
A few of us have Half-Life 2, and there's a few xboxes with Halo and Halo 2, but we can still get a few people playing Quake 3, because we like the pace of the game and the fact that corpses explode into a giant cloud of fine bloody mist.
And I can get at least two or three people playing Natural Selection, which runs on the Half-Life engine. The graphics are good, for the Half-Life engine, and the artwork is pretty amazing, but it's nothing compared to Half-Life 2.
And yet, it's at least as much fun to play as the Source mods, even the "official" ones like CS:Source and DoD:Source. It does something you rarely see -- RTS/FPS in the same game -- and it does marines vs. aliens with such balance that you rarely see people fighting desperately to be on one team or the other.
Yes, if you re-made Doom, it's nowhere near Doom 3. But most gamers wouldn't mind going back to Half-Life graphics if there was gameplay, plot, etc to back it up. And while Half-Life is harder than the Blair Bitch Project, it's not really harder than Always Greener.
I just checked on imdb and such, and there are a lot of "Always Greener" things, so here's a quick summary of the movie, from the blog of someone going to a film festival:
My favorite movie came at the end called "Always Greener," a movie filmed by teenagers (S.M.H Productions) from Fairfield, Iowa. Think of "American Pie" light - without the pie (thank God). A web-based cologne merchant goes too far with his marketing campaign and local students do everything in their power to put him out of business. The movie surprisingly is well put together. A budget of about $3,000 and 3 months of filming allowed these filmmakers to walk away with 6 awards at this festival - including "Best Narrative Feature." Every character was fun to watch and I am very eager to see their next project.
And if you need further proof that graphics don't matter, try Nexus (nexustk.com), which despite a tiny team and 2D side-scrolling graphics, manages to be one of the more interesting MMOs I've played.
The experience is not something you can buy with money. EA proves this. The experience of a good game is something somewhat less tangible than graphics, something that has to be put together carefully from graphics, gameplay, plotline, and all the other elements that make a good game. And it's something that can still be done by not just indie developers, but modders giving games away for free, and these modders can do a better job than the big software houses.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Seriously, why not approach the independent games market the same way that independent filmmakers do it? Games and movies are so closely interconnected these days anyhow. There should be an independent games festival, sites devoted to indie games, etc. Band together and distrubte compilations, etc. Yeah, you'll probably never afford to pay the licensing fees to get on a console, but the PC is open season.
You could also create mini-games to promote the real game, like the way Cry_Wolf has an online game to promote the movie. You don't need tons of money to capture the public's interest. Just a clever marketing scheme.
How does one find out about the indie games?
Marketing and distribution channel of course, and this is the achilles heel of independent anything.
It has to be not only fun, but fun for a lot of people, enough to create a buzz.
...it just doesn't involve consoles.
Big publishers have the console market pretty much sewn up, because consoles are expensive to develop for. Especially now they're moving away from relatively standard chips and architectures, it really requires a dedicated development effort to get stuff running on it. From what I see of homebrew console stuff, most of the effort is targetted at emulation. Fine, but hardly a sign of originality.
So, given the really low barrier of entry for development, PC/Mac is where it's at for indie development. It's been like that for a while now, and I don't see it changing too much in the future.
Game dev and music blog
Actually, the specialized skills you mention being needed for a game are available in programmer "collectives" like Ambrosia (see my post to parent).
So if you have a great idea for a game, but need others skills, you can probably find people willing to help in collectives like these. Or make one of your own.
These guys aren't billionaires, but they say they make a very nice life, and have fun at it.
Lies about crimes
Every once in a while a good low-budget movie comes along that does quite well at the box office. It doesn't have the big flash-bang special effects of a Hollywood blockbuster, but does have a good story, good directing, and good editing.
Indie games are no different. If something is good, word-of-mouth will increase sales. Just because a game is an "indie" doesn't mean it's anything special. I subscribe to PC Gaming and they review all sorts of games every month, including indies, which get the lowest ratings because they suck compared to the rest of the competition. To be fair, a lot of big studio games also get mediocre ratings as well. Cool-looking graphics alone does not make for good game.
What it comes down to is if the game is fun to play. Your average gamer doesn't care about corporate politics, "starving" programmers and artists, etc., etc. when playing a game. They just want to have fun.
The days of shareware games are over. Games like Apogee's Commander Keen will never be anything more than a small blip on the gaming community's radar. This industry has matured, just like all other industries. You don't see or are unaware of indie car makers, indie beer breweries, indie toiletries manufactures, etc. The vast majority of people only know Ford, GM, Budweiser, Coors, Procter & Gamble, and Gillette. Just the same way most games only know EA and Vivendi.
The game is just too expensive. In my country a normal price for a PC game is around $50 or less. $83 is one hell of a ripoff.
"Long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead." (John Maynard Keynes)
With development costs being so high on consoles and PCs, why not just develop for a handheld or a cellphone? Bad graphics? Chalk it up to weak hardware. Bad design? Blaim it on limited interface. Bad execution? Release it at a budgeted price and may the buyer beware.
Here's an "indie game quasi-success story": Vendetta Online is a space-based MMORPG developed by 4 people (Guild Software). It has been online for about a year now, and has a few players (several hundred, maybe more). The fact that it's made by such a small company is part of its charm- regular content updates and bugfixes, quick support from the dedicated devs, lots of personal contact, etc. We even get new features for free (like the upcoming player-controllable capital ships). Can a large company beat that? I think not. And, hell, it's only $10/month. Less if you buy multiple months. The tech's not bad- high poly models, high-resolution textures, some purty pixel+vertex shader effects. w00t!
My Systems
> Books are too time wasting to consume.
Plus they might actually *teach* you things aboute life, the universe and everything! Scary...
There is definitely a very promising future for indie games, and there are lots of developers and portals which are already doing this and doing very well at it. The market is growing every day.
I've seen this with my own site Sortasoft.com, which has been growing at a very rapid pace. The fact that I can distribute games at almost 0 cost allows for a very high profit margin. It also allows me to distribute games for promotional purposes such as contests, etc. at no cost.
As evidence of this... mod me up and then drop me an email (promo +at+ sortasoft +dot+ com) and I'll give you a free copy of my game Funky Farm. Well see if we can get this shameless plug up to a 5.
It seems to be a question of degrees. And I say this for the people reading, not necessarily to the parent poster who seems to know how it works.
You have an idea. You let it mull around the back of your mind for a few years. You get maybe three friends and associates interested in the idea, and over the course of quite a few weekends you pull together a very rough demo. At this point you may need to finagle some art resources either by schmoozing or paying someone. You hit every industry contact you know with your demo, and many that you don't. Look for a "champion" who really likes your game and will help drive it through. While you do that, on the strength of your demo get some fundraising going. VC's are nice, but really hit up small businesses, people, friends, family, etc. Now scale up production, moving into a low-cost but rat free office space, and hiring artists, developers, an office manager, a business manager, etc. Appoint yourself project director (or somesuch), and get to work making that game. Hit your milestones, piggyback into your publisher's E3 booth, and ship. There is nothing in the above scenario that prevents people who are genuinely interested from breaking in.
Most independent studios really are indie studios that got funding and scaled up. The studio that released Alien Homonid, for example, started as a few guys working their tales off, found investers, scaled up, created a great game, shopped for a publisher, and released. Other studios get a publisher involved earlier to mitigate risk.
And these aren't rare: somewhere in the realm of 1/2 of all games are created by independent developers. See that logo that pops up on the screen after the EA title? That's the developer. Not all of those are independent, but many are.
The difference between and indie and an independent developer is just that an independent developer wasn't afraid to grow. At some point they may get bought out by a major studio and enter what is somewhat pessimistically known as a "decline phase," but that's also another step in the natural evolution of things. I believe parent poster pointed out the "craploads of cash..."
If you want to be independent, and all of the risks / control that entails, you can do it. Or perhaps more strongly, that is how it is done.
The ______ Agenda
It Will Be Hard, Because Of The New Systems, More Work Will Be Needed To Be Put Into A Game, So It will make indie games a lot harder to produce, but being able to distribute them online instead of paying for the CD's would help with the costs...
> Maybe there was some deeper stuff in there and it was
> the greatest love story since Romeo and Juliet
The notion that it was supposed to be a love story didn't even occur to me until days later when I read someone complaining about that in a movie review.
IMHO, the movie was not a love story at all, but was a character piece---an examination of two people who feel lost, both within their lives and between cultures. I didn't feel any romantic tension between the two main characters, at all---they were two lost souls tossed together by the tumultuous waves of their lives, finding (in that brief moment before life pulled them apart again) a sense of understanding and companionship that people rarely find, and that steadied them through some particularly rough seas.
For that, the movie was brilliant. But if you were watching it as a love story, then, yeah, it was bad - it sucked as a love story because it wasn't one.
No.
And then there was E
cell phone development is just as closed as console development. sure you can get the dev kits for free, but there are still as many hoops to jump through in order to get your titles into the market.
1) you have to pass certification for whatever platform you are developing for (true brew for qualcomm phones, j2me has it's own, as does symbian)
2) you need to get carrier buy-in in order to even have the option of downloading the games to the phones - this involves digital signatures of the apps that the phones recognize, etc...
the 'big' catch with mobile development, and something that has been very rarely mentioned in any of the hype / news about 'mobile gaming' recently is that there is no single 'cellphone' platform - there are literally hundreds and hundreds of handsets that you are required to port your game to in order to get it out to market.
we recently finished one of the biggest launch titles for a major publisher entering the mobile space, and just for the 'brew' side of things (for qualcomm phones), we had to port our game to 4 different phones to meet the publishers requirements, and then they outsourced the rest of the porting to literally 100+ unique handsets, each with their own performance, memory & display differences...
a major title for cellphones has to not only be released for the 100's of handsets for one specific app type, but it needs to be ported to j2me & likely symbian in order for it to be successful (ie get a publisher), depending on where you are looking to release the game.
j2me is the biggest nightmare - sure there is a 'java spec', but EVERY single phone has a custom version of the JVM with it's own idiosyncracies, and even different firmware versions on the same phone can respond completely differently, breaking your application.
add on top of this all of the extra localization issues, etc
all for a miniscule amount of money
i personally believe that mobile development is a waste of developer time - the revenue streams & business model simply are not there yet and the platform is way to fragmented to develop on.
we were lucky (and the only reason we go near mobile development) because the publisher is managing all of the localization as well as the bulk of the porting for us - all we have to do is provide these 4 key ports (baseline ports) which essentially give them a starting point for the hundreds of other phones that they need to port the game to.
it's a big, fragmented nightmare really.
Indie games? Direct download? Where has the submitter of this piece been?
You grow up, that's why
Those without J2ME are the exception rather than the rule.
And unfortunately, the majority of phones on prepaid plans seem to be exceptions, either having tiny monochrome character-cell displays or, if they do look like J2ME capable phones, being locked into being able to use only content that has been signed by the service provider.
I say there is, I mean, who hasn't heard of Alien Hominid!? Pfft, non-believers.
It's never just a game when you're winning. - George Carlin
The thing about the indie movie market is that I'm quite willing to watch a movie for 2 hours even if I don't like it that much, because it is only 2 hours and doesn't require constant user intervention. I can doodle, glance at a magazine, carry on an unrelated conversation, ridicule the movie, or try to find some redeeming quality about it (some actor I particularly like for instance). For this reason I can watch a wide assortment of movies, develop obscure tastes, and in general help the indie movies market continue to succeed.
I have a much lower tolerance for bad games than bad movies, every time the game requires user interaction I might reevaluate whether I want to continue playing or not, or at least every time I die, save the game, or otherwise get interrupted.
I set very high standards on what games I purchase- a mention in a slashdot article doesn't do it, it takes some combination of positive reviews, personal recommendations, a good demo, a good positive experience with a previous game in the series or genre, and even hype and marketing to even make me even consider playing it. I don't feel it's a big loss when I set my standards so high I occasionally miss good games- I know I'm going to miss good games because I just don't have time to play them all. If it's really good and successful, it will have imitators and sequels that may improve upon the original.
For that among other reasons I don't really think there will be a viable indie games market. Every once and a while there may be a breakthrough that results in a upstart company or dev-team or game concept being propelled into the mainstream, but otherwise probably not much of a self-sustaining niche outside of the main market in which many people could have a career in. But if you are going to try to prove me wrong, think niche- adult games, games for people with disabilities, or whatever you can come up with- and make the games short, cheap, and well-tested.
The number and quality will just vary from one year to the next. It's like asking if there's a future for B-movies.
Unfortunately you get one in every area, in every walk of life and this Costikyan guy is the Idiot of Indie Gaming. Where the hell does he get off saying that no one has 'got it right' until he came along, what a WANKER. There are plenty of succesful indie developers and publishers selling directly to the public. Have a look at most of the MMOG's out there Greg YOU IDIOT. Bad mouthing everyone else in indie game development is hardly a contructive way to go about trying to promote indie gaming, moron. That's what a blog can do to a person already overburdened by an overstuffed ego. Make them think that they're some kind of legend whose every utterance is gold. Guess what Greg, I wrote an article almost identical in subject matter and conclusions to yours, except I did it TEN YEARS AGO in 1995. TEN FUCKING YEARS AGO! Does that make me ten times more legendary and cool than you? MORON. Ego's like yours are NOT wanted in Indie games development, why don't you go and get yourself a gameshow or something?
Just because it doesn't get out to millions doesn't mean it's not valuable - take fiction writing, slam poetry (live, not televised), or street music/theatre performers. There are huge industries around each of those media, but I don't think you're going to walk up to someone who's making their living in a creative art and tell her she's a failure because some people are making way more money than she is. If you're looking to make a programmer's salary, you have to be disciplined, but there's no reason an indie game that does OK won't suit you for a year when you only have to pay yourself. Maybe marketing makes it more likely that the game will sell, but word of mouth is a powerful thing - and free, to boot. So I don't think it's a competition with the big companies and their marketing, it's a completely different avenue of business.
Starships Unlimited is a fantastically additicting 4X game. Battleship Chess isn't too shabby, either.
Both can be found at http://www.apezone.com/
Greg
It is the 21st century and the time for Klax has passed.
Why?
IANAL but write like a drunk one.