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?

Comments

Indie games were the wave of the past

[saskboy]

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.

Re:Indie games were the wave of the past

[JaredOfEuropa]

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.

It's becoming harder though. Back in the days of the C64 and the Amiga, I was technically fully able to create a state-of-the-art game on those platforms. I suck as an artist; I can barely squeeze a recognisable tune out of a keyboard, but on those platforms I could still do the art, music and all of the coding, on my own. In fact I did... my game made it to the stores but never sold a lot, instead of a nice Porsche I got perhaps a 2nd hand Alpha Romeo's worth out of the deal. (I can conveniently blame the producer going bankrupt though :) ). My college flatmate made a game on the Amiga, outdoing several of similar commercial games. (He never sold it but it got him hired at Rockstar).

These days, most types of games need good production values as well as a good concept. Hardly any game can get away with simple graphics like Tetris. You'll need good coders, level designers, artists, musicians, sound effects guys, motion experts... talents that are rarely found in a single person.

To add to that, games are getting more complex in the way of graphics engines, physics engines, and AI as well. It's hard enough to find someone up-to-date in these areas, let alone find someone who can improve on them.

So, you're probably looking at a team of various skills that are not widely available. I'd think these people are likely to be working in the industry already, and not much inclined to work on an extra project, especially not if you're on a typical EA 8 day workweek.

Then again, if you do have a good concept, it might be worth pursuing it, and convincing others to join in. Then hope you get bought out for craploads of cash. :) Nothing wrong with making money.

I point the world to

[cassidyc]

stardocks galactic civ and also Ragdoll kung fu

thankyouverymuch
CJC

Secret bootloader

[tepples]

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.

MorePG

[Doc Ruby]

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.

Well...

[Chickenofbristol55]

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.

EA didn't make ID

[jmichaelg]

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.

Re:EA didn't make ID

[Tankko]

Yeah, but don't forget that DOOM wasn't a huge widespread hit until GT Interactive picked it up, marketed it and got it into stores.

Cell phone and flash games

[Eightyford]

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.

Misconeception about Indie Anything

[Monkelectric]

Just because you made a great Indie game, doesn't mean anyone will care. Seriously. You act as if you could only make a good game the world should coming running. The sad fact is that the average person doesn't have the ability to appreciate art. A few years back a great film called "Lost In Translation" came out. I saw it, and was the *ONLY* person who didn't walk out of the theater. I was enthralled, probably the best movie I saw that year, maybe the best movie made that year.

Year after year art and hard work are ignored for sex and cheap thrills. I wish it were different.

Mobile games good indie platform

[LarsWestergren]

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

If it's a good idea, the big guys will take it.

[Hyperlink Processor]

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.

Indie Game Math

[Rayonic]

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.

Experimenters

[Tom]

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.

Where did you pull those numbers from?

[Anonymous Coward]

... 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?

I'd remain anonymous, too,

[Hosiah]

if I had to stand up in public and wonder aloud " does E.A. already own the future of video games?" Certainly, and airborne simians are going to fly out of my rectal orifice.

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*?

You assume a perfect market - perfect information.

[Anonymous Coward]

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 was a love story?

[Dire Bonobo]

> 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.

Re:Not at all.

[DeafByBeheading]

Sure, but will game developers want to use it? If all you have is online distribution (i.e., you don't have a boxed product with CDs), it would take guts to offer totally unrestricted content. Can you imagine record companies getting behind a de-DRMed iTMS? Maybe some artists would be interested, but that's different--recordings are a way to get you to come to shows. Since video game developers don't really have live shows, the digital content is all they have to sell, so I can see them wanting to make sure that they get paid for it...

Re:I think so.

[rinkjustice]

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.

Wow. That sounded exactly like me about 10 years ago, except for now I'm primarily into retro gaming with my daughter (I buy old consoles and games for cheap but I plan on buying Nintendo's Revolution if I got the ching). This segment of the market you and I are in is growing. Hollywood is running out of ideas and it's terminal so it's not like us "thirtysomethings" can justify spending $60 on a night at the cinema of even wasting two hours on a dvd. TV and satelite is just as pitiful (500 channels and still nothing to watch - I hear it all the time).

Yup, gaming (new and old) seems to offer the most bang for the buck. The industry won't ignore us.