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Indie Games Go Retail
Via GameSetWatch, an AP story about a boxed edition of several IGF entrants. The Independent Games festival has attracted a number of creative designers, and the results are now available on the retail shelves. From the article: "Indie games aren't commonplace outside of the World Wide Web. Despite that, Moondance successfully wooed Best Buy to stock 'IG: Independent Games' on their shelves beginning last fall. The disc features such casual games as the engineering sim 'Bridge Construction Set' and the popular robot battle game 'Dark Horizons Lore Invasion.' 'Our strategy is to have games for all kinds of gamers: traditional gamers, family gamers and now independent gamers,' says Chris Koller, merchandising director for video games at Best Buy."
Are these going to just look like those "Collection of 5 billion arcade games for your PC..." which are infact about 100 copies of the same game, which are freely downloadable, but now enclosed with a special spyware packaging and nice cost attached?
If they aren't, im wondering how they are going to manage to differienciate between the two. I mean, do these indie games offer working support?
- http://www.milkme.co.uk
For most new products, the hurdle of limited space drastically reduces the ability for a newcomer to make a dent in the market. Stores have little reason to stock something they're unsure of, and they know little about it. That goes doubly so for video games, due to the sheer magnitude of games, let alone how drastically different the games are. How do you explain to a customer that a new indie game is "the perfect mix of Robotron and Tetris blended with a reactive light synth" if they've only played Tetris before... and the professional Tetris is sitting just one row over?
Online, all of these games can build up a reputation for quality, or graphics, or just plain fun gameplay. I don't see how moving into a retail space really helps the indie developers, especially if they end up bundled with other games, or forced to share shelf space with non-indie games. I mean, I almost never see people actively perusing the "cheapy" software aisles at Best Buy. It just seems like a bad pairing to add more software that people have never heard of without the advantages of an online network of support, namely large screenshots, lots of actual customer reviews, demos, and so on.
Will this actually make a profit for any of the indie game devs on there? Amazon sells it for $27.99, suppose their distributor gets $15 and passes on $7 in royalties to split up umong all the game devs. So, maybe you get $0.10 per disk sold. If they sold 100,000 of these (a number which seems high to me), sure I'd be amused with the $10,000 I made off a game I wrote in my spare time.
:-P
Maybe the speculative win here is to get popular through this channel, have people reccommend your game to friends and have them pay $$ directly into your site to buy a copy from you. Or get repeat business and have people who bought the disc buy your next game for $$ from your site.
Anyway, best of luck to them all, but I won't be buying until the MacOS X version comes out.
Start Running Better Polls
Actually, if you read your own link, he's refering to having an idea and trying to market it to a large game company such as EA. As an indie myself I have to say, I agree with him. What were talking about here is more then just ideas. Were talking about developing games and marketing them ourselves (via the net or through this new IGF channel), a very doable task.
Which, to complete your comment, is actually what Warren Spector generally writes about Indie development having to do now. Mr. Spector is not an idiot, nor is he an industry tool. The difficulties he notes are quite valid. The difficulties are ones of scale (i.e. you don't see a Morrowind or Oblivion coming out of the Indie camp), and liscensing issues, among others.
First of all the title of the box was poorly chosen since not all Independent games are casual.
Casual games aren't exactly new to retail. What you don't see at Best Buy are the non-casual games produced by independent developers. It is a shame too, as independent developers are forced to make boat loads of casual games precisely because they can't get retail space without a big name publisher. Not that there aren't incredibly good indy casual games (Oasis comes to mind... http://www.oasisgame.com/), but I think gamers are starting to clamor for more innovation in regular games and they aren't getting it from the big name publishers.
Publishers and retailers are idiots as far as we the gamers are concerned. Some may be good at what they do, but they know nothing about games. They shouldn't be calling all the shots but they are. They basically have homogenized interests: big name sequels, flashy graphics, me-too gameplay. At best publishers might sometimes insist on "checkbox innovation", but that's all.
I think the industry senses gamers venting on message boards and blogs, and they are seeing it in declining sales on all games that aren't huge mega-productions. The industry itself is starting to employ "checkbox indy" as a stall tactic. You can already see it creeping up like in this article and like in XBox Marketplace speeches (if there are mostly non-casual games on marketplace correct me, but all I hear about is Geometry Wars and other casual games). When Sony and Nintendo launch their own online marketplaces they'll probably spin a similar line about offering 'exciting innovative games' while in reality the only (non-classic) games available will be casual.