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Wideload's Seropian Talks Indie Game Freedom
simoniker writes "Wideload's Alex Seropian, who must recently finished wacky Xbox title Stubbs The Zombie, but also co-founded Bungie, has been chatting about how big-budget games are made, and noting: "I had a great experience at Microsoft. But being on the other side of the fence, there were a lot of developers that were making games for the Xbox for launch time, and a lot of them were struggling for one reason or another... a lot of them were struggling with trying to manage their finances, that cashflow, because they were living under the milestone payment system. And a lot of them were going out of business. And I thought, 'Gee, if I weren't doing this for a living, I'd think this is totally a loser business to be in.'" Seropian now suggests using a small internal group to make games and staffing up with independent contractors when each project starts. Why aren't all games done like this?"
I'd have to question how viable the idea of hiring contractors to flesh out a project would be. Games continually grow in complexity, and those people who have the talent to create high level art and code and have a familiarity with game design would likely have been hired full-time elsewhere, leaving the second-raters as your talent pool for contractors.
The whole model of hiring remote contractors to do content work is already live and well in indie gaming. Im paying an artist and a writer for my next game -> http://www.kudosgame.com/ and I'll be paying an external PR guy and buying in stock sounds for it too. I've worked for companies that employ sound people and animators full time, which is lunacy. What the hell do these people (not to mention the QA dept) do in the first 6 months of a project?
The movie industry learned years ago that this fixed-staff system was nonsense and moved to a contractor system. Big games need to do the same. Us little guys already have.
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
The games I play these days are the ones that allow me to play in 15 minutes bursts. Games that require 30 to 45 minutes of gameplay before reaching a save points are the ones that I have to schedule into my calendar.
I work for a consulting company, and trust me that all subcontractors have some kind of multiplier for markup. The main company doesn't just pay for the workers time, they pay for overhead, benefits, insurance, AND profit. Yes the subcontractor's shareholders want a big piece of the pie.
So yeah, if you don't need these production workers all the time, then subcontracting is cheaper. But if you use them all the time then it could be cheaper to just hire some more people and cut out the middleman. Of course sometimes the reason for subcontracting is to reduce liability. I wonder if Rockstar would have been as liable for Hot Coffee, if they subcontracted out the game.
I think a good number of indie console developers would be rather surprised to hear that. What with the low cost of Wii dev kits and Xbox Live Arcade, that's no longer true. Yes, you have to know what you're doing, and have some sort of business plan, but small teams making small games have a nice niche in the current generation.
Been there, done that. In my case, it was Magic: The Gathering card game. For my roommate, it was playing Metroid when it came out for the SNES. He finished the game in 48 hours, slept for 72 hours after that, and missed quite a few exams in between. Ah, yes, the days of irresponsible youth.