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?"

Comments

smaller devs do this a lot

[cliffski]

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.

So what's new?

[JaredOfEuropa]

Thus, for his new company, Wideload, Seropian chose to use a small core group, one that would be employed the entire time. Once they design a game on paper, they'll prototype the game, and do pre-production work on it. Then, when they have the funding to put it into production, Wideload will staff up with independent contractors (some work on-site, but most remotely). For the last third of the project, the original core will do all the post-production where they play test and tune the game.

So basically they outsource rather than employ developers. I can well imagine that when they have a few projects in the pipeline (which is what Seropian is after), they'll get together and say: "gee, we got so much going that we could hire two artists, a sound guy and 3 coders, and keep them busy full time. Be a hell of a lot cheaper...". A few years down the line, after having a few bad experiences with some offsite contractors, and being frustrated by increased and more difficult management effort, they'll probably run most of their stuff in house again.

I've seen it happen a few times in business software shops, and I'm not sure why games would be any different.

Authorized development

[Darkforge]

As I've complained before, the problem here is that you can't develop any games for the major consoles unless you are an authorized developer.

Before you can develop games for consoles you need to apply to the particular console company to become an approved developer. The exact process varies but it generally means proving that you are an experienced game developer with a financially stable company. The console companies won't approve hobby/inexperienced teams to work on their consoles.

Got a great idea for a video game? Well, too bad. You have to get approval first... and BTW, Nintendo doesn't like your idea.

Sure, you can code up homebrew games, but doing so requires hacking your console (which is something most people don't know how to do, and in many cases requires expensive/pseudo-legal mod chips or other hardware).

Next time you see an article about "indie developers", don't get them confused with the ordinary shareware/freebie game developers you see online. The consoles have no indie developers, and probably never will have indie developers. Nintendo, MS and Sony are all afraid that people will code up porn games (which they will) and will disable the console's anti-piracy features (which they will).