The Future of Independent Game Development

The Guardian's Games Blog has an article discussing where indie game development will go in the next few years after its recent resurgence. The story follows the success of one small game studio, and suggests that the games industry will move to further embrace low-cost development. Quoting: "The likes of XBLA, ... PSN and WiiWare represent a reasonable revenue stream for publishers and developers, especially with a recession looming. However, in-house staff may not have the skills required to punch out cool, hugely intuitive budget games, with little or no management. If you look at something like Geometry Wars from Bizarre Creations, the project was started in the free time of experienced coder Stephen Cakebread, and may never have happened had he been shunted on to different, larger projects. Instead, big industry players are reaching out to the indie scene to source talent."

Comments

Reach out to the indie scene

[Anonymous Coward]

It doesn't matter if it's not as good, you did it yourself.

Whats with the console obsession?

[cliffski]

Firstly, bedroom coding was NEVER dead. Fuck it, I should know, I was doing bedroom coding games back when I used to read articles in Develop magazine about teams under 100 couldn't make games, and I kept doing it when Peter Molyneux was warning everyone it was suicide to start a small dev company, and I'm still doing it now. The fact that mainstream media such as the guardian doesn't read our press releases doesn't mean we don't exist.
Suddenly, because there are some indie games on console games, people think "indie gaming is back!".

Bullshit.

True INDEPENDENT gaming will always be at home only on the PC and the Mac, and maybe the iphone, because these are the platforms with no barrier to entry. If your game is for XBLA or PS3 or Wii, then your game idea and code has to be approved by a committee of suits at one of those companies. That's about as un-independent as it gets.
True indie gaming is where someone owns the whole company, has invested their own money to fund, sell and promote the game, and earns all the revenue. The minute you have a 'distribution and publishing partner', things begin to compromise.

That's not to say that you don't get some awesome games from 'indies' on consoles, but to herald it as the home of indie gaming is just wrong.

Re:Whats with the console obsession?

[Anonymous Coward]

You can publish to XBOX without getting microsofts approval.

http://creators.xna.com/en-US/

The XNA Creators Club allows you to develop games for PC and XBOX 360.

You can then publish the games to the 360 and charge points for them.
(they get reviewed by the community to ensure that they do not contain bad things).

XNA is a managed wrapper around direct X that provides a nice layer of abstraction.

(Also I would like to quickly say that the Farseer physics engine is very nice).

Joopsy.

Re:Whats with the console obsession?

[Xest]

"If your game is for XBLA or PS3 or Wii, then your game idea and code has to be approved by a committee of suits at one of those companies. That's about as un-independent as it gets."

Not sure what the setup for the PS3 and Wii is but the XBox's community games are peer reviewed by other developers and not by Microsoft officials. XNA is also extremely easy to use and has some fantastic samples available.

I'd argue XBox community games is probably one of the easiest ways for indies to get into game development and have their games published to a wide audience. Even if you develop yourself and advertise yourself games you've made for the PC people still have to find your game in the depths of the web, whilst with XBox community games your game is listed right there on the consolate equivalent of a desktop for the user to find. It takes away the pains of marketing and distribution and even the low level parts of PC game development (you don't need to cater for different LOD for different spec hardware for example), it allows indies to concentrate entirely on the important part- game development itself.

Re:mods

[Xest]

Why can't indies license engines and why should those that do probably not?

There's lots of good AAA quality engines out there with cheap/indie licenses:

www.terathon.com
www.powerrender.com
www.garagegames.com

There's also lots of games that have been built on them by indies and been quite successful.

Fewer big titles can only be a good thing.

[castironpigeon]

Maybe computer games will actually show some game design again instead of being graphics/physics engine demos.

Re:mods

[sammyF70]

because most indie game dev's won't write their own engine, and a lot won't even be able to license one, and frankly a lot of them that do license one probably shouldn't.

There are plenty of free or lowcost engines out there.
Torque (mentioned in TFA) is low cost and relatively easy to get into (mostly script based if I remember correctly).
Ogre3D is free, crossplattform, and in combination with openAL and a good (and free) physics library you can hae a kickass game engine in (relatively) no time.
And that's if you want to write some 3D game. If you want to stick to 2D, your options are even vaster.

I think the problem is that many people who think "I want to write games myself" should have watched THAT beforehand.

Re:Indie gaming is alive and strong

[Dadamh]

Braid is fun times. There are plenty of others. Spelunky and Dwarf Fortress come immediately to mind. The guy that writes Dwarf Fortress supports himself on donations, which is pretty cool.