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Defining an Indie Game Developer
NinjaBee Games writes "A continual debate rages about the nature of making independent games. 'What is Indie game development?' This argument endures throughout the year, but it's almost never heard louder than right after the announcement of finalists or winners of an Indie game development contest. The debate currently is in full swing after Microsoft's recent announcement that they will be changing the name of the Xbox Live Community Games section to Xbox Live Indie Games. In light of this important debate, Brent Fox of Indie developer NinjaBee has written a blog post in which he claims he has finally found the 'clear and undeniable' definition of Indie."
Indie music is music published independently. Indie games are games published independently. If an indie game is taken up by a big publisher, its no longer indie.
Independently of a 3rd-party publisher. A publisher being an entity that provides money up front in exchange for rights related to the game (sales money, IP ownership, etc).
big.
Big is probably irrelevant, I used this to distinguish between the dev's grandma giving them £10 for a pizza during one night of development and EA giving them £500'000 for the rights to the game. But its a needless distinction.
So if Microsoft releases a game and self-publishes it, it's indie? I think that doesn't fit into most people's definitions of indie (I would guess most people use "indie" as a synonym for "non-mainstream", which is practically impossible to formally define)
I would argue that Steam is both. Just because Valve is a publisher that allows for direct purchases, doesn't make it not a publisher.
Anyone can write an application, and put the compiled binary up on their website, and "self-publish". Steam gives exactly what a publisher does: direct access to a large distribution network. In this case, that comes in the form of a desktop client app that serves as a storefront. In the case of EA, it comes in the form of relationships with brick and mortars like Game Stop, Wal-Mart, Best Buy, and others.
Either way, I'd say it's still publishing.
What's curious is that in the indie music world, "indie" just tends to mean independent of the "major" record labels (There are four, right? I'm not a big music person). It can still be published by a record company though. Epitaph Records has been cited as an example of that. But they publish for Bad Religion, NOFX Rancid, The Offspring, Pennywise, and other relatively well known artists. That doesn't seem to stop peoplr from claling them "indie".
The problem is that there is no direct analogy to the "Big Four" in gaming. The biggest publishers would probably be the three console makers(Nintendo, Microsoft, and Sony), then a few dozen or so companies like EA, Sega, Konomi, Activision, Capcom, etc.
Oh, and throw a wrench into the works with Valve, and Steam competitors like Direct-To-Drive, etc.
I think the answer is to have different levels for these indie game competitions.
It could be by number of team members, or by dollar amount, or size of the publisher.
As for scenarios like the one someone else posited where a game is developed by a small studio in January, picked up by a major publisher like EA in June, and entered into an Indie Game Festival in October, I think what's important is what the level of support was when the game was in development. If EA funded the game, no way. But if EA only got involved after the team had a finished product, why not?
Touch everywhere, even when inappropriate.
An indie developer is the guy that says "Hey, I can code. I like video games. I should make my own video game! I have no visual or musical artistic sense, but that's just filler toward the end of the project!"
500 hours of coding later, the indie developer comes to realize that their game will fail miserably due to the fact that they underestimated how hard it would be to come across free graphic, music, and sound effect assets that reflect what the game is supposed to be.
That same indie developer then spends another handful of hours learning Blender to realize that the best they can come up with artistically is a sphere that's had its centre punched in that they euphemistically call a "bean bag chair" and try to completely retool their gameplay around that. Grand Theft Auto 5 becomes Beanbag Jumping World.
1,000 hours, many Blender exports, recording sessions in the bathroom bashing a plank of wood with a hammer to re-create the sound of wood cracking without buying some $100+ sound library and a crappy public domain tune later, they release their game on their webpage and over the next five years, approximately 3 people not related to the author check it out.
If you're develop a game (or, for that matter, create a music track/make a movie) without being paid up-front by a 3rd party for the rights to publish the final product, you're independent. As soon as you get money for the rights to publish the final product before it is even in a releasable state, you're not independent anymore, as this kind of money generally comes with its own set of limitations and set by the publisher. You are now owing a finished product for the delivered money, and it generally should conform to conditions set by the publisher ("look ... you can't show boobs! And could you please add some gore when you use a grenade?")
I would rant longer, but power outage, and my UPS is going to die soon.
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Thanks to RGB and CMYK and other color models and scales we know what exactly means Cyan or 0.0.255 or 0000FF, but the common "blue" remains elusive."
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