Slashdot Mirror
More Devs Going Indie, To Gamers' Benefit
Wired is running a feature about how a growing number of game developers are abandoning jobs at major publishers and studios and taking their experience to the indie scene instead. Quoting:
"They’re veterans of the triple-A game biz with decades of experience behind them. They’ve worked for the biggest companies and had a hand in some of the industry’s biggest blockbusters. They could work on anything, but they’ve found creative fulfillment splitting off into a tiny crew and doing their own thing. They’re using everything they’ve learned working on big-budget epics and applying it to small, downloadable games. The good news for gamers is that, as the industry’s top talents depart the big studios and go into business for themselves, players are being treated to a new class of indie game. They’re smaller and carry cheaper price tags, but they’re produced by industry veterans instead of thrown together by B teams and interns. Most importantly, unlike big-budget games that need to appeal to the lowest common denominator to turn a profit, these indie gems reveal the undiluted creative vision of their makers."
Some indie games are the best I've ever played. The Penumbra series springs to mind. Bungie made their best stuff prior to being assimilated by Microsoft. However, indie doesn't always mean good. I remember hearing about "Darkness Within" and it was truly awful. Intriguing, rather Lovecraftian story, but godawful gameplay.
Is the reason I am going indie, It is my ultimate dream to make a living from games I love making. I know a few indie devs here in Melbourne, for some it is their day job, for others they still need a stable part time job to support themselves, and for most its not the money (although) that is nice. It is about the quality of life. Typed on phone so apologies for bad grammar.
Automation - The Car Company Tycoon Game
Pay for the work wasn't worth it.
Pay in the gaming industry sucks. I left and immediately made about 15% more, the job was more stable, and less stressful. Went on to make much more later.
The second issue that really got to me was the stupid endless "crunch time". It was ALWAYS crunch time. Project management sucked so it was just some fat-ass bigwigs always just moving up the powerpoint milestones, while adding requirements at the same time. I got tired of the 50-to-60-hour work weeks.
More pay for less work. Only idiot noobs straight out of high-school could think much good of that industry. "I wanna make video games for a living!" says the dork who played video games for the last 15-years of his life (at 20).
Sometimes I think about the fun, and I might join some startup again some day, but I'd never work for any of the big guys again.
EA GAMES - We fuckup everything.
As a gamer i welcome indy games. So long as they DON'T make the same mistakes the big game companys seem to make over and over.
I don't care who gets my money. So long as i get something i enjoy that does NOT piss me off at some point. EA... i'm looking at you here.
... because they don't have the budget to spend on superfluous crap that is unrelated to the gameplay.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Large game companies have a lot of personnel. Big bloated game companies need to fail and indies will fill the void. Now if only we could somehow apply this to our financial sector.
... at the beginning was like this. Very indie. This was when they made their best stuff IMHO.
I hope to see a lot more good indie games. These $20million blowout games lately have been terrible (most anyway). Sometimes a simple game is more fun, such as:
http://magic.pen.fizzlebot.com/
There will always be a market for quality.
This one's pretty interesting: http://www.wolfire.com/overgrowth
;), free from DRM and they are even developing for Linux (just as they did the predecessor). They are also designing it very modder friendly by using open formats, allowing anyone to to add content and making the engine accessible by scripting (python). Even now during the alpha stages they are already offering support to the modding community.
It's a "rabbit ninja fighting game"
Check out the hilarious dev/tutorial videos on youtube: http://www.youtube.com/user/WolfireGames
If you donate you get access to their weekly alphas too! Yes, every week not only a progress report, but an actual updated usable product alpha to play around and mod with.
And when you gaze long enough into the code, the code will also gaze into you.
Many Many industries run like this. Astronaut? Considering the demands and risks it's terrible pay. Airline pilot? You start @ $15,000/yr to average $30,000/yr. There was a plane crash where everyone had died. it happened somewhat recently of your typical airline and someone found out that the pilot and 1st officer were the poorest people on the plane. People on welfare made more then they had. I guess video game industry is the same; which isnt surprising at all. The industries take advantage of the 'cool factor'
Ok, time to make myself unpopular around here.
Personally, I don't welcome this news. I've given the indie gaming scene quite a few tries over the last few years, and tend to come away underwhelmed. Ok, there are a few titles I've liked. I guess Portal had indie-gaming somewhere in its DNA (even if the manner of its release, bundled with the Orange Box, was anything but indie). Limbo has an interesting style, though it's also a bit of a one-trick pony that wears thin about half-way through its (fairly short) play-time.
Ultimately, I like big-budget triple-A extravaganzas. I like high production values, cutting edge graphics and plenty of attention to detail. This isn't to say that every much-hyped big-budget game is good; in the year that saw the release of Final Fantasy XIII (and another bloody Kane & Lynch installment), this is blatantly not true. But if I look at the games I've actually pumped most time into and enjoyed the most over the last couple of years, I come up with titles like World of Warcraft (though I'm happily off that particular crack now), Forza Motorsport 3, Ratchet & Clank: Crack in Time, Uncharted 2, Crysis and God of War 3. Not exactly a list of indie titles. And despite me having given them a go, even the high-end indie titles like World of Goo and the Maw have failed to grab my interest for more than an hour or so.
I'm also generally skeptical that allowing creative types to express their "undiluted creative vision" is always a good thing. It's a gross over-simplification to say that big-budget titles need to appeal to the lowest common denominator. Ratchet & Clank: Crack in Time contains puzzles that are frankly on a par with anything I've seen in an indie game recently (the irony being that R&C's puzzles are all built around the old "push button to open door" mechanic, just infused with some fairly mind-warping twists). God of War 3 wasn't far behind. But when you get the "undiluted creative vision", what you're often (not always, I admit, but often) getting is a load of self-indulgent tripe from the creator that a competent editorial board would have cut not because they felt they needed to dumb the product down, but because it's not actually any fun to play. This isn't limited to games; for every director's cut in the movie industry that actually improves the original, there are half a dozen or so that just add unnecessary rubbish, ruining the pace of the film. Look also at what happens to books from authors who have become celebrities, once editors lose the confidence to challenge them; you get the kind of ever-expanding padding-filled tomes that characterise the later works of... say... Tom Clancy, J. K. Rowling and Stephen King.
I'm not denying that management and publishers don't occasionally demand dumbing down, but it's pretty clear that seeing the creative type as a poor, exploited victim trying to defend his flawless original concept from the nasty corporate villains is a misleading approach.
I started out in the industry at 15, back in '85. At that point, everything was indie. There were no big studios, and the few existing companies funded very little.
Moving on 20+ years (cough), I quit Microsoft Game Studios in 2009. At the point where I left, there were teams of 100+ people, no one individual had much impact on the game, communication issues both up and down and across the team due to size alone made everything exceedingly slow and frustrating.
I left.
I started a new company - Fluttermind Ltd. - which has been going a year and a half now. It's still fun, and the distance has given me an interesting perspective. This is what I see.
The mainstream indistry is filled with passionate, talented people. The average Joe thinks these games are worth $50+. From my long-time nerd perspective, that's amazing. I dreamed of this day as a kid and it's finally here.
Don't demonise 'big' game companies just because they're big. That's not punk-rock. That's not anti-establishment. That's knee-jerk foolishness. Big company games are often awesome. I can't wait for Team Ico's next release - 'big' company funded or no. I am utterly enjoying Battlefield Bad Company 2. Amazing multiplayer - some of the best experiences I've had as a gamer.
'Big' games demand a lot of assets, each of which is crafted by a professional - no 'get your mate to paint a splash screen because he's got an A-level in art' crap here. Professionals and their assets are expensive, so publishers don't like taking risks very often. But it does happen. Fable and Shadow of the Colossus are both very weird, off-beat games funded by massive conglomerates and both great games. There are not that many others, but it's the same for Hollywood. For those of you saying 'Yeah, big budget movies suck, too' - I ask you to imagine an 'indie' version of 'The Matrix'. Or 'Lord of the Rings'. They'd really suck.
Don't demonise marketing. I've never had a single marketing bod tell me what to put in a game. Ever. Full stop. Secondly, the one thing more likely to cause you a trip to the funny-farm after slogging your heart out for 2-4 years is for your marketing to suck, or - worse - to not be there at all. It will kill your game. It will kill your company. It will kill your job. The end. Saying 'good games will win through' is like saying 'positive thinking cures cancer': I'm sure there are anecdotal cases, but as people here are usually keen to point out, causation and correlation are quite different.
As for the complaint 'games include superfluous crap'. If you think EA wants to have a team keep running at a burn rate of half a million a month for an extra 3 months so some guy can make a hundred extra guns nobody cares about, you've clearly never spent a minute in a steering meeting.
While some indie games are wonderful (Dwarf Fortress and Wierd Worlds are amazing) a vast majority of them are worth 10 minutes and little more. Note I didn't say 'crap', I just said 'small'. Like a Daffy Duck cartoon. I wouldn't hold 'Duck Amuck' against 'Schindler's List' and compare the two. It is foolish.
I admire anyone's initiative and ability to craft a game themselves, on a tiny budget (yup, I'm doing precisely that), but to pretend that indie means 'better games', or 'better people' is both incorrect and insulting.
Ditto to all of the above.
The industry relies on grinding up graduates who don't know any better, paying them chicken feed until they've proved themselves by getting their name on a published title (or everyone above them has quit). You're always working to someone else's vision, to someone else's requirements, and to someone else's standards of quality - which may be higher or lower than your own.
My epiphany came when driving home after "only" putting in 7 hours one Saturday, I felt like I'd had a day off, and I suddenly thought: "Wait... what if I didn't have to work at all at the weekend?"
Don't get me wrong, it's a great first job, if only to teach you how not to develop software.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
So what great stuff have I missed on the Wii? Crowdsourcing FTW. KTHXBYE. :)
(I've aquired the Bit Trip stuff, really like those. The Art or Balance was great too. What else? There's too much crap out there, so what other gems are there for us geeks?)
.: Max Romantschuk
This is what inevitably drove me away from entering the games industry and towards plain old business software development in the end, despite being a game developer having been my lifelong dream up until the point I entered work.
There's just little point being in the games industry working those hours for that wage, on someone elses vision and project when I can work 8:30 - 4:30pm (or 4pm on Fridays) without having had to work a single minute of overtime and have every weekend free and 30 days leave on top of bank holidays, and when I can work at home when I need to and so on on business software which may not be games, but which I'm at least running the projects for and can hence choose the technology and direction and get paid more to boot. The best part? I still have time to both study and work on my own games in my spare time too.
I'm hoping that this indie resurgence will breathe life back into the games industry, I hope it means every other title isn't an FPS World War II shooter or whatever and the ones in between aren't mediocre tat. I hope it means we can see a return of the innovative and most importantly, fun games we saw in the early to mid 90s such as the Syndicate series, Cannon fodder series, the original Command and Conquer and Red Alert, Day of the Tentacle, Little Big Adventure etc.
Indies take risks, game studios repeat the same old "risk-free" games seemingly oblivious to the fact that by making the same game over and over, people become less and less interested in the same tired clones, such that they're effectively making "risk-free" genres risky by boring the shit out of people with them. This is why there's so many AAA flops, and why the studios turned round and think "But what did we do wrong? This is just like Call of Duty 78: Return to D-Day (for the 78th time)". They seem oblivious to the fact that it flopped precisely because it is just yet another clone, and often with the fun of the original not implemented.
I think your sentiments are common, and also apply to other arts like music. Lots of people seem to like immaculate but (IMO) dull music. Personally, I'm happy with a few rough edges, if the ideas are good, because it reminds me that art is made by people. I'm sure this is influenced by the fact that I'm an indie musician myself! :-P
Programmers are funny animals. Some of them work best in complete isolation. One person can pull off things that entire teams never dreamed of. A kid in their back bedroom, and a rainy summer, can generate a game quicker by any design-by-committee. Programmers don't naturally work in teams, they have to be taught - every serious CS course has a team-building component to it.
Lots of big names started off as tiny indies... Codemasters is the most famous example, most probably, and Valve has bought up indie teams before now. It's not surprising at all, the only surprise is that indie went "out of fashion" with some people for a decade or so.
The skill of programming a game is not about knowing Knuth off by heart, or finding mathematical shortcuts using integer arithmetic, it's about actually having a little vision and wanting to see it move around and make funny sounds. Once you know what you want to do, the rest is just slog-work to get it to work how you imagined. Large teams do sometimes miss the fact that, underneath everything else, there should be a game. Most of the "classic" games of the early 80's were written by teenagers in back bedrooms. Magazine cover tapes were full of indie material. Even large collect-a-weekly-parts programming magazines were written by what we would legally class as children (I know, I've spoken to someone on here that wrote a huge game for INPUT by Marshall Cavendish when they were a kid).
Indie development was around at the start of the Internet - almost the whole shareware scene was indie. It kinda lost sight of itself when huge powerful consoles became mainstream, moving into the "homebrew" and various other sidelines which, because of their dubious legal status, were never as popular in mass-media. Now indie has found its roots again. A teenager can knock up a game in a week and be selling it by the thousands from Steam, or direct from their own website. They don't have to worry about system architectures or OS or having enough processor power. They can be pretty sure that it can be ported to myriad systems and not have to worry about development kits for consoles.
I also think that indie and retro are often closely linked, because of this connection with old-time indie development. Retro remakes are popular, retro gaming magazines are everywhere - I was in London Stansted last week and there were FIVE different retro gaming magazines on the shelf - I couldn't believe it! People are happy to just play silly games that are no more complex than some Spectrum games of old - Facebook jollies, or five-minute play-throughs or even Flash/Java demos on the author's website (Altitude is very cool!). People are carrying devices that can run small games with ease and even buy them immediately and securely from their phones.
In fact, I've started programming on a game that I've been wanting to do for years because of all the indie development I see. I see how simple or retro games are coming back into fashion and it makes me want to code. Chances are that my code will never leave my PC but it's immense fun to be doing for myself - it's replaced quite a lot of other hobbies just lately - and very heart-warming to see my little sprites bop around the screen. Even my girlfriend likes the fact that there is a little game that she can modify and influence and has often said she wants to sit there and make dozens of sprites for it. She often asks what I've got "your little people" to do today. The beauty is that if other people think the finished article is good enough then setting up a store, Paypal link or even Steam distribution takes no time at all. And because I programmed it for the fun of it, it's ALL profit - I would have programmed if a time-traveller told me that I'd never, ever sell a single copy.
If you're working in the industry, and the scare-stories are anywhere near true, I'm not surprised that people are leaving their megalithic corporations that are trying to source funding for $60m games and instead want to see if they ca
And All I Got Was This T-Shirt
Zero Wing II!
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Minecraft is a really good and addictive game. Go check it out at http://minecraft.net
This game was made by one guy, and he has sold a bunch!
Airline pilot? You start @ $15,000/yr to average $30,000/yr. There was a plane crash where everyone had died. it happened somewhat recently of your typical airline and someone found out that the pilot and 1st officer were the poorest people on the plane. People on welfare made more then they had.
[citation needed]. Long-haul commercial pilot are some of the best-paid jobs around in the transportation sector (around 80k-120k pounds on average at Virgin and BA, that's $150k+), especially given the additional perks and the massive amount of days off. Even short haul pilots at cheapo airlines earn 50k pounds in the UK.
I wonder if you know the difference between publisher and developer?
The amount of difference depends on to what extent the publisher's creative control interferes with the developer's vision.
paying them chicken feed until they've proved themselves by getting their name on a published title
A lot of that is the fault of the console makers, who won't deal with an indie developer who starts his own studio until the developer has "relevant video game industry experience". Nintendo spells it out.
I first read the article title as
More Devs Going India, To Gamers' Benefit
and thought this was going to be another glowing article about the benefits of international outsourcing. The Editors need to think more before posting.
Every mans' island needs an ocean; choose your ocean carefully.
...wait, what's that wooshing sound above my head?
Meep.
[citation granted]
Feel free to google the newspaper stories on the pilots.. A real "valley girl" in the right seat... And a moron in the left
Astronaut isn't a fair comparison, I'm pretty sure that most of the people doing that aren't in it for the money, but that's just my two cents.
This is one category, of several really, where you don't really see big studios doing games lately. These odd categories where you never had a large enough appeal from a normal gamer are where the indie studios can produce some fantastic games.
Indie game development industry, meet the indie music industry. I think the two of you will get along nicely.
I don't know how many years on this Earth I got left. I'm going to get real weird with it. - Frank Reynolds
unions are needed real bad in the industry as well
(I'd rather reply to this than spend my mod points.)
Yes, long-haul commercial pilots are well paid. The problem is getting one of those jobs. There's a huge over supply of pilots. I'm a pilot myself and I'm very glad I never tried to make a living out of it.
Once you are in the company, your position is based not on skill or ability or how hard you work. It's based entirely on how senior you are. That in turn decides how much you get paid. Typically you start off in the right seat of turbo-prop commuters getting paid almost nothing. In fact, "self-sponsored" positions aren't unheard of. If you manage to stay with one company long enough that you're no longer part of the "last in, first out" cuts, then your job is safe but your salary still isn't that great. It's only when you start edging towards retirement that the pay starts to reflect the amount of training and seat-time you've put in while earning peanuts. If your company goes bankrupt or you switch companies, you may find yourself at the bottom again.
High end Anyjobs make a lot of money. You're forgetting the 99.99% of all the others that make crap. You're statement is a bit like saying McDonalds employee's make crap tons of money because their exec's are some of the highest payed in the restaurant field
There's a difference between a long-haul airline pilot and the pilots in the short-haul commuter/feeder airlines.
un-ALTERED reproduction and dissimination of this IMPORTANT information is ENCOURAGED
No, they're not. Employment is "at will" so if your employer sucks, work elsewhere.
world of goo and portal are not indie games.
No wonder you think you dont like indie games. Your definition of "indie games" seems to be "whatevers on sale on steam"
& it wasnt bad.
The matrix is a terrible movie, regardless of budget... In fact if their budget had been a bit smaller, maybe they wouldve hired a no-name actor (potentially with some acting skills) instead of Reeves.
High end Anyjobs make a lot of money. You're forgetting the 99.99% of all the others that make crap. You're statement is a bit like saying McDonalds employee's make crap tons of money because their exec's are some of the highest payed in the restaurant field
Huh? GP started talking about pilots, not me. Of course, the McJobs of the airline industry -- loaders, screeners etc -- don't make a lot of money either. But then, we weren't talking about McJobs, but dream jobs.
(I'd rather reply to this than spend my mod points.)
Yes, long-haul commercial pilots are well paid. The problem is getting one of those jobs. There's a huge over supply of pilots. I'm a pilot myself and I'm very glad I never tried to make a living out of it.
Once you are in the company, your position is based not on skill or ability or how hard you work. It's based entirely on how senior you are. That in turn decides how much you get paid. Typically you start off in the right seat of turbo-prop commuters getting paid almost nothing. In fact, "self-sponsored" positions aren't unheard of. If you manage to stay with one company long enough that you're no longer part of the "last in, first out" cuts, then your job is safe but your salary still isn't that great. It's only when you start edging towards retirement that the pay starts to reflect the amount of training and seat-time you've put in while earning peanuts. If your company goes bankrupt or you switch companies, you may find yourself at the bottom again.
I still find GP's average pay figures of $30k unplausible... The $150k+ that I quoted is the average for BA pilots, short-haul/long-haul, junior and senior. Even a lot of cabin crew earn more than $30k.
As you say citation needed, but I'd be interested to know what the median salary is, not the average.
Pilots are extremely poorly paid. That's why when they finally start making some serious money with seniority, they hate to give it up in contract negotiations or job loss. Rightfully so. After all, they absolutely earned it by giving up short term pay for long term pay and benefits. Some pilots can earn over $200k/yr. But they literally start on the bottom rung when starting at a new airline. Imagine changing jobs and suddenly your income is a tiny fraction of it was before doing exactly the work. That's the world of a pilot.
The average pilot pay is something like 50k/yr, but that's only because of the extreme on the high end. A large number of pilots are pulling less than 30k/yr and many instructors are lucky if they make over $10-$12/hr.
Airlines spend all their money on airplanes, fuel, and executives; who do almost nothing. Pilots are almost always the first or second to lose benefits and wages and for what they do, are paid horribly. There are extremely few airlines which are well run and are not plundered on a daily basis by their executives.
When in the media you hear executives blame high pilot wages on the airline's inability to make a profit, that's really the executives complaining they can't sustain an ineptly run company while pulling in exorbitant and completely unjustified salaries, so they want someone else to blame - pilots. Airlines are notorious for being extremely top heavy.
Yep we have just published our first console game http://www.monsteca.com
I got tired of the 50-to-60-hour work weeks.
The worst part is, it actually hurts productivity after a while. It only makes sense to do it for the very last couple of weeks of a project.
We are a small UK indie game developer. I always think of us as a bit of a Dads Army crew (reference to the Home Guard in WWII). We are either to old to see active service in a Major Game Dev i.e. over 35 or too young or inexperienced to have got in yet. We have just published Monsteca Corral : Monsters vs. Robots on Nintendo's Wiiware service. We realised quite quickly once we had sent out previews of the game that no one gives you any credit for being an Indie Developer, they like the idea of it but fundamentally your 100k game (for this was our budget, big for Indie but small for 3d Console) has to stand against every other title on the Wii specially the ones which cost $5 million or whatever a major game costs these days. You don't even really get much credit for being a download game, people just have expectations of the kind of experience they are going to have. We have kind of managed to get to this point helped mainly that our game is in the herding niche (Pikmin type games) and the fact we spent an extra 6 months working it up o this standard.
such as the Syndicate series, Cannon fodder series, the original Command and Conquer and Red Alert, Day of the Tentacle, Little Big Adventure etc
I an addition to all the other well-put reasons noted above - check this game list - they were all PC games. I also blame the consolization of the gaming market for the debacles we've recently seen. Console games tend to be dumber by a large margin as their target audience always seems to be adrenaline fueled , testosterone crazy teenagers with the brain capacity of a squirrel. They also tend to be more expensive as the SDK for consoles and the certification by the owner of the platform is costing a lot, and the programing model is arcane and the development times are longer than for PC games. The PC games of the 90s were done by small teams that were not afraid to experiment. Games of today are done by huge teams, for consoles, and they think about how to nickel and dime the user first and foremost (pay-to-play, paid DLC, episodic gaming, draconic DRMs e.t.c.)
I for one, has long since given up mainstream gaming.
Project management sucked
If project planning and management is not a phase in of itself of your project, you immediately know your management is inept. Prepare to be in 24x7 reactionary development requiring long hours and lots of stress. Sadly, this is the vast majority of management, and especially so in the software industry.
All too often developers are blamed for missed deadlines and held accountable by demanding high stress and long hours. The reality is, this is almost always a failure of management because of serious ignorance or a complete unwillingness to plan their project.
Which costs less? A couple of people working normal business hours for a couple of weeks to several months, creating a sane project and project plan or fifty people working overtime on an unrealistic, half assed plan over the course of eight to twelve months? Sadly, most management picks the former rather than the later. It says a lot of management in the software industry.
And thus, Dilbert and PHBes were born...
Please refer to this link for airline pilot salary info from someone who's been there:
http://thetruthabouttheprofession.weebly.com/professional-pilot-salaries.html
It's also what might save the gaming industry from going the way of the video arcades. I see the gaming industry being in the same mindset as the arcade machine industry was in the late 90s where everything was yet another fighting game because it extracted the most coinage out of the arcade players. DDR was the only breath of fresh air in that stifling wasteland of uniformity. DDR! See any parallels with Guitar Hero and its clones/spin offs?
That industry painted itself in a corner and I see the mainstream PC/console industry having mostly done the same thing for the last 10 years. The big gaming industry is overdue for a bit of a crash I think. The indie developers producing fresh works are the future of the industry - not EA, Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft and their ilk. Steam may still have a future as a distribution channel, but I think they're overdue for some competition. The platform which could be a good incubator for this is Android, although it might take a few more generations of phones and tablets before they get there. They just have to fix that issue with more global payment coverage in the Android Market.
Which costs less? A couple of people working normal business hours for a couple of weeks to several months, creating a sane project and project plan or fifty people working overtime on an unrealistic, half assed plan over the course of eight to twelve months? Sadly, most management picks the latter rather than the former.
FTFY, I think.
$ make available
Except people are still buying in large numbers Madden 2010. Granted they aren't selling in the numbers of the previous games, but they are still greatly profiting.