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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."
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.
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.
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.