More Devs Going Indie, To Gamers' Benefit 137
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."
To make games I want to play (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't blame them. I ditched the industry too. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Id Software ... (Score:3, Interesting)
... 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/ [fizzlebot.com]
Time to burn some karma (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:I don't blame them. I ditched the industry too. (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:I don't blame them. I ditched the industry too. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:give me inspiration over slick production (Score:3, Interesting)
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
Call me picky if you want, but I'd like to see stuff that is both inspired and slick. The best of the big-budget stuff is really excellent. The stuff that isn't good... well, it's just not good no matter how much was spent on it. Let's call crap out for being crap, and laud stuff that's good, and not get too hung up on whether being small or large is best (it seems to be an unrelated axis).
Re:I don't blame them. I ditched the industry too. (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Fluttermind saved my sanity (Score:2, Interesting)
Games today are like was music in the 90's, on the cusp of change.
They are going to go to a more specialized model in the future. Sure there will still be big games (and big music groups), but when tools evolve to a point where decent (not great but decent) effects and gameplayare available to everyone, indie devs will cater to niche crowds. Games which offer specialized game mechanics and gameplay will allow you to reach a small audience cheaply and eventually when the tools improve even more you will be able to do as well with a small indie dev group as you might with a large big company sponsored team.
Re:I don't blame them. I ditched the industry too. (Score:4, Interesting)
(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.
Re:Programmers (Score:4, Interesting)
Of course I'm exaggerating the team situation to an extreme, but it has a truth to it. Programming is an inherently single-person process - team programming methodologies basically boil down to "you do this bit, I'll do that bit, we'll meet in the middle to these specs". It's usually design-by-committee, implement-by-parts, with individual inspirations made public. Yes, there's feedback and direction and lots of other interactions but in-between, the programmers are basically walking to their own personal computer, thinking to themselves, working on their own in their own heads and then sharing with others later.
And CS students, even the social ones, have to be taught how to work effectively as a team because, like mathematics, it's such a single-person process that collaboration is all about getting everyone on the same page by their own methods. Programming in teams does not scale linearly (far from it), does not scale at all in some cases, and isn't portable between humans. Even setting a code-style can be an administrative nightmare - many programmers have breakaway systems where they do the actual grunt work in their own way and then have some sort of conversion back and forth to the team methodology (whether that be source-control methods, coding style, etc.). Sometimes getting programmers to agree on a common development environment can be tricky, even (but fortunately that usually HELPS the code quality rather than hinder it).
If you leave 100 people in a room and tell them that they have to move a 50-ton rock to the other side, they will work naturally together as a team (on average, at least - one will sulk and do nothing because they weren't listened to, another will take exception with the unelected "leader", another will be actively working against the majority with their "more efficient" method, one will be complaining because they're doing all the grunt-work while the others are discussing the problem etc.). Leave 100 programming students in a room and tell them to achieve a similarly difficult intellectual objective using their coding skills and you will have absolute chaos on your hands. And, more than likely, one guy out of the 100 will figure out a super-efficient method at the start, work on their own and then just apply their code to get the job done before anyone can even think about analysing the problem team-wide.
It's a generalisation, but I've seen no end of CS students who would actually do a million times better job if you removed the team around them and asked them to do it themselves on their own. And even if you cherry-pick the most active, most integral and most amenable members and group them together on their own, they aren't any better than the best individual. The *quantity* of work achieved increases, of course, but the quality and the rate of achievement doesn't.