On The IGF Awards And Defining 'Indie' Gaming 28
Thanks to GameTunnel for its editorial discussing the outcome of last week's Independent Game Festival awards, as previously covered on Slashdot Games, and part of a comprehensive GameTunnel IGF section. The writer is particularly concerned that the relatively high-budget, but still publisher-less Savage: The Battle For Newerth won major awards: "IGF has this year shown that a team's ability to raise money is as important as innovation itself. Consider this, if Savage was done on a $50,000 budget instead of a $1.5 million dollar budget, how would it be different? Would things that are in the game have been left out? I believe that the clear answer to this question is yes." What defines an 'indie' game for you, and should there be a maximum budget for IGF-entered games?
Something like the major film studios in 30 years. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Something like the major film studios in 30 yea (Score:1, Funny)
--
This is a fake sig.
/obvious
Re:Something like the major film studios in 30 yea (Score:1)
It will not stop single players but it will give cas
Re:Something like the major film studios in 30 yea (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Something like the major film studios in 30 yea (Score:1)
Re:Something like the major film studios in 30 yea (Score:5, Insightful)
For someone who claims to be "old skool" you should be extremely happy that instead of paying $90 to watch two stick figures fire dots at each other like in Gunfighter, you get smooth, crisp graphics of actual people jumping and firing in slow motion with bullet casings falling to the floor and smoke rising from the gun barrel. Could things be better? Sure, there's plenty of room to improve and game design needs to catch up to the graphical side. But to defend your piracy because you're not getting "value"? Puleeze... you just like getting stuff for free.
Re:Something like the major film studios in 30 yea (Score:2, Insightful)
A 2 hour movie in the US costs $10. Most movies are actually closer to 90 minutes, but we'll assume 2 hours for simplicity's sake. That's $5 per hour.
You're getting double the value of a movie, which more than justifies the price. And that's on a single player, little replay value game. Take UT2004, at $40, and you get value that's pretty tough to calculate, once you take into account all of the extras, mods, and what not. And of course, that's not countin
Self-publishing (Score:5, Insightful)
Divide the Entries (Score:4, Interesting)
I'd also be weary of calling a company like S2 an independent. Sure, they have no publisher, but they are able to do it in-house.
Remember, the video game industry isn't quite Hollywood yet. There's nowhere near as much of an entry barrier.
Re:Divide the Entries (Score:1)
I don't think that a budget based on money makes much sense. Let me give you a highly simplified example:
All games made by major development studios have to pay the developers salaries and get them health insurance. In the midwest, this is at least 70K per developer/year. Let's say that I hire two multi-talented developer that manages to make a crappy game for me in a year. Even w/o IT costs, I've gone over the 100K limit.
On the other hand, what if 8 college guys decide to sink 60 hours a week for 2 year
They are like adults beating up children (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:They are like adults beating up children (Score:1, Informative)
Re:They are like adults beating up children (Score:1)
I love this pic [diygames.com] from their visit to ECTS (is this in London?) and the comment: 'I wouldn't be so upset about the Audi if I had that...' Do you think he means the car or one of the girls? This [diygames.com] is the best though (sorry, I realise this isn't hotties.slashdot.org, but I couldn't help myself...)
I can't blame Savage for trying to get free publicity, but I think there are more deserving people who could put the money to good use. Looks like a two tier system might be the way to go for
indie stars (Score:2, Insightful)
Indie definition (Score:2, Interesting)
You've dropped out of school cuz you're so damn passionate about games.
Working out of your parents basement.
No financial backing, except savings from your part-time job and maybe love money from the parents.
Recruiting family/friends to do volunteer work until the game is done.
When the game is finally done, it's overlooked by investors/publishe
Re:Indie definition (Score:1)
As one of the developers of Savage... (Score:5, Interesting)
First let me say I'm not here to argue with anyone. I'm not going to say anyone is wrong if they don't like that we won, but I want to let people know where we are coming from.
Savage was built over the course of about three years, with a total of seven people contributing to development. Three programmers, four artists at the peak of development. When the game started for it's first few months, it was two people. We're in no way big, and dealing with press, distributers, and the rest of the industry we were reminded of that over and over. A couple million dollars doesn't make anyone care who you are, and it still doesn't even begin to touch the average of budget of a big title. We used free/open source libraries every where we could, the only things we ended up licensing were Bink (for the intro movie) and fmod. We did make it into stores, but I only wish we were as ubiquitous as the article describes. When our release date was approaching, we combed the area hitting up every game store we could find, casually asking about the game and were met with puzzled looks, they hadn't heard of the game.
We answered to no one in the development process, our "publisher" was an equally small group of people assembled for the soul purpouse of releasing our game. Only one person on the team had ever had a development job at another game company prior to this project. I think there is no question that we fit the definition of independant, the thing that seperated us from the group was that we got paid, so we were able to work on the game full time.
We entered the IGF because we were proud of what we have accomplished, as an independant developer and hoped to gain some exposure for it. Our intention was never to stomp on anyone, we all have a lot of respect for other indies, since we all came from there ourselves.
congratulations (Score:3, Informative)
By promoting you and others like you, hopefully other financial backers will think about joining leagues with other indie studios and finally realize that amazing games can come from unassuming backgrounds.
I would love to see a bunch of indie games out there get the cash that they need in order to raise them to the level that they de
Re:From one Indie to Another (Score:2, Interesting)
Your story is almost identical to our story. Small group of guys working out of a warehouse in an industrial park - took 2 years and a lot of sweat to get ENIGMA: RISING TIDE out the door. Made it with our own money and what little investment we were able to scare up (9/11 made it nearly impossible). We currently have 7 different publishers distributing our game worldwide (and an 8th that we are suing) - an enormous amount of work to get it done. At our peak we
Re:As one of the developers... (Score:2, Interesting)
Personally I feel that the web/downloadable vs. open distinction was broken, and perhaps next year they'll try a budget-oriented category. We shall see.
indie game developers (Score:3, Interesting)
also, there is a movie called fungicide (trailer) [troubledmoonfilms.com] by troubled moon films [troubledmoonfilms.com] that would make a great game. when you watch it you feel like you are playing a video game without a controller. it's pretty awesome.
Definations (Score:5, Insightful)
In about 5 more years, any game not published by EA Games would be an 'indie' game.
On a more serious note : a maximum budget? No way, no chance. There are a number of issues that come up when you try to put something like that in place. For one you have inflation/depression in money value. Another is the fact that some of these 'indie' games are developed by teams which literally span the globe. A $500,000 USD budget limit may seem low for an American developer trying to break into the mainstream, but convert that into say Iraqi dollars and that budget limit might not even be reachable after 3 years of development.
Meh (Score:3, Interesting)
But they aren't any longer. I'm not sure how to codify this as a rule - but they've now "gone pro". Perhaps the best approach is the one the IGF has taken thus far - a list of companies that "aren't independent". Each year, they should add successful (even if not profitable) companies for whom new developments will no longer be considered independent.
*You can check out Jumpman Zero in my sig - it's fun, but it's probably not going to be winning any awards. Except maybe for music, which is the part I didn't do.