Economic Climate Spurring Independent Game Success 40
Eurogamer is running an opinion piece suggesting that innovation and creativity have been on the decline for years within the games industry. Now, with the threat of the economic crisis looming, game publishers are shying further from new projects and ideas, instead choosing to rehash popular IP in order to minimize the risk of failure. The upside is that their reluctance, along with technological improvements that make game distribution easier, is allowing independent developers to gain exposure like never before.
"This revolution will give us a new wave of developers who see games through very different eyes to those of their studio-bound compatriots. Forced to consider the financial bottom line, the technological bleeding edge and the whims of Metacritic at each turn, big studio development is by no means uncreative, but certainly has to follow certain set patterns. ... The studio system couldn't have created a game like Flower, the utterly beautiful PSN title which came out earlier this month; but more than that, it couldn't have created a persona like Jenova Chen, the mind behind Flower, who happily talks in interviews about evoking emotions, moving past primal feelings and 'maturing' the industry in ways that don't involve sex, blood and swearing. He talks about making games that don't empower gamers, but instead make them experience other things, other emotions. It's spine-tingling stuff. It's also commercial suicide — or would be, to a studio working in the traditional development context."
Not so much indie as low budget (Score:5, Insightful)
The current economic situation benefits developers who go for a lower budget since that way profit is easier to make. Indie games are low budget but many commercial games can have relatively small budgets too (Wii Fit anyone?). The current budgets needed to produce a so-called "AAA" title for the HD consoles has massively increased from the previous generation while revenue remained the same. The economic situation just accelerates what was inevitable: That these high cost epics fail to make enough money compared to their investment. I've read an analysis that this would happen and that was written before the crisis was even started.
The blame lies not with the economic situation, it lies with the companies themselves who throw gigantic amounts of cash at single games and then suffer when even one of them fails to live up to expectations. The economic situation is just a convenient excuse to make it look like this wasn't the fault of the people in charge.
How low can you go? (Score:2)
The current economic situation benefits developers who go for a lower budget since that way profit is easier to make.
At one end of "low budget", how does an indie developer working on his first title come up with $12,000 for a year's lease on office space, $4,000 for your region's objectionability rating, and other things that the console makers demand of all developers (source: warioworld.com)?
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you save all you possibly can for a few years until you have six figures worth of capital you can use to bootstrap your business with.
I end up with $5,000 per year after I've taken care of rent, food, utilities, and keeping my skills current. To get to six figures would require saving for 20 years. Or am I missing some obvious shortcut?
Office space, are you kidding? You're working from home buddy!
That's not good enough. Nintendo wrote in Become an Authorized Developer [warioworld.com]:
We require that companies are working from secure business offices. Home offices are not considered secure locations.
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I'd imagine that developers capable of making console-standard games all by themselves would have a job that'd make that six figures in a very short space of time. Or you could release on a console that doesn't require your own office, then use the profits to hire your office to make Nintendo games.
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I'd imagine that developers capable of making console-standard games all by themselves would have a job that'd make that six figures in a very short space of time.
I wish I had such a job. It would take me six years to even gross six figures.
Or you could release on a console that doesn't require your own office
And which might that be?
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If you are a good enough developer to make professional quality games, you'd be earning a lot more than that.
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If you are a good enough developer to make professional quality games, you'd be earning a lot more than that.
My employer is a small business, and I'm being paid to make web sites and warehouse management software, not games. If I am (as I suspect) being severely underpaid, can you recommend a guide to negotiating a raise in this recession?
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Forget the home office if you are mad enoguh to make console games.
Nintendo contacted me about making games for the wii. Then refused to let me do so because I had a home office.
I'd lvoe to make wii games. I'm not renting an office to just to keep the big N happy though. I *like* working with my fridge and kettle 10 feet away and my cats snoozing on the desk.
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I contract to a small company currently... we have an office to keep people happy, but we do it in quite a tricky way. We co-rent a small office with 2 other companies in a similar situation. It has a small work area, a meeting room and a kitchen.
Then we all work from home/on client sites anyway. A central server system + a shared calendar for booking the meeting room keeps all the businesses from stepping on each other's feet.
A facade of respectability costs less and less these days.
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I think the answer is obvious.
You develop games for the PC. There are no retarded acceptance boards at nintendo who can refuse me permission to make a PC game because I have a home office, and I can make the game I want, regardless of what publishers think.
Consoles are a major hurdle for indie developers. They naturally belong on the PC platform.
Plus nobody has to take a share of the sale price when you sell direct online to your customers.
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I think the answer is obvious.
You develop games for the PC.
So my customer has plugged four USB gamepads into a hub, and the hub into the front of the PC. But in an era when most of my target audience still have CRT SDTVs and few own scan converters. how does my customer fit four people (self, roommate, and two guests) around a PC monitor?
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Or you could develop games for PC and Mac.
I have four people holding USB game controllers plugged into a hub, in turn plugged into a PC or Mac. But how can I fit these four people around a monitor whose size is typical of those plugged into a PC or Mac?
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If people like it and it's good, who says people won't buy it?
Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo. They act as gatekeepers, deciding which developers are and are not allowed to publish on a given console. This will become less true as HDTVs with a VGA input (i.e. any TV over $300) continue to replace SDTVs, as it'll be easier for PC game developers to cut the console middleman and publish for Windows.
RAD for 2D games (Score:2)
In the name of spurring on independent production, are there any programs out there like SEUCK (Shoot'em'up construction kit) that average joe's can use to create games?
It's not Free, but I used The Games Factory by Clickteam for a few years. Even once I stopped creating the end product in TGF, I still used it for a while for rapid prototyping of 2D gameplay concepts. Even in 3D, there are plenty of PC-based game engines that can be modded using a scripting language.
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I'd love to see a construction kit for SCUMM-type adventure games like the Monkey Island games. Perhaps open source to the rescue?
Something like this [visionaire2d.net] maybe? It was used to create "Zak McKracken 2" ... Linux version is in the works and set to be released later this year. It's not exactly open source but it seems to work pretty well.
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I found PyGame to be fairly easy to use. Yeah, it does require programming but you aren't going to get as much creativity into a system when you're restricted in what you can do (tweaking parameters only goes so far) and anything that's sufficiently versatile to do anything programming can is going to be just as complex. Any restricted system is going to involve hacks for true creativity and when you're going to pretty much hack your system apart you can just as well learn programming, it'll probably be fas
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Adventure Game Studio [adventureg...udio.co.uk] has been around forever. It's the toolkit used to build Maniac Mansion Deluxe. [bigbluecup.com]
The problem isn't the lack of programming tools - free or otherwise. The problem lies in assembling and supporting all the other talent you need: Story. Production design. Set Design. Characters and Props. Art and animation. Music. Dialog
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It's not free and it's Windows only but I've always liked Game maker [wikipedia.org].
In fact I wish there was something like this for Linux.
More Linux games please (Score:2)
Sorry to crunch your happy place... (Score:2)
But didn't the publisher of World of Goo just file Chapter 11? :(
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The publisher for the US retail version did, neither the developer nor the EU publisher (who also financed the development to some degree) went chapter 11.
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Oh, good to hear. None of the stories I read included that detail, I guess it would have spoiled the drama.
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This reminds me of the dinosaur extinction... (Score:2, Interesting)
A huge catastrophe caused the huge creatures to die, and this helped the small ones flourish.
Just a thought.
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I'm prayin for it...