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View Full Version : Indie devs vs. AAA devs



Kensei
24-08-2010, 11:38 AM
Since my post in the main Gaming Discussion was a complete failure (no one replied :( ) I am reposting it here since it is relevant to you guys who are involved in the gaming industry

I came across this video (while catching up on my weekly Zero Punctuation) and the speaker makes some incredibly good ideas about Innovation and how, in order to support innovation, we need to bridge the gap between Indie and AAA Game developers

Extra Credits: Innovation (http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/extra-credits/1923-Innovation)

Ruandre
24-08-2010, 12:14 PM
I'm a huge fan of Extra Credits! James Portnow is very insightful:

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dislekcia
24-08-2010, 01:05 PM
I don't think the "divide" has anything to do with how developers see themselves (that's literally rationalisation after the fact, you don't join a studio or start an indie game just so you can make fun of the "other side"). The actual difference is a huge gulf in management strategy. The video goes on about publisher-driven games as though that model is well known for succeeding, but if it were stacked up against the production models of the film industry the same way the "indie branches" idea is, the wastefulness would be readily apparent.

I mean, come on, a movie's investors can take out insurance to cover their stake once the movie can guarantee it's signed for distribution. There are banks and institutions out there that underwrite that risk. They can do that because there's infrastructure in place that makes it possible for a movie to gauge returns reasonably well over it's entire lifetime in the market. Those same firms will not approach underwriting games with a barge-pole: There simply isn't that sort of projection surety around games yet, partly because of the way publishers insist that a game's release be it's only major earning-point.

So how did the movie industry develop its methods of mitigating risk and managing huge budgets better? The studio model started taking hits from independent movie makers as soon as the studios stopped having a complete monopoly on the means of film distribution. That should sound familiar to anyone with an ear to the indie games space. Suffice to say: The publisher model and indie model aren't incompatible - it's just that the publisher model is so unstable that many people feel it's not the best place to be.

To top it off, hordes of publishers (even the second string pubs that end-users never hear of) are trying to court indies to varying degrees of success. I would like to point out that the smaller publishers are much better at picking up indie titles and successfully running with them and their teams, the reason for this is simple: Large publishers are so inflexible that their management strategies simply can't handle the different ways indies plan to earn money. We're seeing a lot of indie studios emerge into a space where they're still in charge of their own games, but are taking external investment and plugging in to a larger distribution system from a proprietary publisher: Uber Entertainment, Capy Games, Hothead Studios.

Comparing a collective "indies" label with mainstream publishers is a flawed concept. Indies are by definition a massive search through all the possible game success strategies (yes, that means lots fail) but there are so many that there are always new additions to the "success" pile. You can count mainstream publishers on one hand and still have fingers to spare... Comparing a near-infinite search space vs a single entrenched model just doesn't give you meaningful conclusions.