Indie Game Stories #1 How People Look At Indies

Introduction
This is a series of “stories” on the game industry and other various things that we have to go through, if you want to be an indie developer I heavily suggest reading these. If you’re not but are interested in what’s going on in it then read, but if you have no interest in gaming whatsoever then please leave.

Just like with everything else I do, I base everything on facts and not on opinions.

Examples

Indie game creators, we always get the short stick. In pretty much every scenario, we are usually divided into 3 groups.

First is the smallest, the big hits. Super Meat Boy, Dust: An Elusian Tale and Minecraft. All of these games are very different but big hits nonetheless, these developers hit it big in one way or another.

Second are the hidden gems games, Pixel Piracy, Xenonauts and Cube World are all great games but haven’t hit is as big as the first guys, not a lot of people even know about them.

Third is the biggest by far, the under deliverers. These people have plagued the entire industry on how people and business men look at us “new” guys. These include people like the guys of WarZ, Day One Garry’s Incident and Kingdoms of Amalur. All of these DEVELOPERS have either lied, rushed or otherwise did something which made a big negative impact on the industry.

Like how the guys who made Kingdoms of Amalur, the entire story could be a book but basically, they are millions in debt and the people of the state they’re in the US has to pay for it.

With Day One Garry’s Incident the situation is a bit different, this game is genuinely bad. Hailed as the worst game of last year and also the worst developer as they started removing videos off of YouTube that reviewed their game with negative opinions even thou the developers were the ones who gave the review codes to them.

With the WarZ incident it’s a bit complicated, nowadays it’s called Survival Stories. Don’t buy it. What these people did was to lie to everyone that they had been working on a DayZ like game for years, even thou in reality they did something in 6 months and released it as a full product, even thou they said it was open Beta. Which was also the release date of their game. They had promised tons of features which were listed on the Steam page and a huge map, hard to guess that these weren’t true.

The Lessons

These popup companies which scam people are THE things that publishers and investors look at when new guys show up in the industry.

And it’s almost always been like this, like in the early 90’s when Valve first came about with a tech demo of Half Life. No one wanted to fund their extremely expensive project but one publisher did and they are the biggest PC guys today.

Only a few publishers actually give a chance to indie developers, like how EA is outright against them for some reason. Obviously not “officially”.

Budgets in games today are insane, back in the 90’s a great big game would be 400 000 but nowadays it goes to over 6 million easily. Indies don’t have a budget, so making grand scale games are out of the question but we want to and need to make those kind of games to succeed but that raises the problem, we don’t have big publishers. Most of us don’t even have any capital to begin with, only very few developers succeed at Kickstarter and Indiegogo and mostly because they have a game they can show.

Getting an indie team together is an extremely tedious and time consuming process, we don’t have permanent paid employees, no budget no paychecks. This same problem exists in the big industry with the big guys with the big money in a different way. Games that are pushed back cost more to make and publish, development hell is a very costly thing and when years go into a project which should have been done already the morale is down. Delays, missed deadlines and eventually cancellation.

The biggest problem is the passion however, tens of thousands of people want to make games but only a dozen of those people actually have the passion to work on a great piece of art with other people. Especially without pay.

Young people, especially teenagers. Simply don’t have this passion we do, this is one reason why great indie games with more than 1 developer are pretty rare.

A lot of people look at these 1 man developers with awe and they should, they dedicated a huge part of their life into making their game to become reality.

But if you want to be looked up to the populace expects you to make an amazing game, this is enormous pressure on the developer and in reality can even break someone. Like the developer of Fez, you should watch Indie Game: The Movie for his story. I personally can sympathize with him very well.

Next Time

Next time we’re taking a look at the psychology which goes into being an indie developer, the pressure people put on you and what you should expect if you are planning to be an indie game developer.