The Importance of Indie Game Development
Brian "Psychochild" Green has an article up that makes a plea for indie game development - specifically on the PC. In "More on the Importance of Indie Game Development," he makes a plea that the PC is an ideal platform for indie game developers, and that the consoles - while now viable for the "indies" - is far from fertile ground for the indies to prosper. And that the fate of the indies is the fate of the entire industry. His contention (which I strongly agree with) is that the industry needs players with what I consider the freedom to fail.

There needs to be a segment of the industry that is free to experiment with crazy ideas in spite of not being backed up by a history of market evidence of success potential. Sure, some of the large publishers make a big deal out of allowing certain of their subsidiary studios some leeway to be creative this way. However, it's not enough, for two reasons:

#1 - While the publisher might not overtly dissuade experimentation in innovation, the development studio is painfully aware that the price of failure can be severe. They've got too much to loose not to self-censor themselves.

#2 - Big-Business, Big-Budget sponsorship of experimentation cannot occur on a scale large enough to generate the kind of innovation the industry needs to thrive. Due to the limitations of Sturgeon's Law, you are going to need to generate a lot of failures to generate a single success. I don't think the mainstream industry is willing to sponsor experimentation on the scale necessary to duplicate what the indies are coming up with right now.

Brian maintains, "In the end, there needs to be more robust indie game development. And, I don't believe that consoles will ever be as open and easy to develop for as PCs are. Unfortunately, if the current PC game developers keep scaring off PC game players, the indies will have no audience. And, that hurts the industry as a whole."

Preach on, brother!

Labels: Indie Evangelism

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 11:08 PM (Permalink)