GameTunnel to End Yearly Awards?
It looks like there may be no chance for Frayed Knights to win the 2008 Indie RPG of the Year award from GameTunnel.com (somehow managing to steal the cup from The Broken Hourglass, Age of Decadence, and Maybe even Cute-Knight-2-If-Hanako-Gets-To-It-This-Year...), because there may not be one.

In an interview at IndieGames.com, Russell Carroll, marketing director for Reflexive and owner of GameTunnel, he suggests that the extreme effort may no longer be worthwhile. "The awards each year are nothing short of a nightmare. I spend all my Saturdays on them, I work all night after coming from work on them and I take paid time off work to do them... Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, the 2007 awards came off to the sound of crickets. Major websites, such as Slashdot, which in the past have given us front page coverage, didn't cover us at all, not even in their games section. Watching stories about rumors and cakes in the shape of a DS showing up on all the major game blog sites while the awards were not covered was initially devastating."

While there may be something like a top ten list in the future, his current opinion is that the event, as it has run in the past, is over. "When I see toast that is scraped off to look like Pac-Man making the news on Kotaku and the top indie games of the year not getting a mention it really gives you some perspective about what you are spending your time on, and for me, I think it's likely I spent too much time on my awards this year. This was the 6th year of awards, so I've got a fairly set path I follow. I made all the same steps, but we saw less than 1/10th of the visitors. It's unfortunate, but it's been a good run."

So the big question in my mind is: Is this indicative of the state of indie games, or the state of GameTunnel? Are people less interested in the indie gaming scene now, because "casual" has now split off into its own field and become mainstream, and people are getting their small, cheap game fix on the XBox 360, or are people just paying attention to other sites? I know I, for one, have been very pleased with the increase in coverage of indie games on the more major game sites, though I attribute that as much to the dearth of hardcore games on the PC as anything else.

Labels: Indie Evangelism

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 8:22 AM (Permalink)