Monday, December 28, 2009
Indie™ Games - Just Like Homemade™!
Let's say you have one driven, talented seventeen-year-old laboring part-time on her laptop on a video game with a budget of almost nothing. Maybe she's using a copy of Game Maker Pro she purchased with money earned by asking if people wanted to super-size their orders. The game is weird and original. Our game developer then releases her game for free on the Internet.
Is our theoretical game developer an indie? Is his game indie? Of course. This is just about the epitome of indie.
On the flip side, we have Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. Funded by a major publisher, with a huge budget and team, and the biggest video game launch (so far) in history, selling nearly 5 million copies in the first 24 hours across two platforms in two continents.
Indie? Not at all. This is the anti-indie. This game was produced by the very system that "indie" evolved to bypass.
While there is simply no way in the world our hypothetical indie is going to match the production values of the mainstream game, when you strip away the glitz there may actually more similarities than differences. Both games were created by talented, skilled, and driven people. Both games may provide equal amounts of "fun." Assuming our heroine creates a "deluxe," premium version for which she charges money, and she inks a deal with a publisher / distributor, both games could end up on neighboring shelves at Wal*Mart. Even "scope" may not much of a difference - as many indie games have much larger scope than their mainstream counterparts (*cough*DwarfFortress*cough*).
It gets more complicated if we go somewhere between these two extremes. What about a small company that gets a sizable budget from non-traditional investors? What about tiny "indie" publishers? What about an independent ("indie") studio that has gotten wealthy enough that they can run things exactly like a mainstream development project but without any publisher oversight? Or a mainstream "guns for hire" studio that moonlights as an indie?
I worked on the MMO game, Saga (an "MMORTS"), a few years ago. From my perspective, as part of a small studio, it wasn't indie. We had a smaller team by modern standards, sure, and a budget that was way too small to be a AAA mainstream game (but still bigger than most indie titles). But the publisher was a tiny new startup that received investment funding from outside the games biz. These guys were total outsiders, which pretty much defines "indie." But from down in the trenches in my studio, except for a closer working relationship, it was no different from taking marching orders from a major publisher.
Later, I found myself working on a tiny team funded by EA's Pogo. Most of the time, it "felt" closer to an indie development process. We had a shoestring budget and were focused exclusively on online distribution. We would be competing directly with pure "indie" titles. But in spite of embracing much of the "indie ethos," it was definitely not an indie game - a fact brought home when the project was canceled by the publisher just shy of alpha. (And a major regret on my end, because we thought it was a lot of fun and coming along great... but the publisher decided it just wasn't going to sell in the numbers they needed).
I'm really talking about two issues here. First of all, indie is a process, not a product. It's an "outsider" approach to bypass the mainstream game development industry which dominates the hobby. And indie is a spectrum with obviously indie on one end, obviously mainstream on the other, and a very broad nebulous zone in-between without anything even close to a clear-cut boundary between the two... as hard as I try to find one.
It's a little like food being labeled "homemade." Some lady making fresh pies for her family from scratch using apples taken from the trees in her backyard is unquestionably making homemade pies. As she scales up her operation to makes the pies for friends and neighbors, it's still homemade. But then she continues to scale up her process, with only minor modifications, to sell her pies at local grocery stores, and then on an even larger process. At what point in the evolution of her pie business do her pies cease to be "homemade?" As I'm putting a frozen pie I just bought from the supermarket in the oven to heat it up and serve to my family, am I still providing a homemade pie? Does it matter to my family?
For us, the gamers, it can be difficult to just look at a game and say "indie" or "not indie." I ran into this problem recently trying to classify the action-RPG Torchlight. In my view, it's not indie. But I had to look it up to find out. If they'd hidden their process completely from public view, I'd have no way of knowing. And the game dwells deep enough in the nebulous spectrum between indie and mainstream that people could very easily argue with me, even knowing the details, and label it as a full fledged "indie" title.
So if it makes no difference to the gamer, is the distinction at all important? It is to me, definitely. I guess I do support a double (or triple, or spectrum-wide-multiple) standard. I don't think a high school basketball team should have to make any apologies for not being an NBA team. And I really don't know that a high school basketball game is any less entertaining than an NBA game (especially when your neighbor or nephew is one of the players). Likewise, I don't think The Three Musketeers should have to make any apologies for not being Dragon Age: Origins. For that matter, I don't think Torchlight suffers much from the comparison, either. While they may be in three separate leagues in terms of production values and intensity of experience (as they should be), for pure entertainment value the difference isn't nearly as extreme.
My reasoning (justification?) is that emphasizing "indie" encourages players to filters out the glitz, shader effects, modeling of individual hair follicles, ten-minute pre-rendered cut-scenes, and famous voice actors. Admittedly, that's a lot to look past, and video games have always been at least somewhat about spectacle and technological pizazz. But if we can do that, suddenly discussing Cute Knight Kingdom in the same sentence as Fallout 3 doesn't sound ridiculous at all. Nor is comparing a little indie game favorably to a big-budget blockbuster.
That's where I am, most of the time. And where the rest of the hobby / industry seems to be going, at long last. The spectrum is broadening daily. "Indie" is going to become increasingly more difficult to define, especially for the consumer who doesn't really care to peek into the sausage factory to know anything more about how his game was made.
But that's okay. What's more important is that as the domination of the biz by a few companies weakens and indie games gain more "mainstream" acceptance, the old rules dictated by those same "industry power players" lose their influence on players. This includes the old criteria for judging the worth of a game, usually measured in terms of what bigger budgets could buy. You've seen the TV and magazine ads, you know what I'm talking about. While still important, they are secondary concerns for what really matters.
And what really matters? For me, it's still about having fun.
So have fun!
Labels: Biz, Indie Evangelism
- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 6:57 AM (Permalink)
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From my point of view the future belong to indie game devs! With a few exceptions I'm extremely annoyed and bored by many recent triple-a titles.
I'm sure your daughter's(?) game is more interesting to me than Dragon Age Origins (god, I'm lucky if I can endure playing this game for 10 minutes without falling asleep)!
Many recent commercial games with a budget of millions of $ try too hard to look cool. Have a look at DiRT2! While not a bad game technically, it's obvious that the developer tried too hard to make it look all cool and sleek.
The mainstream devs are up to the hilt in dealing with making their character hair and that magical spell explosion glittering look perfect but totally forget that the important part to care about is the content, i.e. the story, the characters ... DAO is so exceptionally boring that it borders on ridiculousness. I don't know why it received so high scores. It seems that everyone is just blended by the fancy visuals.
Mainstream is doomed! It's not where the really interesting things going to happen anymore!
I'm sure your daughter's(?) game is more interesting to me than Dragon Age Origins (god, I'm lucky if I can endure playing this game for 10 minutes without falling asleep)!
Many recent commercial games with a budget of millions of $ try too hard to look cool. Have a look at DiRT2! While not a bad game technically, it's obvious that the developer tried too hard to make it look all cool and sleek.
The mainstream devs are up to the hilt in dealing with making their character hair and that magical spell explosion glittering look perfect but totally forget that the important part to care about is the content, i.e. the story, the characters ... DAO is so exceptionally boring that it borders on ridiculousness. I don't know why it received so high scores. It seems that everyone is just blended by the fancy visuals.
Mainstream is doomed! It's not where the really interesting things going to happen anymore!
I've pondered what "indie" means on my own blog in the past. As I said in that post, "indie" is like that saying about obscenity, "I know it when I see it." There is no hard and fast line, unfortunately.
One reason why this is important to me is because most "indie" games need extra support from game players. The kid with a laptop and Game Maker has no marketing budget and might just put their game on their site and not really know what to do. If it's a really great game, then people need to point it out to others. Recognizing that the game is "indie" means that people should be a bit more willing to get the word out and to overlook other shortcomings (like no music or terrible graphics).
I really dislike the trend for larger companies to try to adopt the "indie" label when they're really well-backed. I think a studio with big company backing (even if it's not big budget) shouldn't be called "indie" even if the development system isn't highly regimented. I think it's a bit of a red herring to focus on the development process; you shouldn't have to be sloppy to be indie.
Why is it that Torchlight doesn't really seem "indie"? Because the game doesn't need help getting out, and it doesn't need to have some problems overlooked for the sake of an otherwise good game. Even though it was developed in a short amount of time, it was developed by a team of professional developers who had worked on this type of game before and knew exactly what to do to make a competent clone. Doesn't mean it's not a great game, but it doesn't need the help of the indie"label to get the good word out about how cool it is. Calling it indie could also hurt other developers who can't muster that type of production values out of the gate.
I know this definition is horribly subjective, but it's a definition that I think works for what I think true indie games need. Any game company with big support that tries to grab the "indie" label without really being indie deserves scorn, in my opinion.
One reason why this is important to me is because most "indie" games need extra support from game players. The kid with a laptop and Game Maker has no marketing budget and might just put their game on their site and not really know what to do. If it's a really great game, then people need to point it out to others. Recognizing that the game is "indie" means that people should be a bit more willing to get the word out and to overlook other shortcomings (like no music or terrible graphics).
I really dislike the trend for larger companies to try to adopt the "indie" label when they're really well-backed. I think a studio with big company backing (even if it's not big budget) shouldn't be called "indie" even if the development system isn't highly regimented. I think it's a bit of a red herring to focus on the development process; you shouldn't have to be sloppy to be indie.
Why is it that Torchlight doesn't really seem "indie"? Because the game doesn't need help getting out, and it doesn't need to have some problems overlooked for the sake of an otherwise good game. Even though it was developed in a short amount of time, it was developed by a team of professional developers who had worked on this type of game before and knew exactly what to do to make a competent clone. Doesn't mean it's not a great game, but it doesn't need the help of the indie"label to get the good word out about how cool it is. Calling it indie could also hurt other developers who can't muster that type of production values out of the gate.
I know this definition is horribly subjective, but it's a definition that I think works for what I think true indie games need. Any game company with big support that tries to grab the "indie" label without really being indie deserves scorn, in my opinion.
@Brian:
Sorry but this logic is flawed:
"Even though it was developed in a short amount of time, it was developed by a team of professional developers who had worked on this type of game before and knew exactly what to do to make a competent clone."
By that you mean that if an indie developer or an indie team knows what they're doing and they're professional about it, they aren't indies.
By that very definition, 2DBoy aren't indies because they knew what they were doing and they used to be professional game developers before making World of Goo.
What does indie mean for you? Amateur games?
Cliff Harris, the man behind Positech and gratuitous space battles (and other games like democracy,etc) is very professional in all aspects of his game development. Isn't he an indie game developer because he's professional? Or because he used to work for Lionhead?
Sorry but this logic is flawed:
"Even though it was developed in a short amount of time, it was developed by a team of professional developers who had worked on this type of game before and knew exactly what to do to make a competent clone."
By that you mean that if an indie developer or an indie team knows what they're doing and they're professional about it, they aren't indies.
By that very definition, 2DBoy aren't indies because they knew what they were doing and they used to be professional game developers before making World of Goo.
What does indie mean for you? Amateur games?
Cliff Harris, the man behind Positech and gratuitous space battles (and other games like democracy,etc) is very professional in all aspects of his game development. Isn't he an indie game developer because he's professional? Or because he used to work for Lionhead?
IMO, the "process" isn't the development process - that could be almost identical. The process is more related to the logistics and who's calling the shots.
For me, it's all about independence from a significant industry third-party presence for funding, distribution, or creative control. Torchlight is independent for distribution (they do go through Steam, but they also sell it direct), but they depended upon a significant publisher (who, granted, doesn't have a big U.S. presence yet...) for funding... and that pretty much guarantees loss of creative control on *some* level, even for a very "hands-off" publisher.
My concern with basing "indie"-ness on how much a game needs the help (and I definitely appreciate the sentiment!) is that tends to be very related to a game's budget... which is a slippery criteria to begin with, especially when capital outlays for a game represent only a small fraction of its cost. How do you compare two games made on donated time? Especially when the time isn't properly tracked?
I think we can all agree that "idie" is a slippery term, and it isn't getting any easier to define over time. But I think most people who pay attention to these things have a feel for what it is supposed to represent (excepting some journalists and industry players who stubbornly refuse to get a clue).
For me, it's all about independence from a significant industry third-party presence for funding, distribution, or creative control. Torchlight is independent for distribution (they do go through Steam, but they also sell it direct), but they depended upon a significant publisher (who, granted, doesn't have a big U.S. presence yet...) for funding... and that pretty much guarantees loss of creative control on *some* level, even for a very "hands-off" publisher.
My concern with basing "indie"-ness on how much a game needs the help (and I definitely appreciate the sentiment!) is that tends to be very related to a game's budget... which is a slippery criteria to begin with, especially when capital outlays for a game represent only a small fraction of its cost. How do you compare two games made on donated time? Especially when the time isn't properly tracked?
I think we can all agree that "idie" is a slippery term, and it isn't getting any easier to define over time. But I think most people who pay attention to these things have a feel for what it is supposed to represent (excepting some journalists and industry players who stubbornly refuse to get a clue).
Bad Sector wrote:
By that you mean that if an indie developer or an indie team knows what they're doing and they're professional about it, they aren't indies.
No, as I said, the process makes no difference. Being professional in your attitude and discipline makes no difference.
Since you mentioned Cliff Harris, let's compare Positech with Runic Games (makers of Torchlight) in terms of indieness.
Team Size
Positech: Claims to be a "one man" shop, probably contracting out some development like music or art.
Runic: Articles say the company was started by 14 people who left Flagship when it closed.
Professional Background
Positech: Cliff worked on the A.I. to The Movies. His independent games don't seem to be related.
Runic: Members of the team worked on Diablo, Fate, and Mythos (unreleased), games very similar to Torchlight. Diablo in particular is fairly big-budget.
Publisher
Positech: self-publishes their games.
Runic: involved with Chinese MMORPG publisher Perfect World.
To me, that last bit is what easily disqualifies Runic from the "indie" title, as our gracious host also points out. Perfect World is one of the larger Chinese MMORPG publishers. So, even if the game was developed in a short amount of time by a smaller than one might expect team, it's still not "indie" to me.
I'll leave analysis of other companies as an exercise for the reader. :P
By that you mean that if an indie developer or an indie team knows what they're doing and they're professional about it, they aren't indies.
No, as I said, the process makes no difference. Being professional in your attitude and discipline makes no difference.
Since you mentioned Cliff Harris, let's compare Positech with Runic Games (makers of Torchlight) in terms of indieness.
Team Size
Positech: Claims to be a "one man" shop, probably contracting out some development like music or art.
Runic: Articles say the company was started by 14 people who left Flagship when it closed.
Professional Background
Positech: Cliff worked on the A.I. to The Movies. His independent games don't seem to be related.
Runic: Members of the team worked on Diablo, Fate, and Mythos (unreleased), games very similar to Torchlight. Diablo in particular is fairly big-budget.
Publisher
Positech: self-publishes their games.
Runic: involved with Chinese MMORPG publisher Perfect World.
To me, that last bit is what easily disqualifies Runic from the "indie" title, as our gracious host also points out. Perfect World is one of the larger Chinese MMORPG publishers. So, even if the game was developed in a short amount of time by a smaller than one might expect team, it's still not "indie" to me.
I'll leave analysis of other companies as an exercise for the reader. :P
Thinking a bit more about it, I think there are two areas you can measure indieness of a company.
1) Resources. This includes money, talent/experience, people, and reputation. The more resources you have, the harder it is to lay claim to the indie title. Resources that come at a cost from a third party (like publisher investment) significantly reduce the indieness of a project depending on severity. Part of the indie ethos is "doing more with less", so having a big bankroll, even if it is your own, tends to reduce how indie a project feels to me.
2) Originality. The indie spirit is trying new things and making things different. Clones of existing games exist in abundance in the mainstream industry. Note that a game doesn't have to be completely original (no need to have to invent a whole new gameplay genre just to be a "true indie"! :)
The originality bit is why I didn't really consider Torchlight to be indie even before knowing about their partership with Perfect World. Creating a straight-up, unapologetic clone of three different (some big-budget) games members of the team have previously worked on doesn't fit the indie ethos.
The Rampant Coyote wrote:
[T]hat tends to be very related to a game's budget... which is a slippery criteria to begin with...
I think it's a larger issue with resources, as I mentioned. All other things being equal, I do think the game made for less money is more indie than the one with a larger budget. I think the game made by someone without a reputation in the game industry is more indie, too.
I realize I'm potentially going to be hoisted by my own petard here. I worked at a large game company in the past (3DO, but not as a manager). Some people, particularly MMORPG players, recognize my name so I have some reputation. Yet, I like to still consider myself indie. Yet, to be honest, if I were to win a huge amount of money in the lottery and do a large game, I think that I'd have problems truly calling it "indie".
How do you compare two games made on donated time?
Why do we need to compare them? They can both be indie. Is this so the two developers can argue about being "indier than thou"? :)
Dunno if this gets us closer to a real, universally accepted definition, though.
1) Resources. This includes money, talent/experience, people, and reputation. The more resources you have, the harder it is to lay claim to the indie title. Resources that come at a cost from a third party (like publisher investment) significantly reduce the indieness of a project depending on severity. Part of the indie ethos is "doing more with less", so having a big bankroll, even if it is your own, tends to reduce how indie a project feels to me.
2) Originality. The indie spirit is trying new things and making things different. Clones of existing games exist in abundance in the mainstream industry. Note that a game doesn't have to be completely original (no need to have to invent a whole new gameplay genre just to be a "true indie"! :)
The originality bit is why I didn't really consider Torchlight to be indie even before knowing about their partership with Perfect World. Creating a straight-up, unapologetic clone of three different (some big-budget) games members of the team have previously worked on doesn't fit the indie ethos.
The Rampant Coyote wrote:
[T]hat tends to be very related to a game's budget... which is a slippery criteria to begin with...
I think it's a larger issue with resources, as I mentioned. All other things being equal, I do think the game made for less money is more indie than the one with a larger budget. I think the game made by someone without a reputation in the game industry is more indie, too.
I realize I'm potentially going to be hoisted by my own petard here. I worked at a large game company in the past (3DO, but not as a manager). Some people, particularly MMORPG players, recognize my name so I have some reputation. Yet, I like to still consider myself indie. Yet, to be honest, if I were to win a huge amount of money in the lottery and do a large game, I think that I'd have problems truly calling it "indie".
How do you compare two games made on donated time?
Why do we need to compare them? They can both be indie. Is this so the two developers can argue about being "indier than thou"? :)
Dunno if this gets us closer to a real, universally accepted definition, though.
For me the only difference between an indie game and a non-indie game (an indie game developer is the developer who makes indie games) is a very concrete one:
an indie game is a game which was developed without the help of a publisher or any other 3rd party which potentially had creative control or the ability to shut down the game.
By that definition Torchlight isn't an indie game because it was made with the help of a publisher. However this has nothing to do with the background of the people who made it or the number of developers.
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an indie game is a game which was developed without the help of a publisher or any other 3rd party which potentially had creative control or the ability to shut down the game.
By that definition Torchlight isn't an indie game because it was made with the help of a publisher. However this has nothing to do with the background of the people who made it or the number of developers.
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