Why Mainstream Developers are Going Indie, Redux
Posted by Rampant Coyote on September 7, 2011
Funny how this seems to be a topic of interest lately. Why are all these veterans of the mainstream games industry chucking the apparent safety of their jobs and going indie?
Two words:
The second highest reason, sharing ideas with the world, pretty much speaks to the same thing. Game developers are creative folks, and many have some great game ideas inside of them that they’d really love to make reality and see how it flies with others. Also, getting better working hours, being sick of working on sequels / licenses, and the chance … however remote… of getting more than just a salary and bonus for working on a best-selling game seemed like popular choices.
In his analysis of the (unscientific) survey, the survey’s author, Daniel Fedor, suggests that studios give their employees more creative freedom to avoid having their top talent leave and go indie. I wish I could say I see that happening, but that really runs counter to the trend. The trend’s been going on for longer than my professional career, and I don’t see how that is going to stop.
First of all, many of the top brass in the industry would dearly love to see their companies turn into factories that can churn out reliable sellers quarter after quarter. They want to see it reduced to formula as much as possible. That’s not an environment that encourages a lot of creative freedom. Creative freedom sounds wonderful and all, but it also more often than not leads to failure. That’s just how it works. The risk of failure may be daunting to anybody going indie, but it’s much more of a potential career-ended to executives answering to stockholders.
Secondly, the trend has been towards bigger projects with larger teams. The larger the team, the less room there is for individual members to have much creative control over the project. Back when teams of 3-7 people were the norm, pretty much everybody – including the intern – felt they had significant creative input into the project, and a lot of personal ownership. While I see the rate of team growth slowing quite a bit even for AAA projects, I don’t see it reverting.
Indie isn’t a magical unicorn-fairyland filled with riches for creative expression. It’s a world filled with plenty of disappointments, failure, and loss. But it’s also a wild and as yet untamed frontier with lots of potential. And as a gamer, for me it’s the place where most of the more interesting things are happening. And this migration of former big-studio talent to the field only makes things more interesting.
Filed Under: Biz, Indie Evangelism - Comments: 3 Comments to Read
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Charles said,
Alpha Protocol was a grand example of creative freedom gone sour. With precedents like this I don’t see shareholders giving many green lights for innovative projects. Perhaps the sad truth is that gamers, or the numbers of which make up the market, simply don’t want innovation. An innovating game necessarily comes with a learning curve. It isn’t comfortable. It doesn’t provide a relaxing time after a tough day at work, or school.
LateWhiteRabbit said,
“Better working hours.”
Amen. To that. I imagine that no small part of the desire to go indie is that working for most studios is awful in a sweatshop kind of way.
I work for a studio that does special FX for big budget Hollywood movies, and we have similar time and money demands from the big movie studios we contract for as the game studios do from publishers. Crunch time is awful, and it amazes me that the big money expects creative enterprise and work to be capable of being produced in a robotic fashion at a constant pace (usually an unrealistic pace).
Our studio wasn’t meeting pace (which was measured by individual) and finally someone spoke up at a meeting and suggested that if only 2 out of the 60 professionals working for the studio had been consistently able to meet the deadlines (and even they missed a few themselves), that maybe, MAYBE the pace demanded was an unrealistic expectation. Thankfully the people in charge conceded this point and gave everyone breathing room on the pace and stopped harping on people about how many “days behind they were”. Amazingly enough, productivity went UP by nearly 30% in the weeks afterward! Imagine that. Treating artists like human beings instead of robots relaxes them and helps the creativity flow!
That’s the biggest problem with the big studio model – expecting developers to work like machines, or assembly plant workers putting together a car.
Going indie can make you feel human again.
Rampant Coyote said,
Indies can work some pretty crazy hours, too. But it’s a different approach — a lot like the old days, when the team had ownership of the project. People do crazy things when it’s theirs – and they get the full reward at the end. That’s their prerogative.
But that also means they can choose when to do so, and when not to. While some people are animals and can work 70+ hours per week nonstop for months (and I guess have no social or family life), for most people extended crunch really degrades performance, as you noticed.
Little crunch periods are a part of life in a game studio. No biggie. Extendo crunch periods don’t work, first of all, and secondly they represent a failure on the part of management IMO.