Indie Biz: Collaborative Competition

Posted by Rampant Coyote on June 17, 2010

Shortly after I made the uneasy transition from being just-a-programmer to managing a project and running an actual (if not all that profitable, so far) indie business, I read a very inspiring article. I wish I could tell you who wrote it, or link to it, but I can’t recall. But the author pointed out the difference, in his mind, between “big business” people and entrepreneurs.

The “big business” folks live in a zero-sum world. They often work with a world leader for whom expanding their market share generally means taking it from someone else. Survival and growth depend upon crushing the competition. As many of these businesses are market leaders, they have a siege mentality as hundreds of small, scrappy companies come gunning for them.

Broad strokes, of course, and I don’t know how much I’m reading my own experiences into my memories of the article. I should note (and I don’t recall if the author did or not) that this mentality isn’t exclusive to the halls of the mega-corporations. It’s just that this environment is more likely to reward that kind of attitude and behavior.

By contrast, he claimed most entrepreneurs he knew would give you the shirts off their own backs to help each other and even a newcomer to their ranks. The attitude was completely different – they lived in a non-zero-sum world, where they saw so much opportunity that they knew they couldn’t come close to addressing without help. They saw other small businessmen and entrepreneurs as potential allies – even the ones who might technically be competitors.

I was grateful to see two indies I admire, Jeff Vogel and Celso Riva, recently echoed this sentiment. I believe their sincerity. I’ve seen the results first-hand. When your biggest problem is getting the word out, and your products aren’t mutually exclusive, competition can be your biggest ally. Game sales from my main site tend to flow in waves. An influx of sales from Eschalon: Book 2 is often accompanied by an increase of sales of not only the first game, but a bump in sales across the board. It’s not clear why. Maybe some folks played Eschalon: Book 2, didn’t find the style to their liking, but then decided to give Lilly and Sasha: Curse of the Immortals a try instead and preferred it?

I don’t know. And as Celso points out – you can get to the point where resources get scarce and the competition becomes a problem, as it has become with casual games and mainstream games as well. But we’re nowhere near that point yet.

But then we have something WCG said in a comment to yesterday’s post. He was trying to be frank but apologetic, but I don’t think he should have apologized. I think he hit a nail right on the head. I’ll repeat it here. He wrote:

The other thing is that there are a LOT of indies, or so it seems to me. I can’t find the time to play more than just a few of the games that sound interesting. In the past, I’ve bought games just to support the developer, and sometimes I never did get around to playing them.

I seldom buy a mainstream game until it’s been out a few years. Again, I don’t have the time to play everything I want right away. And then there are old games I want to re-install and play again. Frankly, every time I see a retrospective on a great old game, it brings back fond memories that I want to re-capture. Wouldn’t that be fun to play again?

So you’ve got a LOT of competition. Yes, you’re even competing with games ten or 15 years old, as long as they’re still playable with DOSBox. I’ve got crates of old games stored in the basement, many that I’ve forgotten all about, so I could probably never buy another game and still have plenty to play.

Compared to all that, price doesn’t matter much to me. If it’s a game I really want to play, something that really appeals to me, I won’t even look at the price. (After all, my computer is easily the major expense in playing games.) My limited amount of time is the main constraint. I’m going to be very picky on buying an indie game, just because I CAN’T PLAY EVERYTHING. If your game sounds interesting, but not exactly what I want, I’ll probably pass, just for that reason.

I wish this weren’t true, but it is.

I love GOG.COM.  It’s allowed me to catch up on some older games I missed the first time around… for cheap. Way cheaper than a new indie game, as a matter of fact.

But as an indie RPG developer, I really am going HEAD-TO-HEAD against not only the brilliant modern indie RPGs like those by Basilisk, Spiderweb, Soldak, Amaranth, and  etc. and etc. … I’m going up against Bioware’s and Bethesda’s and Atlus’s latest, and I’m also competing way more directly than I’d like against classics like the Might & Magic series and Realms of Arkania, now available for cheap and fully compatible with modern platforms.

I try not to think of this too hard, because it intimidates the hell out of me.

But honestly? I do think this is a good thing. As human beings, competition improves us. Or rather, competition and a healthy attitude towards it improves us. The entrepreneurial attitude. I hope I have enough of it. At least, what I see when I read WCG’s comments isn’t “Oh, crap, people might not play my game because there’s so much competition from games past and present.” My thought is, “Then I have to figure out a way to make my game more unique and more likely to attract the interest of people like WCG.” Maybe I won’t succeed, but hey, if he doesn’t like my game, maybe he’d like to buy something from one of my competitors? And hopefully they’ll reciprocate, and all of us – players and developers – will be happier for it.

And then our tiny little sub-section of the biz will grow, the games will improve and provide even more variety, the community will grow, the lion will lay down with the lamb and all that crap.

But mainly, we’ll be getting MOAR BETTER GAMES.

Excellent.

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