Koobazaur's Domain

The advent of Indie Game Devs, triple-A studios disbanding, new easy tools emerging… is Game Making reutrning to its roots?

Back in ye olden days, Game Dev was a much smaller venture. The first few classics were built by small teams. Tetris was a creation of a single guy, while Wolfenstein was made by just 5 people (if MobyGames can be trusted). Compared to the 2009 Wolf game crediting over 100 names!

We’ve already seen a huge upsurge of Indie Game Devs thanks to Steam, Desura, numerous other digital stores, and the multitude of Indie Galas.

On top of that, making games is becoming increasingly easier with tools such as Game Maker, long standing Unity for excellent quick 3D prototyping, and the announcement of Unreal Engine 4‘s new cheap subscription deal.

But what’s perhaps even more noteworthy, even big studios seem to be embracing the Indie wave. We already know of Double Fine’s Kickstarter or Ken Levine closing Irrational to form a smaller studio. Then there’s also Torchlight Devs apparently leaving as well.

Indie Devs – the renessaince?

What does it all mean? No, we won’t see big triple-A behamoths ever disappearing, but I think we will see even more smaller-scale, shorter-lifecycle studios emerging. What’s great about more professional tools and experienced devs entering the field is that it further adds to the credibility and viability of indie devs..

And with that, being an Indie Dev will grow even more respectable (I still occasioanlly meet people rolling their eyes when I mention what I do), as well as convince even more investors or kicstarters to fund promising projects.

Too much of a good thing?

On the downside, however, this also means a lot more competition, and a lot more work to get recognized, especially for the smaller or startup devs without a dedicated PR team.

Another side of the coin argues that perhaps the barrier to entry is getting too low? There’s two issues here – first is the oft criticized Steam Greenlight’s lack of quality control leading to an endless flood of indies, many being simple copypastas or downright broken. And even in case of Kickstarter we saw that sometimes an experienced team with more than needed funding can’t always live up to its promise. And as for more head-shaking food for thought, there’s also this interesting article on App flipping. Yeaaa… hence the Top5 App store titles all being shameless Flappy Bird clones following the week of it being removed.

But whatever happens next – we live in interesting times for the Indie Dev scene.