Lunch With Russell Carroll
I had lunch with the NinjaBee team and Russell Carroll (editor of Game Tunnel) yesterday. Besides some really tasty Mexican food courtesy of Lane (biz guy at NinjaBee / Wahoo), we had some really great conversation with Russell, and got his take on the indie game industry.

Russell brought up is his concern that his own actions as a review site might hurt the lifecycle of indie games. Right now, Indie games have kind of an advantage over retail in that we don't have the "Shelf Life" limits that the retail games have. Indie games can sell consistently well for years, even improving in sales from year to year. Will the temporal order of reviews influence purchasing decisions? Would independent game-players be dissuaded from buying a game if they check out a review site and find that it's actually an older title and there are newer, more 'current' games now available?

I don't really think so, but it's an interesting idea.

Russell also talked about the Game of the Year awards, and his appearance on G4's "Screensavers" show last week. The Game of the Year awards are by far the biggest draw for his site. Curiously enough, he says that the popular "Monthly Round-Up" is really only followed by developers themselves.

Russell is determined to make Game Tunnel THE indie game review site going forward. I wish him luck - and lots of attention. Independent games need all the attention we can get. I didn't even realize that a real 'independent games community' existed at ALL until the end of 2003. As far as shareware titles were concerned, I knew of a bunch of them from the early-to-mid 90's (the Apogee / id / Epic Megagames era), and I knew of Bejeweled. You'd think that a somewhat educated gamer like me would be in the know, but I was clueless. The community just doesn't have much of a presence even now outside the major portals.

It's not that the games aren't worthy of attention. There are some great ones out now - pretty much all of the nominees for Game of the Year in all categories at Game Tunnel are really excellent examples of what the independent game development community is doing right now, and continues to do. And it keeps getting better.

(Insert shameless plug for Void War and Outpost Kaloki here - both winners in their categories for Best Multiplayer Game and Best Sim Game, and Outpost Kaloki came in #4 for the overall Game of the Year award).

Another interesting problem that Russell has been dealing with- generating revenue. He discovered that it is VERY hard to find (or keep) reviewers that will do a professional job for free. So they cost money. He visits conferences like GDC to report on things like the IGF. That all costs money. Ttraditionally portals and magazines make their money off of advertising. That's all well and good - except that indie game developers typically don't have much money. Ultimately, Russell hopes to be able to get the bulk of the site's revenue via affiliate sales.

But that makes you wonder - if you get your money by selling games, does that put you under any kind of pressure to give them good reviews? Probably no more than the pressure to give good reviews to the guys who are buying the two-page ads in your magazine if you are a more traditional game review magazine. It's a tough balancing act, but I came away convinced of Russell's desire to make it work and to really promote the independent gaming movement.

Labels: Indie Evangelism

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