Spector warns indies to "Forget It!"
The title is a lot more inflammatory than the rest of the article, but I recommend giving it a read:

Indie Game Devs: ‘Forget It’

I know I immediately got annoyed just by the title, and by some other things Warren Spector has said in the last few years. He used to be one of my game development heroes (after all, he was in charge of Wing Commander, Ultima Underworld, and Thief). But lately he's been making a bunch of comments that sound like he's given up on the dream and gone to work at the factory.

Quoth Spector: "You have a zero percent chance of success. The barrier to entry in terms of cost, quality required, access to a market… forget it"

Yeah, yeah. We heard this last year from EA's Jeff Brown. It was wrong then, too. The most amusing proof was that the biggest "surprise hit" of the XBox 360's launch was Live Arcade, complete with a bunch of low-budget indie titles.

I won't fault Spector, Walston, and the rest of the panel for expressing the very real risks to new startups. The data isn't incorrect, their warnings are valid, and their suggestions are actually pretty good. But I believe their conclusions are wrong. Cliffski's Mumblings has a somewhat more strongly worded opinion of the conclusions, which amused me. Maybe there's an ulterior motive to what they are saying - maybe not.

The Old Ways Won't Work Anymore

Personally, I think what we're really witnessing now is the end of an era - the wheels of evolution are turning. The first ones to go are the smaller, less "fit" creatures - like the independent studios trying to follow the traditional road. Meanwhile, the big giants assume that they are already in a survival position and that it simply remains to be seen who will come out on top. But I think the entire conventional way of doing business in this industry is on the verge of becoming extinct (or if not exctint, highly diminished). If they aren't careful, the lumbering giants will find that they aren't too far behind their lesser cousins that are dying out left and right.

Things that are changing

* Brick & Mortar sales channels vs downloadable: At this point, most everyone is acknowledging the digital distribution of product is where the fture is. But what form that will take, how dominant it will be, and how it's going to effect the biz overall remains TBD.

* Political Pressure: Games are now mainstream, like it or not, and we're under more public scrutiny than ever. It's effecting how games are being made.

* The biggie - we're hitting the law of diminishing returns with chasing graphics technology. In the past, a game publisher could just put lipstick on the ol' pig, and sell it once again with fancier technology to wow the players. But we're running into the law of diminishing returns on that front. Not only does each successive generation of hardware provide less of an apparent improvement in quality of graphics (meaning it gets harder for the player to notice the difference), but the cost of providing content to take advantage of the hardware is increasing much faster than the video games market. Translation: It's costing more money each year to keep the same audience happy. Already it's gotten to the point where most mainstream games lose money (I'd submit most indie games do, too).

* The audience is changing: The video game audience today is far different from the audience of ten or twenty years ago. The mainstream video game business tends to lag these changes by a few years, but it actually isn't too bad at following the money. It's more mainstream, which means appealing to more than just the "geek" genres. Thus we have the big games today being World War II shooters, crime games in modern cities, etc. The audience is older - and the industry is targeting the older audience (the target demographic now is 18-28 year old males). And we've got more women playing games now than ever before. The mainstream industry hasn't quite figured this one out yet, but the casual games developers are cashing in.

Time To Adapt / Evolve?

All of this points to an "evolve or die" type situation in my mind. The old way of doing things is certainly fraught with peril, and anyone who doesn't have a lot of experience and money attempting that route runs a very high risk of joining the stacks of corpses to the side of that road. The games industry has changed too much - you have to adapt. But a "zero chance of success?" I don't think so. It's still happening. And some clever companies are embarking on new paths to reach the same destination, and meeting with real success, like Behemoth.

Spector & Company are right on the money about smaller developers going after areas the giants can't / won't go. They site the casual games market as the prime (exclusive?) example. You can read this as them trying to shoo the young kids off to making games for Mom, if you want. But I think it's blind and uncreative to think that's the only place the big guys aren't playing. Look at what Positech Games (by Cliff Harris, author of the above Cliffski's Mumblings), Reflexive, GarageGames, Wahoo / NinjaBee, and others are doing. Is there room in these areas to survive, and even thrive?

It sure looks like it.
- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 10:56 PM (Permalink)