Dependent, Independent, and Indie.
I knew that attempting to define Indie Games would stir up some discussion. And it did - in comments, out-of-band discussion, and on other blogs. This is a good thing.

Before going any further, some background is in order. A lot of folks coming from different industries have different views on the meaning of "independent," for one thing. I didn't really recognize this until I read Sammy G's recent blog and had my brother explain to me how the "independent" music industry works - which isn't very different at all from the mainstream music industry, in spite of attempts to sensationalize it with marketing terms.

Independent comics and movies have also evolved their own way, different from games (or music). So perhaps one of the best ways to shed light on what indie games or indie game developers are is by explaining how the videogames industry generally works today, and contrasting that with the indies. So here we go:

But First, A Little History
Once Upon A Time... someone invented videogames. Which was the first videogame is subject tosome amount of debate. And that whole history - culminating with Nolan Bushnell's runaway success with his coin-operated arcade game "Pong" - is a fascinating saga. What matters here is that once videogames started making money - REAL money - a whole bunch of players started entering the field.

Some were old companies wanting to branch off into this new, unknown medium. The Connecticut Leather Company (Coleco), Sears, Texas Instruments, Williams, Parker Brothers, a playing card company from Japan called "Nintendo"... they entered the fray with some newcomers like Atari, the offshoot Activision, Intellivision, and later, Trip Hawkin's dream company, "Electronic Arts." None of them knew what they were doing, and they made up the rules as they went. Some survived, some dissapeared, some withdrew, and new ones entered in a battle for dominance that still continues today. Over time, the videogame business matured and became a multi-billion dollar industry.

The companies that had the money and tenacity to stick with it became the giants that pretty much run the entire show. These are the "major publishers." While it may just be their own hubris to say they rule the industry, a hefty lion's share of the money made by the industry passes through them.

Can't We All Just Get Along?
Like any other media industry, you can break the jobs down into two categories (which mingle and intersect all the time, but we'll pretend it's a clean break here). You have the guys who actually CREATE stuff. And then you have the guys who take that creation and productize it so that it makes money.

Most of the time the guys who create the games really DO want money... it allows them to keep doing what they love for a living, rather than asking "Do you want fries with that?" while dreaming of making games. The obvious match-up here is that the creators get together with the convert-to-money guys, and a little symbiotic relationship emerges. I make the games, you sell them to people, we'll split the profits, and we'll both be happy, right?

In the games industry, the creators are often called "development studios." And the money guys are often called, "publishers," and they do duplication, marketing, and strategic relationships with distributors and, through them, sales channels, where the constomers finally part with their money in exchange for a few hours of fun and entertainment. Yes, it's kind of a long pipe, and everyone gets their piece of the action.

It seems to me that the guys furthest down the money stream tend to get the smallest share after an industry has matured in any medium. But that's a whole 'nother rant.

Dependent Vs. Independent
The relationship between the publishers and the studios can take many forms. In one case, you have a studio that is owned by a major publisher. We don't really call them "Dependent," but they really are part of their parent company, no matter how many promises they may be given about retaining creative control. The parent company still has final say over what games get created, or whether or not the entire studio will continue to exist.

If you aren't owned by one of those previously mentioned major publishers, then you are "independent." Unlike some other industries that may have evolved different ways, in the games business, it's pretty cut-and-dried as to whether or not you are independent.

Now if you are an independent studio, you have to figure out how to make money from making games. Most of the time, this involves getting into some kind of relationship with a big publisher. Nowadays, most independent studios are guns-for-hire. The publishers have games that need porting to different platforms, or expansions or sequels that need to be made, or licenses that they need to exploit. If they can't get it all done with their in-house studios, they'll farm it out to the independent studios on contract.

If an independent studio does a good job on its contracts, and consistently delivers quality product on schedule, then they may become attractive enough to a publisher to get bought out by the publisher and turned into an in-house studio. Brought into the mothership. For many independent studios, this is the goal (at least for the guys who stand to make a lot of money out of the deal).

That's independent. But when we talk about "indie" games (or, as Jer put it, "Big I" Indie), we're actually talking about something else.

Independent vs. Indie
While the above is the most common scenario, it's not the only way things CAN work. This is where things get fuzzy, and we enter into the realm of "Indie."

There are a ton of other ways for games to get made and convert into cash to allow a studio to keep making games. They are the roads less travelled. I've talked about some of these methods in the past. These ways don't involve a major publisher at all - or at least not up-front.

The problems? Well, the big one is that they don't involve a healthy advance from a publisher up-front. This means less operating capital to create a game (usually, unless you happen to find a ton of investment from other sources - which has its own risks). It means doing it yourself as far as marketing and, often, distribution. Or at least not having access to the tried-and-true, well-understood channels the big publishers have a lock on.

This is what we're talking about when we talk about "indie" games.

Guerilla Warfare
If "indie" pretty much covers such a wide variety of possibilities, why do we give it a label? Why do we want to draw a distinction between "indie" games and those that are "not-indie?"

Well, Mike K. and Sammy G. are pretty much correct here. It's marketing.

The indies are the underdogs - by a tremendous margin. We're talking about as much as two orders of magnitude (or more) in combined development and marketing budget. This is a fundamental difference from, say, the music industry (well, at least on the production side... marketing budget differences are still astronomical).

Now, if the value of the game to the audience was in direct proportion to its cost, that would be one thing. But it's not. Now, I will admit that the "average" indie game out there is even crappier than the average retail game. But I will submit that I've gotten a heck of a lot more enjoyment out of several free indie game demos than out of some top-shelf titles for my Playstation 2 over the last couple of years. Maybe it's just because I'm a jaded, old-school gamer and something reasonably fresh and amusing like Cute Knight, Deadly Rooms of Death: Journey to Rooted Hold, Orbz, or Steam Brigade are more exciting to me than yet another generic third-person shooter. Even if you can now see realistic sweat on the faces of the enemy soldiers!

But in order to compete, the indies can't possibly go toe-to-toe against these giant corporations.
So it's gotta be guerilla marketing. Commando style! (Not to be confused with going commando...) Something has to be done to make the indie games stand out from the incredible background noise generated by hundreds of millions of advertising dollars being thrown behind their big-budget cousins.

And part of that guerilla strategy is the label. "Indie."

What's In A Name?
The "indie" label has stuck. It's hard to define, and it is a term that comes with a bunch of excess baggage from other media and industries. But so far, nobody's come up with a better term that has stuck. Except for "casual games," but that's actually a very specific category of games that may or may not be indie (but more often than not, they are produced by indies).

The label is desireable to communicate the difference to the audience. It breaks indie games into a separate category, in a hope to help them get noticed in the marketing din of the modern videogame market. There are signs that this is starting to work - indie games are starting to get some attention in the industry. Though I expect your average Joe Playstation still has no clue what an indie game is or where to find one.

Because indie games are such a wide, inclusive category, Sturgeon's Law holds just as true amongst the indies as anywhere else. Most indie games probably deserve to languish in obscurity.

But then there are a lot of things indie games do have to offer a player that they might not be able to find from mainstream games. The indies can serve the niche needs of an audience underserved by the mainstream developers. That's where the entire "casual game" phenomenon originated. The indies have a lot to offer players, if they can only be noticed and tried.

Labels: Indie Evangelism

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