Boons for Indie Devs

In my last post, I lamented the state of affairs for someone interested in working for a big studio. This doesn’t mean I wouldn’t work for one. It would just have to be the right one. I mentioned Epic Baltimore because they are one of those places I’d work for. I’ve been very vocal in my criticism of Epic’s previous games, from the writing in the Gears of War franchise to the juvenile glorification of dick jokes in Bulletstorm. Under all of that, they make games that are fun to play and are packed to the brim with action and innovation. Plus, I love how they run their company. 

On top of everything else, a few years ago they decided to release a free version of their award-winning Unreal 3 engine for anyone to use, and bundled it with all their content tools. Since then, they’ve been updating and maintaining the UDK while promoting developers who make cool things with their product.

That brings me around to the state of the industry for independent developers. It’s a good time for people who want to make good games with small teams and smaller budgets.

The UDK is just one of the free tools available, but making games still costs money. I’d like to focus on how indie studios can collect that money, and what is out there to help them distribute their game once they’ve completed it. We’ve learned that industry veterans can gather millions of dollars via Kickstarter, but that’s not a sure bet for everyone. The games category on the fundraising site only has a 34% success rate, which places it 10th out of 13 for all project areas you can donate to. There has also been growing skepticism and hesitation towards funding game projects this way, with one high-profile fraud exposing the flaws in such a system. Game development is such a tricky and unpredictable animal that often it is difficult to lay out a timeline for completion so early in the process, especially for indie devs.

There are other sources of crowd-funding starting to appear. Gamesplanet Labs is a combination funding/distribution platform with a selection process for which projects go up for donations, and clear set of “commitments” for devs to follow.

IndieGoGo is another crowdfunding site that allows you create a campaign for almost anything. The benefit of IndieGoGo is that you can elect to use a Flexible Funding set up, where you get to keep whatever you make, even if you don’t hit your goal.

Once you make your game, getting it out so people can buy it is important too. Valve’s digital distribution service Steam has been a popular choice (and with good reason), but making the cut is tough. To make things worse, Valve has been overwhelmed with submissions and just can’t get through them all to make good selections for the platform. That’s why they’ve announced Steam Greenlight. As an extension of their Workshop system for mods and add-ons, developers will be able to put their games up for consideration on Greenlight, and the gamers will be able to vote on which games they like. The best received games will get promoted to the full Steam service for purchase.

This sort of popularity contest does mean that so much will rely on social media and marketing, as the ability to get the word out will mean a better chance of your game getting published. It will be more difficult for the sleeper hits to gain traction, but overall I think this is a great idea.

You can look to the future with your game if you want. OUYA is an Android-based console that is being funded on Kickstarter right now. If you want to make your game in Java for the Android platform, you can get it on this new console that, so far, everyone is making a big deal about.

It is worth noting that Epic has said that they will add Android support to the UDK eventually. 

Hmmmmmm