Indie insight

Jeff Vogel of Spiderweb Software has been kind enough (and narcissistic enough) to undertake a bit of blogging on the topic of independent game development.

Which is cool.  Don't take my narcissistic comment the wrong way - everyone who blogs is narcissistic.  It's cool because the more attention indie game development can get, particularly successful indie game development, the better.  And I don't necessarily think there are really any trade secrets worth hoarding here, so why can't successful indie developers pull aside the curtain a bit more?  Indie game development is hard work, besodden with failure and ruin, and almost utterly devoid of accolades.   And in that sense, it's not really any different than mainstream game development.  It's also risky business, but perhaps one 'secret' is that it might actually be less risky than mainstream game development.

Jeff's been making a steady living doing games for over 15 years.  That's a pretty stout achievement, particularly given the nature of the games he does.  He makes butt-ugly old-school RPGs only die-hards will love.  But the 'trick' is that there are evidently enough die-hards to make the exercise profitable.  Predictably and consistently profitable.  Having read the two recent posts Jeff made as 'tell-all' confessionals of the financial numbers behind one of his recent games, I wanted to distill some of the key disclosures that were made.  Again - these aren't trade secrets.  It's common sense stuff for anyone who's not totally drunk on EA and Microsoft's relentless propaganda.

• The Long Tail is a real thing and it works.  If you're not beholden to pay back someone else's huge initial capital investment, you can ride the tail to profitability.  For the purposes of this discussion, the long tail is the steady, word-of-mouth driven sales sustained well after initial release, in contrast to the 'blockbuster opening weekend' effect that mainstream games tend to rely on to make it into the black, financially.  I've referred to this as the 'spike economics' of the game industry, and mainstream developers and publishers alike live and die by it.  Indies can't, because it requires huge (i.e. expensive) marketing campaigns, and it needs a steady diet of game releases allowing for the occassional blockbuster to pay for both itself and all the non blockbusters that 'missed'.  Note that this model may ultimately prove to be the undoing of mainstream game development as well, but that's the a story for another day.
  
• Time is the most valuable thing you have.
  
• Making multi-platform games is like printing free money.  You're already doing the design and implementation work.  If you take the right approach from the beginning, it's only a marginal amount of 'extra' work to get one implementation to work on multiple platforms and you've just hugely broadened the size of your potential customer base.  Which is critically important when your customer base is niche to begin with.  Which brings us to...
  
• Serve an underserved niche.  Mainstream game development is like a whale - it has to eat an ungodly number consumers just to stay alive.  For that reason, many particular kinds of gameplay just get shoved aside categorically by the big publishers because the games simply don't exhibit the scale of consumer popularity necessary to offset the increasingly bloated development budgets.  And so the world is rife with cliques of gamers whose true desires go unmet by the industry at large.  And it is precisely these gamers that will forgive your pitiful little game its glaring deficiencies compared to a AAA mainstream game, if only your game scratches their specific itch when none others will.  As Jeff put it: "You have to write something that they can't get easier and cheaper elsewhere."   Because if they can they will.  You may eventually nurture some consumer loyalty, but you'll have none initially, and never enough to offset the fundamental disadvantages you'll face as an independent.  Like any successful organism, you have to discover an unclaimed part of the ecosystem.
• "Big budget games will ALWAYS look better."  And "graphics are expensive. Really expensive."  Moral of that story - don't even try to match mainstream graphics quality.  You'll lose, and you'll just go broke/crazy trying.  Your time and budget (which is mostly time) are better spent pursuing the handful of unique things that are going to attract that underserved niche.  Good graphics aren't unique, and definitely aren't underserved.  Yes, a certain percentage of people will ceaselessly hate on your game for how crappy it looks.  Screw 'em.  They're not buying your game anyway.