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NDIE? I N A T O NDIE N I ATES N G I A T S S I E N V E WH OS IN L U RY O O P T O S I S L I S E R SUCC DAN G G N I M A IE G THE IND

G G

reat public movements are often started in opposition to the establishment; Communism, The Labour party, even Christianity all thrived on suppression. Yet, once theyd started, these movements all took the time to dene themselves, and what they believed, more clearly (which often resulted in internal purges). Analogously, Indie games (that is, independent games) were also dened in opposition; by not being publisher-owned they dened themselves against the moneygrabbing publishers of the 1990s and 2000s. Were the underdogs, they cried, and in need of your support. Yet the Indies never clearly defined themselves and we, the media, didnt help. Its hard to point to an Indie ethos today thats distinctive from that of the typical developer and, with that in mind, its worth remembering that many of the biggest developers of today, such as id and Epic, started out as Indies. That throws up questions. Do we want to still call them Indies? If so, does that weaken the phrase? What about companies like Tim Schafers Doublefine, Introversion, or Ed McMillens Team Meat? Do people stop being Indies just because they become successful, or is it more an ethos? Can an Indie employ a thousand people? Perhaps the more important questions are: what does it mean to be an Indie today? How is the Indie market growing or shrinking? What problems do Indies face getting the public to play their games? What tools do the established Indies use to get their games to the public? Is Indie just a state of mind?

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The state of indie gaming

The super spookiness of Amnesia

Indie games can do the pretties too

Many Indies were, originally, solitary or in very small groups, often family groups and there was a reason that Darwinia developer Introversion, the classic example of an Indie, dubbed themselves the last of the bedroom programmers. If you look at the archetypal UK Indies of the 1980s, the Collyer brothers who made Championship Manager, or at Andrew Gower of Runescape, they typically worked on their own from home. Yet when Introversion started operating, in the early 2000s, there were literally no Indie studios left there was just no route to the customer for games developed by independent developers. Hence their slogan reflected that what had once been a thriving industry had died off and died quickly. In 2001, when we made Uplink, there was no digital distribution. says Chris Delay, founder and creative brain

journalist Stuart Campbells Indie Zone from 2004 in PC Zone. Post Introversions, the Indie boom can be attributed to three things; Flash, Steam and the iPhone. The advent of Adobes Flash, an easy-to-program and ubiquitous platform, allowed many wannabe game developers to learn their skills quickly. Free tutorials, both from Adobe and online, gave these developers the basics of 2D game creation and soon you couldnt move on the net for flash-based games and animations. However, few professional Indies emerged from Flash. Developers could make some money from adverts, so animations like Home Star Runner and Weebl & Bob, could thrive, but most people did it just to get the attention and CV credentials to get employed by advertising and design agencies. Charging money for a embedded flash-based animation seemed crazy at the time. Flash Indies would eventually benefit from the advertising-derived monies sent out by Kongregate, Miniclip and other portals but these were a temporary aberration, for instance, Indie developer friends have told me that Miniclip now charges as much as $60,000 for developers to host their games.

Flash, aa-ahh!

Introversions indie darling, Chris Delay, looking into the future

independent devs had to knuckle under or die

behind Introversion. We had a website, but there was no download facility. There was no Steam. Even then, people didnt want to buy stuff from Amazon because it wasnt safe. We ended up doing shop versions. The conditions werent there to encourage an Indie scene in the 2000s. Thats why individuals didnt make games, because they couldnt sell them. The market had narrowed to just big publishers owning the route to market andindependent developers had to knuckle under or die. Note, however, no-one called themselves Indie, as independent developers were the norm. The phrase can most probably be traced back to music journalism and Indie music possibly back to music 102 October 2012

If theres one thing you dont want from rollercoasters its rampaging

So the next big step for Indies was the advent of Steam. Before this, independent developers hardly existed the few who did lived hand-to-mouth doing contract work and rarely kept hold of the rights to their games. Many promising independent studios folded or were absorbed by larger companies. In the UK, Rare, Bullfrog, Sports Interactive, The Creative Assembly and many more sold out to the big publishers. Steam, Valves experimental selfpublishing method, had its adoption driven by the much-hyped Half-Life 2, so that it was widespread when that game released. The first thirdparty game on it was the primitive Rag Doll Kung Fu in 2005, sold for the then-cheap price of $10. This game was so successful that its developers, then working at EAsubsidiary Lionhead, could afford to leave and form Media Molecule, creators of the multi-million selling Little Big Planet. Steam has been a haven for Indie development ever since. Though

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The state of indie gaming

You dont need shouty dragons to be a fantasy epic

The grand masters of gaming?

Installations that need installation

Were still waiting for games to be taken seriously
Establishing games as art has been an eternal task, if not of developers then of games critics. The desire of people with a vested interest in games to proclaim them art is huge. Their opposition comes from people like film critic Roger Ebert or aesthete Brian Sewell, who have come to games later in life and cant conceive of them as appropriate sources of aesthetic appreciation. Yet Indies are likely to win this argument by themselves. First, as weve argued already, Indies games are necessarily experimental, with design and appearance, and are often created following the same conceits that artists have when creating their ideas. If I conceive of an idea about, say, the vapidity of human expression as represented by evanescent cloud formations, creative tools are now egalitarian enough for me to realise that as an art installation in any media; as a painting, sculpture, video or as a piece of software masquerading as a game. Second, Indie games are being represented in the mainstream as creative, and their creators are being treated with the same respect as other creative media. Films like Indie Game: The Movie or Us and the Game Industry represent Indie game makers as agonized, impoverished and driven using the same language and clichs that are normally applied to Van Gogh, Hemingway or Bunuel. If art is something made by artists, then these movies will make the public who see them believe that games can be art, far more convincingly than the arguments of the media or even playing the games. (Super Meat Boy, while tremendously fun, would only undermine that argument). Its sad then that mainstream games and their cynical, exploitative marketing campaigns, are likely only to continue providing evidence to the entrenched opposition. As a friend of mine is fond of saying, nothing really changes until all the old people die.

Some may call this gratuitous, we call it good, clean fun...

Valve takes a substantial cut of the cost of a game reportedly as much as 70 per cent its never demanded IP rights and the wideness of the services spread and the limited number of new titles on it, has meant that a good game can make money quickly. Steam decided they were going to Andy Payne - Mr. be open to Indies, recalls Mastertronic Introversions Chris Delay. Things could have easily gone the other way. The final ingredient in Indies success was the popularity and openness of the iPhone and iPad market. Early games like Paper Toss were as primitive as Rag Doll Kung Fu , but as the hardware got more powerful and the dev tools got better so did the games. More and more developers were attracted, which trickled back into PC. iOS also introduced something else new ways of making money.

The extreme competition for the top places on the iTunes marketplace meant that prices got driven lower and lower. Developers slowly moved to a free model, where they gave away limited versions of their games. This meant that players could play a game and then decide whether they liked it which they often did. Apple helped out by allowing in-application purchases, so even the free games could make money. So thats how the Indie market got to today. But thats also the seed of some of its problems. Valves lackadaisical, egalitarian nature made Steam attractive to Indies but has also made it harder to get onto over the last couple of years, as Valve simply couldnt cope with the number of submissions it gets especially as there wasnt a clear submissions policy or route, beyond knowing someone at Valve. Its certainly a lot harder than it used to be, says Size Five Games Dan

growing pains

Marshall. Several key games every year catch the imagination and rise to the top of the Indie Darling tree; the rest just survive or die You send them your game and then hear nothing back while they sift through the billions of games they presumably get sent every day. Similarly, the iOS market allowed all sorts of developers to become Indies. However, it has also driven prices down for games in general, as developers flooded to the platform in a something akin to a gold rush. Saturation is a huge worry, says Andrew Smith of Spilt Milk Studios, but on the flipside never before has the games tech and the delivery platforms been so mature. Thankfully, the market is now so large its becoming self-sustaining. For example, it now pays the middleware developers, who had previously only created multimillion pound game engines, to make cheap or free versions of their development kits. For example, Epic, an old-school independent developer that had diversified into October 2012 103

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The state of indie gaming

Men with laptops talking to other men with laptops

engine development, has made its Unreal Development Kit (UDK), available for free. Several developers I talked to had particular praise for the crossplatform development platform Unity. As free as the UDK, this toolset allows for easy creation of games across all the current games platforms Xbox, PS3, PC, iOS, Android, HTML 5 and so on. Dan Marshall, creator of Time Gentlemen, Please, cant praise it enough: Its a great way of making games quickly and efficiently, with a load of pre-baked goodies you can drag, drop, and endlessly modify. In Indie circles when someone says theyre making a game in C++, DirectX, XNA or whatever, the catch-all phrase tends to be why arent you using Unity? And its a good point. Its extremely versatile. Unity also helps the Indies deal with another problem the speed of change. In the current climate, change happens so rapidly that what worked a few months ago may not any more, says Spilt Milks Smith. Developers are constantly talking and sharing how the markets changing, driven partially by the eternal hunt for the new, and partially by hard metrics from their own games. Andy Payne OBE, is owner of developer/publisher Mastertronic, and chair of both the British developer association UKIE and developer consortium Appynation. He thinks this adaptability to change gives Indies an advantage over the big companies; The threshold of sales and revenues can be significantly lower for an Indie, he says, so they can target smaller

niches. Games like Minecraft, Limbo, World of Goo, Braid, Bastion and Frozen Synapse have proved that talent comes through. Indies invent new ways of playing games. As software transitions from products to services, Indie fan bases will be crucial. In that sense, incumbent developers have a huge advantage. Whether their early games were great successes or not, they have ongoing numbers about how games are selling, especially on iOS. The more games they make, successes or not, the better they get to know the markets theyre making games for. Hardingham elucidates: Afun fact I like to tell people who think that anyone can make the next Angry Birds; Angry Birds was Rovios 150th game. There was an awful lot of experience behind it. However, theres another sense in which incumbents have an unfair advantage. This sharing, this mutual support produces a similar self-supporting circle to that in the book industry, where authors routinely praise their friends works. In games, the outcome of this is no less corrosive to the open market as it is in books the outcry when indie industry insider Phil Fish won the Independent Games Festival (IGF) main prize for his

The Develop conference is a perfect place to share ideas

An indie industry ?

One day, Ill tell my grandkids about the Indie explosion

game Fez, was huge. This wasnt simply down to the game having been entered several years on the run, but down to the perception that he was part of a group working towards each others mutual benefit through awards like IGF. This isnt surprising; historys full of examples of groups bonding together for mutual benefit, such as unions or guilds. Problems only arise when these groups exclude other participants unfairly, for instance, in the way the unions do with a closed shop.Thankfully, this isnt dominating yet. Discovery, that is the ability of players to find new Indie games, is only getting better. The two key recent developments in this area are Steams new Greenlight feature and Kickstarters crowd-funding.

What is it to be Indie today?

Our panel answers
Andrew Smith, Spilt Milk
Indie means how you approach game dev. Its less about money and more about creativity, but there are always exceptions. Icount all the big guys, as long as they only answer to themselves (bearing in mind theyre creatives, first and foremost), as Indies. Being successful cannot mean theyre discounted. statement of intent more than anything hard-and-fast like how many people are in your team, or whose money youre spending. Idconsider all of the above Indies, really, even if they dont. Its about the games theyre making, and the way theyre going about it.

Chris Delay, Introversion

Ian Hardingham, Mode 7

Dan Marshall, Six Five Games

Indies love nothing more than arguing about the term Indie. Itspretty fluid, and to me it feels more like a movement, or 104 October 2012

I think indie is an ideal and a spirit - I dont think its necessarily linked to how your game is funded or how many people you have. Having said that, I tend to think of an indie as someone who doesnt have to answer to anyone else when designing their games.

There has always been that that difference. Isnt the thing about indie, that its the odd one out? I remember that when Darwinia won the IGF, people said we shouldnt have, because Introversion werent Indie. We had a Steam distribution deal, so we couldnt be! It struck me as very odd at the time because wed spent three years developing this thing with zero income, racking up debts and selling everything that we owned, so that we could finish this game and wed done this Steam deal and it had robbed us of our Indie status.

Miles Jacobson, Sports Interactive

Gaming still hasnt had punk. Forpunk, you cant be paid while making it, you can only be paid when youve made it. Cliffski is punk. Without punk studios coming through, whats the future?

Andy Payne OBE, Mastertronic.

I think all independent developers have the right to call themselves Indies. Some are larger and more established and experienced than others. But if you are in control of your own destiny and sell your games yourself then you are an Indie in my book.

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The utterly beautiful Machinarium deserves your time

What is it to be Indie today?

Dreaming of clouds and direct to TV
You already have Indie games on your PC, your phone and your console. Next theyll be on your TV. Four companies are driving towards this: Apple; the ubiquitous Valve; Gaikai, just bought by Sony; and the newcomer OnLive. Steams plan is the simplest; they want to make it so that when you run your PC games through your TV, theyll look their best. This is their Big Picture mode. Apple, similarly, have a set-top box called Apple TV, which allows you to control your TVs movies and games through your iPhone and iPad. The new iteration of this has been expected for six months and is almost certainly in deep development; wed bet itll come out within the next year.
Indie gaming relies on a passionate fanbase

The last two players are very different. They come from a background in streaming games to any device and its this that gives them their advantage. Such a big advantage that Sony bought Gaikai for just over $380 million last month, with plans to use it just in its TV division (or so they say). Similarly, Samsung has made a deal with OnLive to carry its streamed games on its forthcoming Smart TVs. This is likely to be the next platform that the multiplatform developers target. Though Spilt Milks Smith sounds a note of caution: well see the big boys trying to squeeze out the indies quickly others are excited. Marshall has already spoken to Gaikai and OnLive theyre pretty open already and really keen

and Mode 7s Hardingham confirmed that his Frozen Synapse game will be on OnLive soon; this is a good space for Indies Onlive and Gaikai do not need to spend large overheads for new games. The big difference with this platform is that the only limitations to the end user are the controller, their internet connection and the resolution of the television. Everything else is completely pliable; its entirely plausible that people could program games that use far more processing power in bursts than any commercial computer, just for streamed games. Taking advantage of that sort of multicore processing could eliminate loading screens and frame rate problems entirely.

Kickstarter (www.kickstarter. com) is the older one, and weve talked about it in these pages before. Its an online crowd-funding platform combining social media with marketing, and its allowed Indies with great ideas, and/or superb credentials and/or great marketing to get funding. Yet using it is like twisting in a game of Blackjack; if you ask for too much money and dont reach it, then youll get nothing. Its brilliantly helpful, but its a doubleedged sword says Size Fives Marshall. Im aware that some Indies are regretting going down that road because all their backers think theyre publishers and deserve a say in the games design. Ive also heard theyre living in perpetual crunch, because backers wont tolerate the concept of a day off. So long as you can juggle it, its really helpful. Similarly, its little use to new developers: Ifyoure fresh out of uni, dont expect anyone to believe your claims and throw money at you, says Smith. Meanwhile, Greenlight is Valves big idea for dealing with the problems of developer access to Steam that we talked about earlier. Its, again, acrowd-sourced approval platform,

similar to their Steam Workshop, which aggregates mods for games like Skyrim and Team Fortress 2, and allows registered Steam users to vote for their favourites. Spilt Milks Smith is in favour; It puts the emphasis on having fans who believe in your game and your team, which is a very sensible and self-regulating system. It also forces indies to get involved with PR and marketing to a certain extent, and thats a good thing in my book too many just ignore it. Similarly Marshall of Size Five thinks its going to clarify the previously-unknown submission process Greenlight probably isnt a perfect system, but I trust in Steam enough to tweak or modify it. Its hard to know how big the market for Indie games

SIs Miles Jacobson wants gamings punk revolution

Everyone loves cute robots. Except evil robots that is

is given the lack of a coherent definition, no-ones really been tracking it as an industry. Yet, when a one-man game like Minecraft can sell upwards of 4 million copies; when Indie dominates the bleeding edge of gaming; when games as challenging as Braid, Pathologic and The Binding of Isaac can be commercial successes; when all these stars align, you know its going to be a great time for gamers. Hardingham probably sums it up best; I feel immensely lucky to be a part of it right now something new and exciting happens every single week! One day, Ill be telling my grandkids about the Indie explosion of the early twenty-teens. n October 2012 105

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