Can the Indies Save Gamers from Boredom?

Electronic Gaming Business, March 24, 2004

Unlike the film, TV and music industries, the game business has no farm teams on which to draw new talent and innovation, yet more and more voices in the game world decry the lack of innovation and insist that this medium needs a way to generate and test new ideas just as other media have for decades. "We run the risk of boring our users to death," Electronic Arts VP Andy House told the Digital Games Summit in January, just as he had finished a world tour to gather new game concepts for an industry that is in a design rut of sequels and metooism. In fact, the unexciting title mix and sales this past Christmas suggests that all of those AAA titles the big studios now focus on polishing to a highproduction shine are still selling mainly to core gamers with little hard evidence the market for the key moneymakers of the industry is expanding.

Hollywood has an independent studio system to fall back on when the blockbusters falter. TV networks often experiment with new programming concepts (i.e. reality TV formats) that eventually become network mainstays. Major game companies may want to follow the example set by their older and better educated sister media and look more seriously at how small independent game developers could feed and inspire the larger ecosystem of game innovation.

Innovation on the Cheap

The 110 entrants to this year's Independent Games Festival (www.igf.com) represent a font of creativity that the industry ignores at its own risk. Many of these games are made by up and coming developers or those who work for the majors but devote spare time to personal projects. "There are germs of really interesting ideas in these games," says Alex Dunne, chairman, IGF, which is run by CMP Media's GAMA Network.

Dunne singles out a design like IGF finalist Gish from Chrono Logic (www.chronologic.com), which uses realistic physics modeling to follow a ball of gelatinous tar through 2D platform environments. Mind Control Software's Oasis, also an IGF finalist, is a strategy game you can play in just a few minutes, what company CEO Andrew Leker describes as "anti-Mine Sweeper. There's no such thing as a bad click. It's a game design principle that would not have been nurtured at a large publisher."

But perhaps these are ideas that should be nurtured and funded by the big guns of gaming who could use smaller development companies as labs for new ides. "There has to be the freedom to risk and explore," says Leker. "The large publishers need to spend more seed money to have prototypes made by independent developers."

Just $100,000 could go a long way in bringing a gameplay concept to a demo stage. This sort of eco-system of media industry investment in innovation, not unlike indie filmmaking, which is often supported or owned by major studios, or middle list book publishing, is quite plausible in the gaming world and is often discussed. "All the publishers I talk to claim they will eventually invest in that way," says Leker, "but I am not seeing a lot of dollars flow.

Back to the '80s

The mainstream gaming industry is about 20 years behind Hollywood in cultivating the small indies in that like the film world of the 1980s, the game studios are only starting to sniff around and contact these small companies to see how they fit into their larger business models. "We have been working on getting Electronic Arts to look at our stuff since July, but it takes time," says Kendall Kunz, CEO of Full Armor Studios.

Kunz, who briefly served as an interim CEO for PopCap (Bejeweled) Games, did land a contract recently with EA, which will distribute his popular downloadable puzzler Walls of Jericho title at mass merchandise outlets. His company, less than a year old, has already produced four titles with five staff, and most of his games break even after 3,000 to 5,000 sales. Walls of Jericho has sold over 30,000 copies already on the major game download venues.

The small indie developers are starting to get the attention of the investment community after the recent sale of GameHouse to Real Networks, says Kunz. In its disclosures about the deal, the companies revealed that GameHouse had made $5.5 million profit off of $10 million in revenue, the sort of margins that VCs crave. "Most of the VCs I know are trying to find sure things, but once they are sure things it is not when the companies need the money," he says.

The Lessons of MMUC

More than adding an incremental, but high margin revenue stream, however, even the small casual game developers have something to teach the big publishers, who are trying to crack the code of that broader audience. Kunz says that game designers have to admit that even they are too immersed in their own experience of hard core game play to relate to general gaming audiences. Kunz's crew recently put out a beta of an upcoming puzzle game to 350 testers and over a weekend received unexpected feedback that made them remove a major feature of the game. "There's a lot a major publisher can learn from having this capability. The IP they are getting is this huge brain trust of people who have worked in this marketplace."