![]() ![]() ![]() (Incidentally, if I remember my Bedrooms to Billions correctly, this, is exactly what Rod Cousens did for his first game.) True, without that sales nous, you might end up squeezed out, or with your game cloned or pirated – but that was only a small number of people too. A savvy enough dev could simply ring up the buyers from a major retail chain like Woolworths and, with chutzpah and bullshit, get his game onto a shelf. What could be different this time? Well, in the ‘80s the supply-side of the market as a whole was much smaller. For them, as Rob puts, it “I cannot think of a time in the past 30 years where trying to make a living from videogames hasn’t been screwed.” He’s one of the few indies (see also the legendary Jeff Minter) who survived through the repeated dark ages by doing the same thing that they’ve always done, popular or unpopular, and accepting the commensurate increase or decrease in their wages. Always some dude yelling that we’re all going to die and you should be afraid.”įearon points out correctly, that these sort of market shifts aren’t new. ![]() There’s always some dude with a crate and a hand drawn sign ready to usher in the end of all things. Rob Fearon has characterised the current mood as “ like being a bystander at an apocalypse cult meeting. Not all developers are singing to the same tune. Six years on, and the refrain that you hear from is of an ‘Indieapocalypse’ – of the devastation of independent studios, where the four horsemen ride out and the indie community is swept as a whole into working for EA, and no-one is left in the wasteland but a raggedy Tim Schafer, gnawing desperately on Rami Ismail’s femur. The indie boom of the early 2010s carved away the majority of the middle tier studios, with a vast number of developers going indie, drawn by the perceived easy pickings on platforms like Steam and iOS. They don’t call themselves that any more. I remember meeting the team from Introversion, in one of my first journalism gigs, where they introduced themselves as ‘the last of the bedroom coders’. That horrible market structure removed power from game developers, so the games were mostly terrible, studio after studio closed, and the staff hopped between impermanent jobs. In the UK at least, publishers took over the distribution of games so that by the 2000s, all the old indies had morphed into gradually larger studios, struggling to make minimalistically-polished games under the burden of bleed-’em-white-then-buy-’em-out publisher contracts. Or is it? I wasn’t around for the first indie explosion, back in the 70s and 80s, but I sure saw its death. O, miserere mei, the indieapocalypse is nigh! In co-working spaces around the world, indies in the midst of development are hearing the horror stories from those who released recently, those who’ve dumped their game into a Steam Sale or -godforbid- a Humble Bundle. Each is gripped with a secret fear that they might have to go and, yknow, work for a bank or something. The four horseman of developer doom – Distribution, Saturation, Stagnation, and Free Software – are putting sugar cubes in their steed’s feedbags and sharpening their implements.
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