Monday Night Live: Avoiding the Sharks

This week’s Monday Night Live guestblogger is Peter Stock, developer of the wonderful physics-based indie puzzle game Armadillo Run.

Indie developers are pretty much all small fry in the big picture, but they can play this position to their advantage rather than let it be a shortcoming. By small fry, I mean that they typically have small teams and budgets. There’s the possibility that work is done in people’s spare time and it’s unlikely that they have access to console development kits. In contrast, mainstream development is comparatively flushed with money. So how can this situation be played to the best advantage for the indie? By avoiding going up against the big fish on equal terms.

People complain all the time about how games are all the same and publishers shun risk to fund games that conform to established genres. I didn’t pay much attention in Business Studies, but I do remember the bit about niche markets – even if a market’s small, if you’re the only one satisfying it then you’re in a good position. So the astute indie developer should consider the potential competition for their next game idea and choose something else if the market’s already well catered for. It’s particularly bad if there are games that already offer everything yours will (or more, and better), effectively making your game redundant before it’s released.

In addition, games that require a lot of time and/or money to develop are best avoided by the first-time indie developer. So an FPS, RPG or MMOG might not be the best place to start.

So where are the best places to explore the market? Although I’ve said that a game needs to have something unique to set it apart, it doesn’t have to be totally new – indeed, some familiar elements are desirable, since it gives players an immediate point of reference. So a novel twist on an existing idea might be all that’s needed – Determinance introduces a novel control scheme to the well-established fighting genre and Armadillo Run (my first game) has been described as a combination of Bridge Builder and The Incredible Machine.

The main advantages an independent developer has are scale and control. Being small allows them to exist by appealing to markets too small to interest the larger operations (10,000 sales would be great for many indies, but wouldn’t be enough to cover the costs of a mainstream title) and having total control over their work gives a lot of freedom to indie developers. The IGF competition, the Indie Game Jam and the Experimental Gameplay Workshop have shown some amazing ideas that would be unlikely to be made by mainstream developers. I accept that they might not all make commercially successful games, but they show how much can be done outside the boundaries of cookie-cutter game design.

So all I’m suggesting is a bit of common sense. I love Gran Turismo, but I’d be mad if I tried to make a game like that and expected it to sell – there’s too much competition, and the existing games are just too good, apart from the fact that it would be far too much work.

We can get away with less as long as it’s different. And to be honest, we have to settle for making ‘less’ in comparison to mainstream game budgets. So we have to be different.

Share this gibberish!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 16th, 2007 at 3:03 am and is filed under Monday Night Live. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

3 Responses to “Monday Night Live: Avoiding the Sharks”

1. Paul:

   § January 16th, 2007 at 3:06 am

   It’s also cool to be different – as indies we actually have the chance (and often the time) to aim at something weird. “Size” of games is always a contentious issue – a lot of indie games aim small and succeed, but I’d like to see more people aim “medium”: try and compete with existing games simply by being better, not more expensive. There are a lot of indie games out there using under-powered graphics engines which look awesome: that’s another route to competition.

2. malakian:

   § January 16th, 2007 at 7:41 pm

   I agree largely with the opinions here, but I have to think filling the niche is not as straightforward – there is ever present indie-dev issues like exposure, cost of advertising, getting it out there really. The hurdles are still there!

3. Mercedes Granroth:

   § February 19th, 2012 at 12:13 am

   Anytime I hear that somebody’s really rich, the first question is, ‘Do you do anything with it? Or do you, like, chill? You just sit on it?’