Indie Games Development is Vital to Drive Games Industry Forward and Provide Creativity

Games development is a tough business, as the industry becomes consolidated with a handful of giant publishers and the expectations for new titles continue to grow smaller developers can struggle to survive. This is bad for gamers because it means less creativity and less risk taking and ultimately less variety in the games they can buy. There is a big difference between developers and publishers.

Publishers are extremely risk averse. They would rather take the familiar option than try something new, they fund developers grudgingly and frequently make demands for creative changes based on what their marketing department says. This means gamers end up with more unimaginative titles which are expensively marketed at them. Sure they look great but what about the game-play? Where has the challenge gone? Everything is dumbed down and forced to fit a formula in an attempt to attract the mass market for maximum sales. Publishers only care about profit, they aren’t in the industry to make good games or drive creativity forward they are there to make money, pure and simple.

This is where independent developers come in, as an alternative to the corporate behemoths. Developers are in the industry to try and make games that gamers will love. Their obsession is not about money, however, and they develop games because they love gaming and they are always looking to push new ideas out there and experiment with new game-play. The only way developers can truly make the games they want is to stay independent of publishers.

There are a handful of exceptions to this rule. When studios regularly make big money for their publisher it often results in a situation where the publisher is genuinely afraid to meddle in case they break something. It is also inevitable that developers will work with publishers once they have a successful game already developed because they can actually cut a reasonable deal in that scenario and publishers have all the marketing and distribution links.

Independent developers face a real challenge to secure funding. It is rare that they can compete with the gigantic teams employed by people like EA, who can have literally hundreds of people working on a single title. What they can do, or what they have to do if they want to get noticed is come up with new, fresh, unique and crazy ideas for games. While the mainstream stagnates you can still find creativity in the indie game scene.