Indie games are changing gaming industry
At first sight it seems that indie games have remained at the height of their popularity for the last few years. Games, created by independent teams, become iconic and have devoted fans and imitators worldwide.
Over the last years, the market of indie games has been flooded with thousands of projects, which has even transformed the term “indie game”. Now indie developers are not only enthusiasts for whom game creation is exclusively a way of self-expression. Many indie games are created on a commercial basis and the cost of their development varies from $10 to $10000. They differ from mainstream (in the broad sense of this word) games only in that teams create these games with their own money, instead of the publishers’ money.
Besides, indie games are more often aimed at a narrow target audience, like the fans of certain genres, arthouse plots and atmospheric games. Individuality is, perhaps, what attracts players the most.
But the horizon of indie games is not as clear as it seems at first sight.
It is not a secret, that only one indie game out of 1000 becomes successful. Gamers’ editions write about such games, indie developers, dreaming to repeat the success of Minecraft, are inspired by such stories. But reality is much more prosaic and a project, which cost its team a lot of money and effort, may turn out to be a failure.
According to one of the most popular game platforms, Steam, the average cost of an indie game is just above 8 dollars.
A few factors can lead to a game’s failure:
- The team’s lack of attention to the promotion of the game
Many teams do not even have social media pages, let alone a site. Putting it simply, even if the project is good, by the time it is released, the target audience does not know anything about it.
- Non-professionalism
Yes, it is supposed, that indie games are created by small teams on a limited budget. Players admit that the purchase of a game from an unknown developer is like a pig in a poke. Therefore, many are not ready to pay even 10 dollars for an unfamiliar game.
- Wrong marketing strategy.
An interesting opinion was stated by one of the founders of SteamSpy. He thinks that developers only waste time cutting prices and offering big discounts to players at the very beginning of a sale. If a project is made for a narrow audience, in any case it will first be bought by the most devoted fans, who are ready to spend money on the game anyway. Instead of discounts, it is better to give the first buyers some other bonuses — fan packs, soundtracks and so on.
Nevertheless, the popularisation of indie games has one very interesting feature which, in my opinion, has a big future. Game developers, especially those who carry out campaigns on Kickstarter, closely co-operate with the target audience and react to feedback and players’ responses much more responsively. Actually, any gamer now has the possibility of direct participation in game creation — at the level of crowdfunding, testing or by simply giving helpful advice.
In general, involving players in games is one of the major trends of the computer industry. Blockchain itself offers the players and developers an additional way to monetize their game activity by selling game items and achievements. The development of indie games, in turn, changes the very nature of crowdfunding campaigns. Analysts say that, in the future, gamers may finance certain game features — boosting the characters, unlocking new levels, etc. This type of game financing presupposes a deeper interaction of developers and gamers and their involvement in the process of game creation and improvement.
Even though this tendency is marked only in indie games, it is possible that the developers of games for wider audiences will go this way, too.
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