Indie game developers have no money but good ideas, AAA companies have money but no ideas.
It seems to me that big gaming companies are more risk averse in that they don’t care too much about the end product as long as it’s guaranteed that it makes money. That’s where indie developers come in and create new ideas. And to me the reason why indie studios can get creative has to do with the nature of them, with that they’re not biased by anyone or they don’t have a track and rails to follow, ideas flow fast from inception to execution, there’s no one to convince that what you want to try is a good idea, you just do it.
My thinking is that:
- Big companies should be OK games that fail, as long as they contain novel concepts and are polished.
- Indie studios shouldn’t sell out to a larger company that introduces politics (Which seems impossible based on what’s happened throughout the years of shut downs of studios from the acquisitions of EA).
I’ll be starting a indie game in the next few months, I’m passionate about engineering and software and I’ve seen politics and how they affect productivity in the IT industry and I’m assuming it’s the same in the gaming industry where big companies don’t have a good understanding of how to give freedom to a team and probably never will unless the CEO is a champion of that idea.
Take Netflix for example, where Reed Hashtings is proud of not making decisions in a whole quarter. They not only are proud of the control they give to employees. They practice making employees own their work and how to do it. If you work at Netflix as a web developer you’re choosing which frameworks to use, when you take time off and how you work. Netflix’s ideas would be great in big gaming companies in that they should give ownership and control to small teams to develop games. Netflix is great at what they do not because of the original “idea” of starting video streaming of movies but the complete opposite, they started being great based on how they operate and how they take action.
Recommended reading about Netflix (I didn’t get paid to share this link, it’s just a great book): https://www.amazon.com/dp/B077Y4WVPT/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1
So if we bring Netflix’s ideas to a AAA development company the results could be astonishing. I’ll be putting that to test, if this works we could see some great change in the gaming industry. My dream is that I’m so excited every week for a new game as I am for movies every few weeks. Right now only Zelda, Mario and a few other releases make me excited. My goal is to start with a few indie games and move to bigger projects later on. I’m still new at game development but I’m learning every day. An embarrassing proof of this is that I was working on an online MobA as a solo developer and I got a friend to help me with the music but that was going to take years to be done so I decided to stop that and build a small project instead.
