Looking at the Little Man: Indie Projects vs. Corporate
By Ethen Butt
In the world of digital media, many different studios and companies produce franchises and products that people see and interact with every day. But a notion that comes up constantly is that these small studios are producing projects more popular than these industry giants like Ubisoft or Blizzard. Games and movies have had this pop up in recent years in large quantities, especially after the COVID lockdown.
One example of a very popular indie video game is the game Lethal Company, a simple game that achieved huge reach. The gameplay loop, or the main idea behind the game and its mechanics, is to grab up to three friends and hunt for loot on a dangerous planet full of monsters and supernatural beings that want nothing more than to kill you. All to reach a quota so you don’t get terminated by the company. On paper, it doesn’t sound much different than something like Destiny 2, a looter shooter. You take to the solar system as a guardian with powers that transcend the laws of the universe called the light, using them to kill alien races from outside of the system that want to kill the last remnants of humanity. It has been developing new stories and features since, with highs and lows in terms of popularity.
Both games sound similar but one has had much more attention than the other. Destiny 2 was released in 2017, a sequel to the original Destiny game. Lethal Company, on the other hand, was released in October of 2023. During the same month, Destiny reached a count of 135k average players, and Lethal Company reached a peak of about 240k.
So the question is why and how did this small game made by one person beat a game with hundreds of people working on it?
Let’s look at another example in a different industry. In October of 2023, an indie pilot episode was published by the small studio Glitch Productions, The Amazing Digital Circus, on their youtube channel (THE AMAZING DIGITAL CIRCUS: PILOT (youtube.com)). Little is known of the story as the pilot’s main focus was showing the main cast of characters and their personalities, as well as setting up a mystery. It seems to be roughly based on the story “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream’’ by Harlan Ellieson, a story about the relationship between humanity and machines, taking most of its inspiration from a tale of a machine that holds several people in a loop in which they are forever tortured. In less than a week, The Amazing Digital Circus reached 100 million views and by the end of the month, it reached over 200 million views, making it the most-viewed pilot on YouTube. In contrast, the most recent movie in the previously highly popular Marvel cinematic universe: Madame Web, a story following the story of Cassandra Webb, a middle aged woman who can see into the future and her attempts to save three girls from death. Just as a side note, I have not actually seen the film, all information is found by looking it up online. The movie is one of the worst-performing Marvel movies to date. It grossed roughly a hundred million dollars. The average ticket price in America is ten and a half dollars. The movie’s budget was 80 million and grossed 99 million, with the average price for a ticket being roughly 10.53$ (information about ticket pricing found on Axios Movie Day 2023 is Sunday with $4 movie tickets at Regal, AMC theaters (axios.com) and Madame Web information found here: Madame Web — Box Office Mojo). Dividing the ticket price vs total gross, the movie had roughly nine and a half million people who paid to see it.
Both Disney and Bungie made decisions that lowered peoples opinions of a franchise and/or the company itself, but this is years after they started. In the past few years people have been consuming media at an increased rate especially after the pandemic lockdown, as it takes time for not just Disney and bungie, but every company to produce a film, tv show or video game people start to look to other sources. There are thousands of indie projects out in the world that people are gravitating towards. Both of these examples show how indie ideas can outperform massive company projects. But if this is the case, why do we have these huge companies?
Let’s continue to look at the film industry, way back when these companies were starting out, they were doing much the same as indie companies: producing a pilot episode or short film in hopes of gaining some attention from the general populace. In fact, there is a whole film concerning the humble beginnings of Disney, showing that even this giant film company had a small start. Part of what made Disney such a large company was its original stories and animated features of fairy tales such as Snow White or Beauty and the Beast. So how can such a beloved company produce such a lackluster movie? Well it’s a matter of passion.
Disney has been a common household name all over the world for quite a long time, ever since their original few films all about popular German fairy tale characters. After that they cemented their position by experimenting, taking some existing stories and putting a spin on them, for example Robin Hood, an animated feature with anthropomorphic characters. They were also doing a lot of original work, like Journey to Atlantis, the Great Mouse Detective, and Brother Bear. They did not limit themselves to only animated movies; they also produced several live actions, like Pirates of the Caribbean, a film based on their own original ride. All of these extremely popular movies and yet they made Madame Webb a movie that has been looked upon rather negatively. Passion is a defining point when it comes to working most anything. When Disney started all the films it made were projects of a small team putting tons of time and effort into everything they did, as they gained more and more popularity they grew as a company, gaining more animators and directors.
The issue came when they reached a peak, Avengers Endgame was one of the most climatic movies of all time, and the issue is that since then all marvel movies have been rather lacking. They have not been putting in as much money into these movies as they had been, meaning they had less money to invest for CGI or computer graphic imaging, which is a large part of many live action movies today. It gets to a point where they continually try to top themselves from the last film and they hit a point where it gets too pricey so they cut corners; due to this many companies tend to remake older films or give finished stories a new spin.
Old material can only be reused so many times before it gets stale and people start to lose interest. So it’s a dilemma, they don’t want to risk money on a new film project that may fail, but how many times can they bring back an old fan favorite before people stop liking what they are producing?
The Amazing Digital Circus was produced by a small studio that does mostly passion projects, like their three previous shows Murder Drones, Meta Runners and Sunset Paradise. All of them are animated and had a much smaller reach with Murder Drones being the highest viewed, currently sitting at 41 million views. They began as two brothers putting together a small team of animators to bring stories to life with 3D animation. (Home | Glitch Productions and (14) GLITCH — YouTube). Glitch has also taken advantage of their newfound popularity to showcase other indie projects during a previous live streamed event.
Let’s hop back to those video games I mentioned, Lethal company and Destiny 2. The video game industry is rather new to the world and is growing rapidly as more and more people invest time and money into the products produced. The way games start to fail is when the heart driving the game, the developers, lose the passion they had when they started or, and this being the more common, when the income produced by the game can no longer justify the production cost. Bungie, the company behind Destiny, is also responsible for one of the most popular game franchises in the world, Halo. Halo is up there with games such as Call of Duty as the most iconic first person shooters; for many people it is the game series that gave them that appreciation for the genre. Destiny was also a very promising franchise especially around the launch of new DLC or downloadable content, an extra purchase a person could make to add another storyline to the game. Around the release date of these DLC, the average player count would skyrocket, as the game brought the interest of more and more people; the player count reached a peak early in 2023 as the release date of the games latest DLC was set hitting a player count 316k an all time high for the franchise. The name of this DLC is Lightfall, and in the year since its launch it has come to be regarded as one of, if not the worst DLC ever released for the game, finding a lack of interest in the story and new abilities introduced. All that culminated in the average player count and general player sentiment to plummet steadily over the course of 2023.
Even a large company makes mistakes, as much as they try to brush over them, but when the community that developed around and grown with your game starts to mistrust you, how do you recover? Looking at statements of both current and former employees, the development team is still very passionate about the game, they saw the planned features as well as some of the microtransaction plans for the game and knew that the player base would strongly dislike them. The developers begged “upper management” to allow them to make changes, but they were disregarded. As 2023 wore on player count continued to drop; in April 2024 the average player count is roughly 72k (all information about average player count can be found here Destiny 2 Steam Charts · SteamDB). This is largely due to a filler DLC that is free for everyone, made because of the delay to The Final Shape, the most ambitious DLC for the game, that is due to release sometime in June, four months after its initial planned release date in February.
Now let’s look at Lethal Company. The game was developed by a single individual, Zeekers. Zeekers started in 2012 at ten years old. He started by making games on the popular game engine Roblox, he later moved to the popular website for indie game developers, Itch.io (Download the latest indie games — itch.io). He experimented on the website, releasing short horror games like It Steals, a very simple game about collecting things while being pursued by a monster (sounds familiar). Steadily, he gained a small following of people interested in his games. After all that experimenting he produced and published Lethal Company on the steam store as an early access game, meaning that the game was still being developed, but was in a playable state. He plans on further updating the game at least 9 months after the initial release, and so far he has released several content updates introducing new planets to visit and new monsters to be afraid of (all information found here The 10-Year Journey Behind Lethal Company’s Success (pushtotalk.gg))
Booth Zeekers and the two brothers who started Glitch had one thing in common, the desire and passion to pursue making things. They didn’t make one product that was an overnight classic, they spent years developing their unique style and vision, and with the case with Glitch productions finding people who shared that same passion. Both Glitch and Zeekers took the opinions of the community that interacted with their ideas and changed them to make them better, making these ideas feel like, as a community, we had some actual influence on a work of art that everyone can enjoy.
It’s encouraging and more than a little endearing to see and hear people talk or do things that they are passionate about, and just by listening you can for a moment, step into their shoes and see that passion with new perspectives. See the things that lead them to have such a passion. So why not try and be that passionate person. Every engine story starts somewhere.
To wrap this all up, I hope that you look at all these facts and decide to make something yourself. It doesn’t have to make an appearance on the world wide stage, it doesn’t have to be perfect. You Got This (youtube.com), in the wise words of twitch streamer and game developer Thor Hall, “you may not be the best or even the fastest and that’s ok, you can do something that no one else can, just by being you, so be the best you you can be.” When it comes to the wide digital landscape, the creative possibilities are endless. So go, design worlds for people to explore in games, write a story to touch someone’s heart in a short film, express those hidden thoughts in your own works of art. The only limitations are your imagination, so go make something that you care about. For those individuals interested in making their own video games, Hall has a website giving various resources and encouragement for anyone and on his youtube channel he gives general life advice along with some witty banter (Game Development).
