Fox Searchlight, Miramax, Focus Features, Paramount Vantage. Practically ever major film studio has a label geared to finding, producing, and distributing “specialty” films, films that cover risky topics or themes, films that have a unique voice or emotional tone – films that at first glance may have limited mainstream appeal.
The music industry has an entire spectrum of indie label sizes (including now anybody in their basement). As artists grow in popularity they have the option to transition to larger publishing labels to support a larger fanbase.
The next big step to propel games forward as a medium is having more specialty publishing labels. Like specialty labels in film and music, these companies can more easily pursue marketing and distributing games that are unique and original.
Remember way back when everyone in the industry was basically like, “We can’t have any creative independent games because indies can’t get into the retail channel. Digital distribution will save us all!” Well, digital distribution is here, and there are in fact more indies, but the quality or depth of those games has not magically increased. Just the quantity. While I appreciate the rebellious spirit of those who honestly thought it might be different, the reality has settled in. Now the digital distribution channels are crowded and any indie has to fight for attention just like trying to get on a store shelf.
There was more conventional wisdom discussed by the ubiquitous “they” at the same time – what was in theory also holding us back is the fact that we were making the same fantasy and science fiction games. If we make more diverse games, we’ll attract more diverse people, and that will encourage the development of games with more cultural value or significance. Well, the Wii has brought new gamers as well as all sorts of new types of games. I’m not one to applaud the slapping on of licenses to games, as I suspect these might be, but we finally live in a world where someone can make a game out of Hell’s Kitchen or Pretty in Pink. That is something. But you can’t really say the broadening market has necessarily produced more meaningful games.
We’ve made great progress towards those two limiting factors, but what’s next? We need to create infrastructure that will allow more independent developers to succeed making games based primarily on their emotional impact or value/relevance to society today. On the surface these typically seem like they limited appeal, but if they touch on something true to human nature, they end up having a much larger audience. Those are the creative risks we need to be encouraging as an industry, and part of that is understanding what kinds of people and companies are best placed to do it.
The primary role of the specialty label is to offer a shield of reputation to convince others to take a risk on controversial content, or content seemingly targeted to a small audience (but in fact with broad appeal). The label gives consumers a shorthand for understanding the value of the content, an association with the quality or other characteristics of the label’s games. The reputation of the label also is meant to help convince publishers, before the game is complete, that risque material will be handed respectfully. The label is a branding tool for the independent developer.
There also more specific concerns that specialty labels could address. These days “publish” is a catch all term, practically outmoded. If a publisher distributes a game on their online distribution platform, they often don’t take on many additional responsibilities. If they do marketing it’s going to be tied to their platform. But there’s a growing amount of work an indie developer can’t keep up with (or wouldn’t necessarily want to), including things like:
- Testing & quality control – Standards compliance on each platform can be a bit of a bear on a small developer. As indie games step outside their current niches into more systemic and procedural games, a larger amount of testing will be necessary to ensure quality.
- Marketing/PR – Most small developers do this themselves while their strength is game development, resulting in this being poor across the board. Or at least not as effective as it could be, I’d wager.
- Distribution deals – As royalty rate schemes for online distribution increase in complexity, indies could be served better here by people with experience making those deals (and people who can focus their time on it).
Any independent label of this sort will have to focus on two key strategies. First and foremost is that, even if a label’s driving purpose is to deliver original games, it is still a business aiming to be financially successful. They must spend appropriately to audience size – but not riskiness of subject matter. That’s the advantage they have over mainstream labels.
Just as important is creativity in marketing & branding – of the games and the label itself. It’s a complex entertainment landscape out there, and I doubt anyone has a sure fire strategy for success in getting above all the noise. Being flexible and thinking on your feet, as the ground shifts out from under you, is absolutely necessary.
Nine years ago, Greg Costikyan wrote a piece in Game Developer on this general topic. Today Manifesto Games is probably one of the closest things the industry has to a specialty label. At the same time, it doesn’t pursue all of these areas, either. Certainly focusing on your own digital distribution makes it more difficult to build a bigger brand umbrella for your clients, since you’re not going to be focusing on promoting them on other platforms.
So what are the main factors things keeping the industry from having more specialty labels to fill this void? The platform owners, naturally, and developers themselves. Inserting folks in the middle of the revenue stream means less money for the parties on each side. I don’t know that Microsoft’s current royalty schemes leave a lot of room for the specialty label to make the value it offers cost effective. Not to pick too much on MS here, most comparable services don’t do any big favors for the developers either.
The platform owners have very little motivation to change themselves. They have a position of power over developers, even more so on consoles but also on PCs. The hope here is that this will naturally change with increasing competition. While today console exclusives are dead, long live exclusives – small developers are much more likely to make their game for one platform because they don’t have the resources to target multiple ones. You’re not going to pay several hundred dollars for a console to get one or two exclusive, original, downloadable games, but what about 10-20? Competition should force each service to offer better value to the developers in order to attract the best games.
That leaves the developers. Lord knows if I was in business for myself, and someone came to me and told me they’d market my company and my game in return for a cut, I’d have problems taking them seriously. The liklihood that they’re going to be able to promote my pre-civil-war-era-you-play-an-escaped-slave action-RPG, as a for-instance, is probably minimal. The key, as in other industries, is that the people behind the label have to be just as passionate as the developers about creating original, unique games. Conveying that passion is the easiest way to approach a skeptical developer.
There are a lot more challenges for any company trying to break ground in this space, of course. The companies that do, however, stand to gain quite a lot from that effort – just as we all stand to gain from theirs.
I did an interview recently with the GM of Relic, and he made a good point about where he saw independent games at: smaller games are there to prove out radical concepts that the conservative mainstream will later adopt. I have to agree that this is the stage independent games are at.
In music, indie bands can be considered a genre unto themselves, as can independent games in the state they’re in. I’m not sure if the benefit would be that great, having independent games merely be independently funded and launched games. As it stands they’re much different than commercial products, which is maybe not an apparent plus for consumers, but right now it has its purpose in the industry.
The issue of people is a different story, and from the developers perspective I totally agree. It would be great to be able to make a living producing independent games. It just seems like they exist as more of a proving ground right now than a market.
Well, at this point “indie” as a genre or term for who’s backing a developer is almost moot. It’s pretty hard to use it consistently. In music, “indie” rockers sign with big labels, and it’s just a momentary classification of a style of music. Independent typically means not associated with any major label/publisher, but then what about studios like, say, Silicon Knights that are published by majors but not owneed by them? Those are pretty rare these days, so are they independent?
Anyway, I don’t know that smaller focused games are inherently a proving ground for ideas for the largest mass market. There are ideas that will always be limited in audience, assuming they have the distribution & marketing to reach the largest applicable audience. The thing that more specialty labels can help with making sure those games reach the largest audience they can possibly appeal to.
I see what you mean, but indie rock for instance is different enough to fit in that independent space — it’s not just that they can’t get published by a big player. It’s off-kilter and just different to be different. I think the same can be said about a lot of independent games. You don’t see anyone making an independent Call of Duty clone, instead they’re about time manipulation, ghosting, physics — they experiment with odd story structures and controls.
In game development the creator/publisher relation is so different that I don’t think you can look at it exactly the same way. A few large companies sit in that second party limbo; they’re not owned by the publisher but really, they might as well be.
Double Fine, on the other hand, is noticeably independent. Their games are strange and different, and they have to hunt for publishers. I think what I’m getting at, in defining independents as a genre, is that there are a pool of games that could not exist in the mainstream market; there is a reason they’re independent besides pride.
I bet in the next few years we see a big budget game that uses the ghosting mechanic that The Adventures of PB Winterbottom, Braid, and Click 10 used. People liked the mechanic, and now some of the risk is gone.
I’m a firm believer that demographics are garbage and that ideas don’t have to be constrained to certain markets. Why? Because after explaining Gears of War to my mother, she gave it a go and had some fun. She was horrible at it, but she was laughing and screaming the whole time. She had fun. Nobody ever told her what it was like to play it because they assumed she wouldn’t like it. If someone is told they aren’t going to like something, then they won’t like it.
Of course you have to target something with a retail game. With smaller independents it’s possible to do something different with little financial risk.
Frankly, if it isn’t a testbed, then what is it good for?
I think with the tide of digital distribution we will start to see big publishers investing more and more in smaller games. This is already happening on the XBLA/PSN services and I believe it will continue.
This does a few things for them. As mentioned previously, it can be testing grounds for new IP, to see if a new idea or gameplay method is marketable, etc. Another important factor not mentioned is that it also can keep the staff happy (some developers out there care) as not everyone wants to work on blockbusters and sometimes developers just need a temporary change of pace to keep the fire alive in their career.
Just as the post says, the key is keeping the costs appropriate. You can’t have a team of 10 senior developers on $100k salaries working for a year on an experimental game. Well, you can, but you’ll probably go out of business very quickly. Save that for the sequel of a small game that is a surprise success.
Overall, great post. Us developers often dream of pursuing our own ideas and for the first time since the shareware days it is starting to get a little bit easier to make that happen. The filter is once again becoming who has the balls to take the risks necessary to throw your resources behind a new idea.