A Kick in the Pants

by Piyoz on Sep 5th, 2013

How’s it going, game industry? Having a rough day? Too many death threats in your inboxes? Are our politicians still giving you trouble for causing our children to become heartless, crazed hell-spawns? Too busy with organizing pre-order deals, online passes, and invasive DRM to spend your mental energy on, perhaps, more useful details like your marriage anniversary, what color the sky is, and whether or not you’re wearing clean socks?

Well, relax. Take a few minutes for yourself. Here. Here’s a fresh cup of coffee for you.The indie game industry is ever-growing. Small, one-office game developers scattered across the globe can now take whatever product their unfettered imaginations have cooked up and send it out to the masses for all to enjoy. Platforms like Steam Greenlight, PSN and even the oddball WiiU have become hosts to countless indie titles of every genre, style, and size. The fact that the virtual work of craftsmen dedicated to the medium can be played and enjoyed by players all over the world is pretty amazing when you think about it.

There’s another method that many ambitious amateur game designers take to manifest their dreams into code. And it’s not even for amateurs.

Kickstarter is a website and community dedicated to providing funding and feedback to individuals and companies with unique, experimental and wild ideas. You can find concepts for movies, books, and of course video games. In fact, video game projects being realized through Kickstarter fan support is becoming more and more popular. Just look at that excellent A Hat in Time project. And Star Citizen. And the recent Mighty No. 9 by Megaman mastermind Keiji Inafune. The amount of funding and support that these projects have acquired is staggering!

Let’s continue looking at Inafune-sensei’s Mighty No. 9 project. This project reached its $900,000 goal in about a day. Think of how successful this venture will be for its team of creators. Money caked with fame and sprinkled with adoration!

Contrast this with a game like, for example, the new Tomb Raider. This recent reboot received positive reviews across the board, and sold several million copies. Yet, despite this, the creators deemed this game a “failure”. Why? Because the game cost around $100 million to develop, distribute, and market. There are movies that made with a fraction of that budget! When you have to spend such a ridiculous amount of money to produce a game, it requires an equally ridiculous number of sales to make it “successful”. Try 5 million. That’s what Square Enix estimated to ring in from Tomb Raider. Instead, they had to settle for a mere 3.5 million copies sold.

That’s why very popular titles like Dead Space 3 and Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning were also not able to redeem themselves from the bargain bin. The expectations that the creators had for their sweet, precious concoctions were so grossly unrealistic. It’s a wonder they continue this model at all.

At the university that I just graduated from, there were always huge construction projects and remodelings going on all year. This is because the president of our school is so dedicated to “advancing” and “providing state-of-the-art services” and “creating healthy learning environments” along with an assortment of other dubious improvements. How does the university pay for all these projects? By raising tuition! This puts us, the students, those who should be benefiting from an enriching college experience, further and further into inevitable debt.

These projects continue because my university is in a constant competition with the other universities around the state to see who can maintain the prettiest campus, provide the fanciest computer labs, and have the most handicap accessible class facilities. Yes, the buildings and lawns are pretty. But in the end, the students  have to drop out or are left with years upon years of impending servitude to tuition loans. At the end of the day, nobody has won.

The thing that much of the AAA game industry doesn’t realize is that bigger is not always better. Go ahead and dazzle us with your open world, Bethesda. Give us your most fluid and natural character animations, Assassin’s Creed. Keep on imitating Call of Duty’s fluid first-person combat, Battlefield. These game elements are impressive in their own right, to be sure. But often we’re given high frame rate, smooth facial animations taken from motion capture, and passable attempts at gritty, deep narrative in lieu of actually new and creative styles of game play. It seems to me that the indie scene has a better grasp on what gamers actually want than the focus group-driven AAA game makers.

These Kickstarter projects have genuine potential. Looking at the numbers, these games clearly have thousands and thousands of consumers who want to play these games, but what they don’t have is support from a publisher willing to provide funding. These large publishers are so obsessed with giving us games with descriptors like “cinematic”, “immersive” and other buzzwords. AAA publishers have become disconnected from their audience. They’ve transformed the gaming industry into something so bloated and unwieldy that experimental and fun ideas conceived of by gamers for other gamers need to pursue other avenues.

Conclusion: the AAA gaming industry has become too large for its own good, producing passionless titles and series with enormous budgets meant to appeal to wide audiences. What they’re ignoring is that simpler, more creative games (like those found on Kickstarter, Steam Greenlight, etc)  can have even more success when they make games that people actually want to pay money for.

Have your own thoughts on the recent indie game explosion? Let us know what you think by posting in our forums!

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