A Pivot To Indie won’t save us
A Pivot To Indie won’t save us – AURAMBLES
An indie dev's response to NYT's "Games Can’t Afford To Look This Good" and the meme of "I want smaller games with less graphics and I'm not kidding".
Certainly some food for thought, but I feel like people saying indies will save us are saying that as consumers and a lot more selfishly. AAA is struggling to deliver interesting games and indies are killing it, so you play indie titles instead. Whether those indie titles are actually produced organically and whatnot is kind of secondary for that purpose. The mass layoffs in AAA are bad, but in the New York Times article, for example, they're mainly seen as indicative of the business model faltering, which should naturally give more room for indies. But yeah, that these studios are still horrendously profitable kind of shows that this may not be true in the end.
I haven't thought too deep about my desire for the industry to push to indie, but this was an interesting read.
Another point that I've thought though, is that marketing budgets are insanely high in AAA in order to cut through the noise of the rest of social media.
I would imagine that if EA or whoever was pumping out 10 times as many games, they would need to share that marketing budget equally. The chance for cut-through for each game would be small and many of the projects wouldn't even make financial sense compared to putting bets on a smaller number of the bigger budget games. The game release cadence would be really confusing and noisy, with people not knowing what is worth playing.
Very much agree with the last point about games being profitable as fuck. It should be enough that the industry is making shed loads of money above cost without the need to increase shareholder value every quarter by cutting jobs.
I wonder how much of the ballooning cost of AAA budgets are due to losing technical expertise by staff turnover/churn? I can't imagine that creates an atmosphere of efficiency.
Something important to remember is how many great franchises or games were originally made by a very small (or "indie") team. Zelda, Tetris, Mario, Minecraft, Sonic, Civ, and others. Each eventually either grew massively or were bought out by a bigger corporation later. Indie games may not be our savior, but so many mainstream games started out small. It seems to me that the smaller the team, the bigger the innovation.
Somebody is gonna try to fact check me on this, so I'll just say my point is you can't have a healthy gaming industry without a healthy indie industry too, IMHO.