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Can US indie companies compete with the current economy?
AlloughN
Member Posts: 168
Indie companies don't have huge budgets, they scrape through on volunteer time and private donations. If big companies like EA are having to cut workers, even after a big launch like WAR had, whats that saying for the upcoming indie companies?
Lets look at it this way, some to most "innovative" games come from new developers. Most big companies just keep coming out with the same old thing. Themepark. We whine and complain like any good mmorpg.com user, but we still play the games. We continue giving the big companies money so they can make more junk, or copies with a few new features.
Darkfall is indie developed. Yes, they have a company, Adventurine has been around for a while, but its still indie. If Darkfall delivers what it promises, its going to tear the MMO world of that genre apart.
Is Darkfall going to be the last innovative, new, indie developed game to ever make it to "prime time" for a while?
We could include EVE in here, since CCP is relatively new to the MMO and did do a good job with EVE. They are (in my opinion only) slowing down. They have promised ambulation for how long??? Even so, they aren't going to get near the players Darkfall is if it delivers.
Is the indie game, here represented by Darkfall, the last of a dieing breed? Is the bad economy, and the players themselves going to force the indie's out of the picture?
Lets face it, as long as they don't have a reason to the big companies aren't going to change. Why should they bother coming out with something totally new, like Darkfall, when they can get your buck by promising you "next generation".
If this is true, we are in for a terrible time until things straighten out again.
There are other things, like maybe Darkfall waking everyone up to the fact that they don't have to eat the latest junk food the big ones are serving them. But who really knows? Will that only change the fantasy genre, or will it be able to "splash" over into the other categories like medieval, and sci-fi.
**Not saying themepark is all that bad, when in moderation. When we have 38 themeparks all built the same way with the tag "for carebears" on every seat, then themepark is bad.
Comments
Fanboyism much?
Sorry but are you offending EVE. If you say it takes long time to ship ambulation then yes, it is true but it also cost allot of development time and money . And how long did DFO took ? Oh yeah....
And please! DFO, DFO? get real! There is guild wars 2 , earth rise, fallen earth, star trek online, all point bulletin, champion online, mortal online and much more. Most of these guys are indie developers with the exception of arena net but hey, that will be fine since they have one of the best developers around + they are a very nice company which started small with guild wars and look at it now.
DFO only will get EVE numbers if most is promised, not extremely buggy and a decent polished game. Only then has it a good chance to reach 200 k subs but even then, i doubt they will make as much money as CCP. They are the king of the niche market atm while WOW is the king of the mainstream market.
But anyway, yes there will be loads of indie developers coming. If you checked EA track of 2008, you can see why they didn't made allot of money.
Need for speed was a bad game, sport games did ofc. well, miror edge was to short and dead space, while a good game was also a bit short. Spore wasn't the success they had in mind probably.
OP , i advise you look better in current mmo's in development section. There is more then DFO.
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the old days, the days of gold.
representer of euhporium, shade/amity , high member of the council.
played
UO,M59,EVE,L2,AC,GW,WOW,LOTRO,SWG pre cu/nge,COH/COV, VG,TR,L1, POTBS,Neocron 1 and 2, DAOC pre TOA and age of conan
playing: EVE ONLINE
Waiting for Earthrise, FE, bioware mmo, guild wars 2, DFO , mortal online , the chronicles of spellborn
I think you answered your own question. What comes out of our wallets speaks volumes more than what comes out of our mouths.
Indie developers won't have a hard time if they produce a quality product and people support them.
There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody's expense but his own.
-- Herman Melville
What do you mean it's many times easier for an indy developer to make a game and get their name out than it was even 2 years ago much less even further back.
Just because Indy companies are be smart and keeping quite about what they're working doesn't mean they're not working and not there. Excessive hype makes AAA games sucessful but it kills indies we rely of slow but steady growth not a burst that then slowly declines over time.
There are a couple seriously sucessful indy companies out there. Some of them like Jagex with Runescape are even defining the market and having SOE copy their methodolgies.
I find it amazing that by 2020 first world countries will be competing to get immigrants.
I highly doubt many indies can survive this economic downturn. Indies are ultraly relying on VC money to operate (unless they already have a game and taking in revenue). And that is just going to be tight.
If the company has already taken in a loan, then they have no problem.. Please explain why the economic crisis should have any influence here..
If the company has already taken in a loan, then they have no problem.. Please explain why the economic crisis should have any influence here..
Not all indies have cash on hand that can last years. Many start-ups needs multiple rounds of VC fundings to survive. If an indie is in the middle of a funding cycle, and funding sources are drying up, well, you know what happens.
Bank loans are not always the proper vehicle to fund start-ups. MMOs are expensive ventures. Even if you are talking about a fraction of what it costs a major title (~50-75M range), you need at least something like 5-15M over 2-3 years. No bank is going to give you a $10M loan. These are typically funded by VCs, which operates very differently.
And I don't think anything smaller is viable. You still need *some* content and technology to make a professional game. (Something like a web game does not count).
@Shadenis, I would stay away from the Darkfall forums if I were you. It looks like you got branded troll one to many times.
If you'll notice, I said I was using Darkfall as a example, since its the most prominant of indie games to be released right now.
You really think that a bay area studio, that has several MMO's out, and has a huge IP for their next one is indie?
No one has really determined when a company goes from indie to big, but I would say its about where they start getting funding in the millions per quarter, or have over 250k subs in all their games combined. That would leave CCP still indie, and Cryptic as pro.
@Last poster, you hit the nail right on the head. I just lost a job a couple weeks ago. The company was in between funding cycles and was unable to get more. It went under like a minnow tied to a rock. Thats exactly what I mean. If those companies that manage to make it through see only "more of the same old" is selling big, thats exactly what they will deliver. = Death of the Indie, at least for a while.
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I'm hoping that we see a flurry of indie games succeed. I'm not a player of the fantasy genre. I have never played WoW, and probably won't play Darkfall. I still want it to succeed.
@shadenis, if I really was a fanboi, wouldn't it be for the game that I write about? If I was a Darkfall fanboi, I probably wouldn't have "StarQuest Online" under my name now would I? Lol
Depends on where the money is coming from, and how secure the investors feel about the product with the state of the economy in mind.
I worked for a indie group for 3 years, and was out of a job last august because our funding was pulled.
Im just going out on a limb but dose a company stop being indie after it starts making huge profits, i thought indie meant 'independent". Dont see where profit margins come into that word?
Problem of Darkfall is not that its done by Indie company...
Problem lies in the fact that Darkfall promises 10 times the volumes of features , other huge established companyes dare to promise.
Question is ? How can a team of 10 people in Greece make something that would cost Blizzard 100 million dollars and 200 people working on it for 5 years ?
If Indie company - tone down its promises , and delivers modest but tightly focused game.
Let say - Very basic graphic , and just procedural quests - BUT giving full skill based sandbox MMO with high focus on gameplay
Well that is very possible.
The game might not be stellar succes at first. But it will steadily raise number of users.
Exactly Same thing happened to EVE , and Runescape
They started small and modest , and became giants
The discussion aside from the games themselves, I see that the future of MMORPG's is in hand of the privately held, indie companies. Reason is very simple, as long as privately held companies can keep afloat, pay their devteams etc. they are responsible on their actions just to themselves and the gamers.
The companies with publicly traded shares have their main responsibility for shareholders, who expaect dividents and to whom games are but a remote thing. This is, I think one of the main reasons for Sony going cash shop, more money back to investors.
To sum it up, privately held indies can divert any surplus cash back to their games, publicly traded companies have their first and foremost money hole in the form in investors, games themselves are secondary.
Playing: AC2
Played: UO, DaoC, Horizons, Ryzom, WAR, LotRO, Eve, VG...
Yeah I hate excessive quotes
:initiate devil's advocate mode:
Can it be done yes. Can it be done well, maybe. Can Blizzard do anything with 10 people, no. Of those 200 people, 30-50 of those people would handle oversight and or administrative duties. That alone would be a few million a year of the budget and wouldn't get you a line of code or a single sprite. There would be many writers and everything would run through a commitee. Commitees, meetings, and a vertical chain of command hold those unimportant programers and graphic artists back.
Point is everything a big company does is more expensive and takes more people than their smaller counterparts. Smaller horizontal companies keep people moving and while a feature will take several times the effort (and time) of a single quest... well I don't think DF will have 10k quests to write.
BTW location doesn't mean anything. There are talented programers anywhere computers exist in numbers.
If the company has already taken in a loan, then they have no problem.. Please explain why the economic crisis should have any influence here..
This depends on the structure and pricing of the loan. If it was a relatively long term loan with a fixed and comfortable interest rate and repayment schedule, that's one thing. If the loan has any interesting features, however, in terms of interest resets, acceleration of payment schedule due to economic conditions or something of the sort, it's a whole different ballgame. The fact is that right now there isn't new financing for jack. And as others have pointed out, most of the money funding for indies would be from VCs, and frankly there's FA VC money available now because the VC holdings are all in the tank.
I would say that right now it's a horrible time for an independent developer due to the economy. It's also a horrible time for most big-time developers, who are going to be cash crunched due to much lower sales of their existing product. It's just a bad time overall, pretty much for anyone.
Yeah I hate excessive quotes
:initiate devil's advocate mode:
Can it be done yes. Can it be done well, maybe. Can Blizzard do anything with 10 people, no. Of those 200 people, 30-50 of those people would handle oversight and or administrative duties. That alone would be a few million a year of the budget and wouldn't get you a line of code or a single sprite. There would be many writers and everything would run through a commitee. Commitees, meetings, and a vertical chain of command hold those unimportant programers and graphic artists back.
Point is everything a big company does is more expensive and takes more people than their smaller counterparts. Smaller horizontal companies keep people moving and while a feature will take several times the effort (and time) of a single quest... well I don't think DF will have 10k quests to write.
BTW location doesn't mean anything. There are talented programers anywhere computers exist in numbers.
First of all I completely agree location is not important, and there are very talented programers in Grece and all over the world.
But programmers , artists ..etc , that work for , let say Blizzard are the cream of the crop.
Secondly - Even though i agree that administration and meetings and commities are keeping creativity down. I work in high tech , and belive me - there are much effort to keep this to minimum , and work with maximum efficiency.
So we are talking here maybe 10% slowdown due to big organization
So
If 20 people is 100%
200 people is 1000%
1000% - 10% = 900%
which means that 200 man company still performs at least nine times better than 20 man company.
So , i think all this bragging about Indy being more capable, is bunch of hogwash.
Indy companies should not try to do BIGGER,BETTER products
They should instead do FOCUSED, SMARTER products
Im just going out on a limb but dose a company stop being indie after it starts making huge profits, i thought indie meant 'independent". Dont see where profit margins come into that word?
Independent of what?
If a small independent makes a hit game, makes a lot of money, hires more people to make more games, how are they "independent" or different from any other established game company?
Exactly, then they are no longer independent. To be independent you would have to rely on yourself, in this situation an indie company would be independent due to reling on only intself and its smaller group of workers. But that still does not mean that they cannot do a better job than blizzard. Smaller companys many of time have surpassed larged dominating companies with ease. Its the goals they must set. I'm no apple (Mac) fan but look what Steven Jobs did to IBM, perfect example. Jobs had a small team, of only about 15-20 people! and wiped IBM out of the picture. The thing is everyone should bite their tounge and just wish for the best here for the little indie leagues.
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What if Paul Revere was like the boy who cried wolf....?
Originally posted by Hazmal
What does he say when people ask what he did? "My mommy was irking me yo - I wanted to keep pwning nubs on my xbox, so I roughed her up with a hardshell. That is just how I roll."
I think it has to do with the attitude to. I've worked on both types of teams, and from what I can see its sorta a Rebel vs Empire attitude.
The Indie's tend to do things smarter, and maybe faster per person because theres sorta a individual feeling of attacking the Deathstar. On a established team, its kinda more laid back. Your just part of a company.
See what I'm saying? A lot of times, the workers on a indie team take the game as a symbol of their personal abilities.
But if they are crunched for money MORE than what they are already, the only ones that may make it through will be the mass sellers, like WoW clones.
I really don't mind a good WoW clone, but when there are 2 of them? Now think of every game coming out for the next 10 years being exact copies of WoW. WoW is a great game, but copying them is not a cool way for a Dev to go. If we wanted to play something like WoW, we would play WoW.
Either way, I hope the indie's in 09 come through, or we are in for a bad decade.
Does sound like OP is hired by Aventurine or something. Darkfall might have something, but, the way its put here, it just sound like a commercial more than anything else.
I'm sorry, I guess I shouldnt have used Darkfall to represent the coming indie games.
Heres what you do, its real easy. Pick a indie game that is new and innovative. Once you have it fixed in your head, use it everywhere you see Darkfall in this thread.
I'm a volunteer writer for StarQuest Online. I'm not involved at all with Darkfall, and I may or may not play the game, depends if they really can deliver all they promise. This thread isn't about Darkfall, its about the economic state of the indie developers.
Lobotomist- I never said they could deliver bigger and better (indies in general) or that they are more capable. While I disagree with your 10% figure, it's truely worthless to argue that point (I was figuring in the 20-25% range, not some totally rediculous like 40-50% loss).
IMO with features taking the bulk of their time, you can offer more of them with no loss. With no real lore or quests for a dungeon, I'm sure you could crank out 2 or 3 a week. Regular mobs concentrated, a few "treasure" spawns and maybe a couple hardened mobs. IIRC Blizzard takes a few weeks to build a single 5 man "dungeon", and a month+ for 10 and 25 mans. Skills and spells can be like that as well, at the core the effects can be amazingly similar, changing variables (dmg type, dmg modifier, casting costs and whatever else). Yes 500 spells can all be run off a single template with only animations and variables changed. Skills are a bit trickier, but if there is a skill to use a weapon and a weapon mastery skill, I'm guessing there will be skills for almost everything. You want to equip that armor, well you need the skill to equip that class of armor, dodge/parry/block I'd imagine come in both passive and activated modes.
Truth is I won't be at all surprised if they can or if they fail to deliver on all the features. Everything could be there and working fine, some of it could be there but be buggy, or somethings may end up scratched. It'll be interesting to see how much of each option we get.