Introduction
"How do you define what an independent game developer is?" asks Jason Della Rocca, executive director of the International Game Developer Association. And it's a great question, one that's become increasingly harder to answer in today's gaming industry.
No one knows the answer for sure - not even Introversion Software. The U.K.-based game developer won three awards at the Independent Games Festival (IGF), including the Seumas McNally Grand Prize, for its popular title Darwinia. There is just one problem: some folks didn't think Introversion should qualify as an independent developer. Feathers were ruffled since Introversion is successful and has made a significant amount of money (the company signed an agreement with Valve late last year to sell Darwinia through Steam). That irked the four founders and directors, such as Chris Delay who recently vented his opinion in a post on the Introversion site. Here's an excerpt:
"On a separate [sic] point of debate, there were some rumblings from some of the judges and other indie developers (we know who you are!) suggesting that Darwinia did not qualify as an Independent Game and should be excluded from the competition. Much of the reasoning seemed to be that Darwinia was now commercially successful thanks to a Steam distribution deal.
"Firstly in order to say that a game is or is not "Indie" you need a definition of the term, and the IGF rules offer no such definition that we can use. Indeed Half-Life 2 would have been eligible [sic] - funded internally by a privately-owned dev company who owned all the IP, and then distributed digitally online direct to consumers. We don't pretend to know what the definition of "Indie" is, but we believe any definition that rules out Darwinia is worthy of immediate dismissal - four guys working from their bedrooms for three years including 18 months of open experimentation, funded by real-world jobs and bank loans, releasing a game that is entirely their own creation and property - Darwinia's development IS the definition of an Indie Game. To suggest that signing a deal with the Steam system six months after launch somehow strips Darwinia of its Indie status is bordering on ridiculous."
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