Defining Characteristics
It's hard not to sympathize with Delay; how can a game developer no longer be considered independent because it turned out a hit? Obviously, we don't want them to toil in poverty while confined to their parents' basements. Yet when two independent game developers like BioWare and Pandemic join forces in a partnership with funding from a capital investment firm to make an $800 million behemoth, it's tough to compare it with a small band like Introversion.
In fact, it's difficult to determine how much of a factor commercial success should represent in defining an independent game developer. We can't exactly consider, say, id Software as an independent developer. Or can we? Della Rocca points out that id Software is technically an independent developer even though it is one of the more successful and well-known brands in the industry.
"They're not owned by a publisher or big corporation, but there's obviously a difference between id and the smaller, indy garage guys," he said.
Della Rocca breaks the industry down into different camps.
"On one hand, you have the sort of farm league developers; they don't have any money and they don't have great development skills so they're bench players for the minor league teams," Della Rocca said. "On the other hand, you have developers that want to be independent because they don't want anything to do with the mainstream and don't want to be beholden to a corporation."
Demiurge Studios of Cambridge, Mass., isn't a garage outfit - the company actually moved into a rather nice bit of office space recently - but nevertheless it's considered an independent. In fact, co-founder Al Reed gave a seminar at the Game Developer Conference recently on starting an independent developer called "Bootstrapping a Game Company in the Age of Blockbuster Budgets."
During his presentation, Reed talked about how Demiurge was started from scratch with no seed money, investor support or corporate backing. It's an important distinction, Reed said, because "it's cheating if you're already rich."
Like many young gaming companies out there, the seeds of Demiurge were planted in college; Reed and few classmates at Carnegie Mellon University got together to start Demiurge. But here's the bad news: "We're seeing less and less of college students creating viable companies today and fewer of the rag-tag indy developers that start out as amateurs in a garage or basement," Reed said.
It seems just as many colleges and universities have legitimized the idea of game development as a viable study and career choice while opportunities for young minds eager to break into the industry is shrinking.
What about all these new game development classes and programs? Della Rocca dismisses them.
"Those courses are designed to create worker bees," Della Rocca said. "They're not teaching you how to be an entrepreneur in this industry but rather how to be a good developer within the corporate system."
