How Independent Game Developers Work

me I have Jonathan Strickland, one of our writers. Howdy, it's a it's a good day to play a game. Yeah, it's kind of kind of cloudy outside. We were dealing with the remnants of a hurricane in Georgia, so uh, it's a good time to just relax on the couch and PLoP a game in the old Xbox three sixty and just take it for a world. You are gigantic editorial gaming room with every system that you could possibly imagine, in gigantic screens to play them on. Right, the chairs

suspended from the ceiling and nice little harnesses. It's awesome. Yeah, exists only in our imaginations, right, We don't have one

of those. But we were talking about game developers and how cool it is that that some of the smaller developers are starting to get a foothold in the market again, right, and the and the console market specifically, because they've always kind of been around in the PC market, and and the Internet is really opened up the opportunities for people who are developing games for computers, whether it's web based or whether it's something you know, you download from a site.

But video game consoles for a long time really didn't have that many independent developers producing games for them. And uh, there's a few reasons for that. Well. The first, let's let's kind of look at the recent past and how video games were developed. You have these enormous video game software corporations UM, and many of them have entire departments dedicated to produce just a single game, and some of

the games cost millions and millions of dollars to produce. UM. Like, uh, there were reports that Grand Theft Auto for cost like a hundred million dollars to produce, which is you know, you're talking about a Hollywood movie at that point. That's kind of a huge that's a huge number. I mean, there's no kind of do it. Um. And these games are so complex and so resource heavy that they require

large groups of people working together to produce them. You can't, you know, you can't have just one or two people working to create a game of that size. And uh case in point, I mean take two Interactive, the company that that produces Grand Theft Auto. At the point of this podcast, as we talk now, um, at time of press, um, they are in discussions with Electronic Arts to uh to work out some kind of combination. Uh. You know, obviously they're going to if they decide to murder Jora agree

to be bought out. However they structure it. They're doing so because of the costs about of the resources that e A would be able to give them to produce additional games in the future. Right, yeah, And now this isn't the way things always were back in the day,

a day that Chris and I can actually remember. Um, video games were simple enough where it was entirely possible for a person or a small group of people to produce a game from start to finish and put it on on the market and uh and make money and um, like in the good old days. Oh well, we're not

even you know a lot of the people. I've read several interviews in gaming magazines that said that a lot of these guys who are producing these high tech, super amazing immersive gaming uh interactions, they all started programming on their VIC twenties and Commodore sixty four's with the code that they used to put in the back of some

of the magazines and the computing magazines. And you know, it used to be where you would find, you know, the local kid in your school and he had written this game, you know, after school, and they would distribute it at on floppy disks with a bag with a little instruction yeah for I don't know what five bucks or something like that. And even big quote unquote big developers would would do the same kinds of things. You could write off and and have him mail you the

game actually floppy disk. A guy I know did exactly that, Richard Garriottum was he was he any good at it? He? Yeah, he was? He handsome. Uh, he met some success. Richard Garriott, or Richard Lord British Garriott as he's often called. Um. Uh, produced the Ultimate Gaming Series and then went on to do many other things. Um, he's trying to go off into space right now, as I understand, but the Ultimate series really was incredibly popular, and that was one of

those series. I was born out of a single person working on a game, just something that he thought was interesting. He was inspired by the Dungeons and Dragons paper and pencil game and worked out of his his parents garage and with his brother and formed Origin Game Systems and the rest is history. So but that was back when it was possible for a person or a couple of

people to create a game. And then what happened was with the with the console system in particular at twenty sure, the market became flooded with lots and lots of terrible games, and I mean horrible, almost unplayable games. I've got many of them in my basement and I have played several of them. I can admit right now, I am one of the people who did own the a ET game, widely considered to be the worst videos game of all time.

I can tell you that it's pretty bad. But you know what, I had a Raiders of the Lost Art game that I think might might tie for as horrible as the a a D game was. Where we're off Steven Spielberg's Twitter listening right, Sorry, Mr Spielberg. Um, but at any rate, all these games flooded the market and it it caused the market to crash. People got got fed up. There's no way to tell if you're going to buy

something that was of any quality or not. And people kind of moved to the computer systems and they got away from the console systems. That wasn't really until Nintendo came on the scene that the console system kind of had a renaissance, if you will. And part of the reason was that Nintendo was almost draconian in what could come onto its system. They had very specific guidelines and uh and quality control, so you didn't have the glut of really horrible games on the Nintendo system like you

did with the Atari system. I'm not saying that every Nintendo game was great, but there was. There was a much better ratio of good games to crappy games on the Nintendo system. And uh, it's it's actually continuing on like that today. If you look at games for the WEE, you'll see the official Nintendo seal on the outside of the box that tells you that it is in fact licensed by Nintendo. Right now, now, this is bringing us

up to current day. Now, current day, you know, we get past the point where you have all these huge video game systems that are spending millions of dollars and and really um uh kind of kind of monopolizing the market in a way away from the third party developers or the the independent developers rather um well, now we've got a couple of game companies or game system companies, Nintendo and Xbox, that are allowing people to create their own games uh and even sell them across the their

their internet based um services. So when Nintendo it's called we Wear and with Xbox it's the x and A Creators Club. Um. But it's these are the these these allow people to create their own games, whether it's you know, one person or a small group or whatever, and uploaded it gets pure reviewed. They can be um uh set out on the marketplace and people can actually buy these games. You can make money doing it, and it takes a lot of the expenses out of producing a game, out

of the equation. You don't have to worry about distribution anymore because it's all over the internet, so you don't have to produce the hard copy and the box and the documentation. All of that can be done electronically, you just have to convince them to h to carry the title in their store. Right. Yeah, that's um, that's still still a big step. It's a bigger step with Nintendo than it is with Microsoft Endo, right exactly. It's that

same thing we were talking about what the consoles early on. Yeah, yeah, they have, um, they have a developer Developers Kit that you can purchase for two thousand dollars and once you that immediately kind of will will cause certain people to say, you know what, I'm just not even gonna bother and that that cuts out a lot of the crappy games right there, the people who are just curious because no one's gonna drop two grand just to find out if they can do it, right, Yeah, yeah I wouldn't. I

wouldn't be able to. Yeah, I'm done too. But that you also have to become a licensed developer with Nintendo in order to offer your games on their system. Otherwise you know, they won't carry it. So there is some quality control there. And now there's once your license, you could create whatever games you like and uh, they'll carry it based on the the E S R B rating so which is of course the rating system that tells you whether or not you know what age level the

game is appropriate for. So, um, they're not as draconian as they used to be, but it's still a pretty tight grip. Xbox is a little more loose. They you have to have a premium account with the X and a Creators Club, which costs about a hundred dollars a year, so it's a subscription ba thing um, and then you get you get access to their Developers Kit. Everything is programmed in visual c sharp and um, you use that

to create the games. You upload them, and the community kind of peer reviews it and if it passes Muster, it can hit Xbox Live marketplace and people start downloading it. Well that's that's pretty amazing. Um. You know, I was reading actually the other day, and we're not just talking about completely about consoles. There are other uh consoles that you may not think of his consoles that would be

affected by this. I was reading a report in Macworld. Uh. You know, people are if you go to the app Store on your iPhone or iPod Touch or in iTunes, you can you can poke around in there even if

you don't have one of these devices. Um, they're independent developers developing games for the iPhone and the iPod Touch, and uh, there was an article and on August in mac World called a tail of two Tetrises, and an independent developer named Noah Witherspoon developed a game called Triss and it's basically it's very similar to let's just say, it's really really similar to Tetris, to the point where the Tetris company actually has threatened him with legal action

and he has removed the game from the the iTunes store. But um, you know, even on on a on that level, you know, we're not just talking about you know, the PlayStations and the xboxes of the world. I mean, there are people who develop games for these other systems. And if you wonder why people might actually want to do this may not necessarily be to get an extra you know, twenty bucks for fifteen people to download it. The more

people do this, the better they get at it. So some of these independent developers of today are going to be the people like Take two or You or the Square next of tomorrow. They could be the next big video game manufacturer. And some of them actually come from that background already, but they got out of it for one reason or another. And and now they're making the games they always wanted to make, because that's the other side of the coin of the big manufacturers versus the

independent guys. UM. A lot of the big video game companies, they're going to concentrate on games that have a proven track record, so like first person shooters and and real time strategy and resource management games, things that that people know there's a market for. Whereas your independent gamers there are developers, they're they're more likely to um experiment and really try some really bizarre new things that that no sane video game company would pour money into, and it

may turn out to be the next big hit. Sure you never know. I mean, Jonathan Blow with Braid is a good example. That's that's that's the current golden child of the uh independent developer community. UM. And it's even you could even argue that it's not that innovative of a lot of people have compared it as a sort of a mixture of Mario and Prince of Persia because you have a time time man meant thing where you

can you can rewind time and uh. But even so, it's it's something that probably no major video game company would have poured resources into and now it's on Xbox Live and you can download it for like fifteen bucks. Yeah, that's gonna be a big opportunity for for some people to get their feet in the door, especially considering UM.

I read an article um in Ours Technica was basically covering a report and screen Digest talking about how games are more expensive to make for this current generation of consoles than it was for the previous generation. So we may be seeing the end of the middle class developer, if you will, You may see the just the big names who can afford to do it in the little guys who are willing to take a chance and want

to do something to get their their foot in the door. Uh, you know, to get them get their name out there until they get picked up and become a bigger right. Well, the cool thing is, I think no matter which way you slice it, it's a really good time to be

a gamer. We all have things to think about, like say, what's the best site to buy a new leather jacket, whether to buy the three or six metapixel cameras, But thankfully we don't need to think about online fraud because for every purchase you make, Visa keeps an eye out for fraud with real time fraud monitoring and by making sure you're not liable for any unauthorized purchases. How's that

for peace of mind, safe, secure visa. So for my fellow gamers out there, game on, I mean it's it's pretty exciting and uh, if you guys want to learn more about these kind of topics, you can read our articles on how the Xbox three sixty works, or how the PlayStation three works or how Thentendo we works. All of them can be found at how stuff works dot com. Let us know what you think, send an email to podcast at how stuff works dot com. Brought to you

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