PS4 'gets' indies: your move Microsoft
Sony's recent approach to the indie scene suggests a real sea change on the horizon. VG247's Dave Cook argues that the competition now needs to keep up or risk death.
The balance of power in the games industry is shifting.
I don't think the future of the games industry has ever looked so unclear as it does right now, and part of this uncertainty stems from the resurgence of the indie developer on big-name consoles.
This isn't a new trend of course, and I've seen many people suggest that it received widespread notoriety thanks to the success of Jonathan Blow's XBLA hit Braid. I'd have to agree.
Things quickly picked up speed from there, and here we are today in an industry where indie developers no longer need the backing of big entities to release products and make money. It'd be crazy to propose a future where publishers are suddenly irrelevant but a change in attitude is required to adapt to whatever comes next.
It's refreshing to see that most of the big stables have taken a positive view to supporting new talent lately, and several top-flight execs have spoken about the need to approach indies as equals, instead of a threat or irrelevancy. It seems everyone's slowly coming around to the idea.
I can see both sides of the coin here. Why would indies pay a lot of their own money to a platform holder or publisher when they could follow Mojang's example and fund their game through an iterative paid-alpha model? Similarly, why not take the project to Kickstarter and try to fund it there?
You would own 100% of the IP rights and keep the profits for yourself. Best of all you wouldn't have publishers leaning over your shoulder telling you that what you're doing is wrong because some focus-testing group said so.
It all sounds very lovely doesn't it? The harsh reality is that Kickstarters can fail, submitting games on iTunes without featured placement is like entering a lottery, and paid alphas take months of work without any guaranteed income. In the end big publishers or format holders really can give indies a leg-up. They can be a useful asset.
This isn't always about the big corporate guy p**sing on the little players, because any success enjoyed is mutually beneficial. If an indie game does well on a digital platform like XBLA, both Microsoft and the indie team benefit. Both sides can happily co-exist and reap great rewards, and Sony has recognised this full-well with PS4.
Jonathan Blow's next game The Witness is a PS4-timed exclusive. No money changed hands. He just prefers the way Sony is treating him and his vision. Case and point.
The signs are all around you. I keep using this example, but when Square-Enix calls the high-selling, critically-acclaimed Tomb Raider a failure then it's not a stretch to say that these large-scale operations are staring down a crisis waiting to happen.
If I were a Crystal Dynamics employee I'd take having my hard work being branded a "failure" as a slap in the face with a heavy chain-mail glove. The game hasn't been out long, clearly had a high production cost and will most likely enjoy long-tail sales for many months to come.
What's really happening is that production costs are rising to meet expectations. You needn't be a maths whizz to understand that if a game costs a lot to make, it will need to sell exceptionally well to recoup the spend. Veteran game analyst Bill Pidgeon recently estimated that games with production cost of around $100 million need to sell between five and ten million units to break even.
That is poor economics if ever I saw it and some have also called out Pidgeon's equations on the matter, but the sentiment stands that triple-a game budgets are through the roof. When you factor in marketing budgets, staff salaries, raw development cost, engine licensing, shipping, needlessly extravagant press events and showing face at expos like E3, TGS and gamescom, you may start to ask yourself if much of this is fat just begging to be trimmed.
After Braid showed the world that indies could succeed on big publishing platforms we started to see something of a gold rush. The amount of independently-created, low cost-high return games appearing on Xbox Live and PSN began to swell. Did every indie game released on both formats see the same success? No, of course not.
These platforms were - depending on who you ask - monstrously expensive to publish on. Some teams have claimed they were charged thousands of dollars to re-submit their game every time an update was required. I spoke with Prison Architect dev Introversion about this last year and they were more than happy to put Microsoft's practice to the sword.
I realise that one studio can't speak for every developer on Xbox Live Arcade, but in this one instance I was a little taken aback. If this really is true across the board then it seems like Microsoft is charging these teams a lot for the privilege of being tucked away, several button presses under the dashboard.
Introversion's QA bill for Darwinia+ under Microsoft was $30,000. It was a financial flop compared to Prison Architect's paid alpha model.
The team's experience of Xbox Live with Darwinia+ showed them just how financially unsound Microsoft's marketplace could be. Sure Braid sold well, but that was before the rush to make your millions through digital channels became a widespread wind-p**sing contest. Everyone got very wet and only a handful of lucky teams saw success while staying relatively dry.
Now, I'm sorry to have to do this again but I'll type this next bit in big bold letters so you understand me clearly:
I am neither a fanboy of PS3 or Xbox 360. I own both formats and think they are both superb. I'm focusing on PS4 here because - obviously - the next Xbox hasn't been announced yet. For all I know Microsoft has made the best indie platform ever seen, but I can't say that because I haven't seen it yet.
Sony has really impressed me lately. Someone high up the executive food chain has realised that PS4 needed to embrace the indie community with open arms or it risked being the last console the company ever produced. Give that person a raise Sony, seriously they've earned it.
They seem to be doing everything correctly so far, and I think unless Microsoft can match or surpass Sony's efforts then there's a very real danger that the new Xbox could struggle to meet the lofty financials it needs to survive. Again, I'm talking theoretically as I haven't seen the new Xbox yet.
Sony created the PS4 in close collaboration with developers and asked them what they wanted it to do, rather than creating it internally with blinkers on. This extended to indie developers like Double Fine, who were asked to play around with dev kits to see how they might use it in future. That is positively refreshing.
The end result of collaboration, open dialogue and frank discussion between developer and platform holder. Such an open forum is surely the future.
We heard recently that PS4, PS3 and PS Vita will support Unity, which is fast becoming the 'go-to' engine of choice for cash-poor indies or teams looking for a flexible, open and relatively easy-to-use engine.
Compare that to the Sony of old, which released a console so restrictively punishing to code for at the outset, that Square-Enix had to develop its own set of programming tools for its then-PS3 exclusive Final Fantasy 13. That is absolutely insane and should never have happened in the first place.
But much like the indie scene, this is an iterative process and PS4 has been tweaked, refined and made better because of Sony's transparent approach to the console's creation. One of the PS4's designers Mark Cerny has called the process "developer-centric".
Now, that might seem obvious to say, but consider this: selling consoles is one thing but what sells hardware? Games. How do you get more games? You make the platform easier to publish on and offer the best potential return on investment to the developer.
You may then ask yourself why it has taken Sony and Microsoft so long to reach this conclusion, but in reality this has always been the case. They're not stupid, it's just that the nature of games has changed.
The indie scene wasn't as lucrative back ten years ago as it is now, Kickstarter didn't exist, among other factors. Now seems like the perfect time to grab the bull by the horns and it's smart that Sony is using the coming of the next cycle to change tact.
Not a minute too soon either it seems, as things were looking pretty hairy for a while out there in triple-a land. THQ collapsed, many big players posted negative figures this financial year and several multi-million releases failed to break even. The change has to happen now for some companies. It really is do or die time.
Sony made clear that it was supporting the indie scene at GDC last month, along with an initial list of titles on the release slate. The response from the development scene and from readers here seems to suggest that this is the correct answer to many difficult questions.
Console indie games are going to explode even further in the next five years. If you don't believe that then you need to start looking closer at the way the industry is going. This cannot be escaped or denied and in the end we, the gamers, will become richer for the experience.
The question is: which of today's big players will still be around by then to reap the rewards?