[IGDA_indies] making money

[Ben Sawyer]

Just a few points...

In terms of financial indpedence/making money...
Doesn't this dismiss the many indies who don't necessarily want to achieve
financial freedom from games?  The just want sustainability for their work
be it covering their costs, or making their sweat worth their effort.

I think financial freedom sounds a bit one-sided toward those indies who
seek to commercialize their work in such a form as to be free of any other
needs.  Some of the indies I meet actually don't want or at least don't need
even that as the threshold.  The threshold should support people who want to
be fulltime but not at the exclusion of those that want something else.  And
why should being an indie require funds as part of a SIG definition?  If you
do that you short of set a charter to exclude those people who might want to
call themselves indies but who aren't looking for any revenue.

If you ask me the Indie Game Sig's charter should be to "ensure the
sustainability of independently produced, and distributed computer games"
the groups charter shouldn't be to support indies itself but to do the
things it sees as useful that make it possible for independently produced
games to flourish.  

I think it's a mistake to equate indie with independent business.  That may
well be 85% of the goal but this SIG has a danger of devolving into one that
is only about business practice if it corners its focus as such.

I said before that the SIG should look at what it can do in the same efforts
as local farm cooperatives and other small business and artist cooperatives
for some models that it can adopt that might show a path toward the types of
value adds that developers might want.  I can't reiterate that enough.
These cooperatives were formed at times for the EXACT same reasons this SIG
seems to want to form and thus why reinvent the wheel when in some cases
there are dozens if not over 50-100 years of tactics and ideas that have
worked for other organizations.

I would also tell you right now that you will get no where until you
eventually turn this into an effort to promote independent games to the
people you need most which are consumers.  

What I'd suggest is taking all the energy that exists right now and stop
talking to game guys for a bit and start talking and researching what
elements have helped other similar communities work and then map that back
to the games industry.  Talk to people in the indie film community (don't
just observe and guess), talk to heads of farm and artist cooperatives to
see how they work, etc.  Look as sustainability too - there is a lot of
literature on the business and general philosophy of sustainability that
might prove inspirational to this group.

Brian earlier called this "open source" but marketing and distribution
collectives in the farm, arts, and other communities are not open source.
It's a poor analogy.  They're actually very different.  There about pooling
resources to leverage collective strength in marketing and distribution
whereas open source is about doing that to leverage production.  Open source
groups actually do little on distribution and marketing in some ways it's
the total opposite in model.  Red Hat, IBM, HP, OSDN, Slashdot, etc. took
over the distribution and marketing from the cooperative because they built
service models that they could earn money on.  The games, food, and arts
industries don't have that hook (well with exception to cellphone carriers,
and some portals maybe) so I sort of think brian's just wrong here.

I think if you started collecting information about these things and sharing
it you'd be able to evolve a charter and a series of activities you'd want
to accomplish that would turn into a real plan.  The SIG should be about
identifying ways it can cause indie games as a whole to flourish
(artistically, and commercially) and THEN looking at how it can do that
which is what Brian and Jason are trying to point out.  

I don't think you can do that talking to a community of indies that haven't
collectively done anything yet.  Individually there might be some case
studies sure, but the people or scenes that have thrived a bit more
collectively are not in the game industry and so you need to start by
looking outside first.  

Brian said earlier that "The biggest thing I think indies can help each
other with is information and advice.  That makes the biggest difference by
far."  but this I think again is too insular...  Sure do it - it's
absolutely the low-hanging fruit here but if you really start pushing
outside the box and thinking bigger then just swapping war stories then you
might build something that really starts creating progress.  

>From what I can tell there is a lot of great info on building games, there
is even some ok info on selling stuff, and distributing it, there are great
communities like Garage Games, GameDev, etc.  There is the Austin Games
Conference, the XGA stuff Andre does, the Garage Games Conference, the
Christian Game Developers Conference, the Alt+Ctrl festival coming up, and
the GDC.  Collectively there is a lot there on the information side.  If you
were a smart self-motivated indie where do you feel information is
lacking???  A list of contacts at publishers isn't going to help you...  

Recruiting more people to this list will help on that too.  Information
gathering and sharing from the community shouldn't be too hard.  The
problems holding back indie games are not totally informational (sure some
better organization, identifying key informational needs where the resources
are week, etc. might help I work on this all the time for serious games) but
the problem is marketing and consumer driven - you need to expand the
consumers appetite for playing and purchasing games not on retail shelves
and/or from larger commercial publishers.  This needs to be made easier, it
needs to be branded better, and it needs to be easier for consumers to find
out about games that might actually appeal to them.  This group needs to
figure out ways to evolve around that and what that means.

Honestly one of the best things this group could do is create and brand, and
promote a killer distribution/consumer information oriented Web site for
Indie games.  We have have a Sundance festival in IGF but there is yet to be
a Sundance Channel or IFC.

It would have some content judging or some other thresholds as you could get
killed if 90% of the work sucks to meet to ensure quality and it would be
really well done.  It would basically make it much easier for people to find
such games and acquire them.  I can go to download.com but it sucks, I can
try to find stuff from time-to-time but honestly it's not as easy as it
should be.  I think if you did this, and you found a way to make is
sustainable and operate collectively as a non-profit then you'd be on to
something.  Right now I go to the IGF site to find stuff but that's not
really a true portal is it?  I could download Real Arcade but their
threshold is much too commercial and I don't want the chore of the install.


The bottom line is when you find a way where people see their contribution
as expanding the consumption of indie games then you'll really have
something.  Otherwise you'll just be all talk.


-----Original Message-----
From: indies-bounces at igda.org [mailto:indies-bounces at igda.org] On Behalf Of
Brandon J. Van Every
Sent: Sunday, July 25, 2004 1:11 AM
To: Indie SIG mailing list
Subject: RE: [IGDA_indies] making money


Brian Hook wrote:
> Brandon Van Every wrote:
>
> > Do we agree that being an Indie is about making money?
>
> Well, only in as much that Indies like to eat.  To me, being an indie 
> is about having freedom.  Making money provides freedom.

Ok, so the goal of all Indies is to be financially independent?  We might
like more, but that's the bare minimum we want to achieve.


Cheers,                     www.indiegamedesign.com
Brandon Van Every           Seattle, WA

When no one else sells courage, supply and demand take hold.

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