This does a few things for them. As mentioned previously, it can be testing grounds for new IP, to see if a new idea or gameplay method is marketable, etc. Another important factor not mentioned is that it also can keep the staff happy (some developers out there care) as not everyone wants to work on blockbusters and sometimes developers just need a temporary change of pace to keep the fire alive in their career.

Just as the post says, the key is keeping the costs appropriate. You can’t have a team of 10 senior developers on $100k salaries working for a year on an experimental game. Well, you can, but you’ll probably go out of business very quickly. Save that for the sequel of a small game that is a surprise success.

Overall, great post. Us developers often dream of pursuing our own ideas and for the first time since the shareware days it is starting to get a little bit easier to make that happen. The filter is once again becoming who has the balls to take the risks necessary to throw your resources behind a new idea.

In game development the creator/publisher relation is so different that I don’t think you can look at it exactly the same way. A few large companies sit in that second party limbo; they’re not owned by the publisher but really, they might as well be.

Double Fine, on the other hand, is noticeably independent. Their games are strange and different, and they have to hunt for publishers. I think what I’m getting at, in defining independents as a genre, is that there are a pool of games that could not exist in the mainstream market; there is a reason they’re independent besides pride.

I bet in the next few years we see a big budget game that uses the ghosting mechanic that The Adventures of PB Winterbottom, Braid, and Click 10 used. People liked the mechanic, and now some of the risk is gone.

I’m a firm believer that demographics are garbage and that ideas don’t have to be constrained to certain markets. Why? Because after explaining Gears of War to my mother, she gave it a go and had some fun. She was horrible at it, but she was laughing and screaming the whole time. She had fun. Nobody ever told her what it was like to play it because they assumed she wouldn’t like it. If someone is told they aren’t going to like something, then they won’t like it.

Of course you have to target something with a retail game. With smaller independents it’s possible to do something different with little financial risk.

Frankly, if it isn’t a testbed, then what is it good for?

Anyway, I don’t know that smaller focused games are inherently a proving ground for ideas for the largest mass market. There are ideas that will always be limited in audience, assuming they have the distribution & marketing to reach the largest applicable audience. The thing that more specialty labels can help with making sure those games reach the largest audience they can possibly appeal to.

In music, indie bands can be considered a genre unto themselves, as can independent games in the state they’re in. I’m not sure if the benefit would be that great, having independent games merely be independently funded and launched games. As it stands they’re much different than commercial products, which is maybe not an apparent plus for consumers, but right now it has its purpose in the industry.

The issue of people is a different story, and from the developers perspective I totally agree. It would be great to be able to make a living producing independent games. It just seems like they exist as more of a proving ground right now than a market.