Indie and Mainstream Games – Room for both?
Games must move forward. The way I see it Film, Cinema and Books have all grown to the point where different ’sub-industries’ exist within the relevant field.
For example, you can go to the cinema and see a big blockbuster movie. Examples of these might be 300, Chronicles of Riddick, Alien vs. Predator etc. These movies don’t usually sell on their exquisite character development or their sophisticated handling of controversial issues. They are meant to be dumb, they are meant to be entertainment. That’s fine and there’s nothing wrong with that.
But movies also have this ‘other world’ to them – the world of the independant movie maker and the art house cinema. These are the films made for ‘film enthusiasts’ – those that enjoy film more as an art rather than just mindless entertainment. It is here that you find creative minds working together to use film for a higher purpose than just entertainment. Films with a political message, documentaries on a misunderstood or little known topic and films which are pushing the art form forward.
What’s key about this dichotomy is that the independant film industry is there. It IS an industry. And where there is an industry there must be funding. Now I’m not a film enthusiast, so I’ve probably never heard of any or at least most of the films that are released into that category. Neither have most people on the street. But these films still make money somehow. There are directors, actors, sound engineers, camera people and all the other people needed to make a film who make a living from this without being a household name or their product becoming a household name.
Now what about games? Well, by this point we all know the story, in a roundabout way.
The myths and legends that tell of a not-so-long and not-so-forgotten era where game designers made games by themselves, where they were anything and everything. Where their creative muscles could be flexed. Where they had a certain amount of freedom to run with unusual concepts and try things out. Where the common values of chivalry, gameplay and unneccessarily sadistic programming challenges ruled!
And then the dark clouds of corporate success ushered in a dark age. Where Electronic Arts (hereafter to be known as ‘The Borg’) and others suppressed the purity and beauty of ideas coming from the good guys. Where originality was snuffed out like a candle in the wind as the world was subjected to such horrors as FIFA 2007 Special Championship European Rejects Edition, Pokemon Slightly-Maroony-in-a-kind-of-Blood-looking-fashion-Red and Driver 3.
Or so some people would have you believe. The truth of it remains for another post. But in the meantime let’s stay on track.
The film industry went through a heavy-commercialisation phase too where very few original films existed and all the films being made were made by just a handful of the same massive studios.
Sound familiar?
So, having reviewed where the film industry has been and where it is now, how does the games industry find this happy co-existence of more mainstream ‘entertainment-focused’ games with more marginal ‘art-focused’ games? It has to be something to do with the funding models. The flow of money. To that end, Sony’s new online download service, Steam and the new Xbox Live service could just be what the industry needs.
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