Why Indie Games Are Our Saviours

09 Dec 2009 at 00:00:00 by Tim McDonald

Do you believe that the big companies care about innovation, or – and here, I don my wank hat – advancing the artistic possibilities of the industry? Because they don't. Not deep down. It's an easy thing to do, or to pretend to do, when you're in a strong position, and occasionally we do see surprising glimmers of brilliance.

Then you look at Guitar Hero and Call of Duty and Splinter Cell and Prince of Persia and Need for Speed and Battlefield and Command & Conquer and every Sims expansion pack ever and just about every first-person shooter “with innovative multiplayer and/or a twist” and every third-person action-adventure “with an open world and/or a twist” and every new racing game “that's not just for the hardcore/that's not just for the arcade crowd/with a twist” and you die a little inside.

They're not bad games, and I repeat that there's the odd glimmer of brilliance. Battlefield was initially groundbreaking. Need for Speed Shift turned a series which had been careering off course for years on its head, and it's clear that EA wants the new Medal of Honor to revitalise that particular ailing series in the same way. Guitar Hero, despite being shat out so frequently it's starting to make compulsive laxative drinkers look like they're straining, is coming along in leaps and bounds. Again: they're not bad games, there's just a seemingly infinite supply of them - which is ironic, considering that most of them were something new and interesting before they became a series. In part, the repetition is probably because creating a brand in gaming is a difficult thing, and we're a rather fickle industry. In part, it's that making anything new is a big, big risk in an industry as expensive and tech-dependant as this.

It gets worse, though. We're at the stage now where even the oldest and most degraded series can be resurrected with a few new gameplay ideas, a big marketing budget, and a tug at your nostalgia with a line like “Your favourite series from five years ago is back with some new graphics!” (Yeah, okay, there's a reason why I don't write marketing copy.) I fall for this all the time, and honestly, I'm fairly torn; the announcements of Deus Ex 3 and Thief 4 made me simultaneously pray that the new games will be half as good as the old ones while wishing that the poor dead corpses of the series would be left unmolested. That's saying nothing of the utterly cancerous Altered Beast and Golden Axe “updates,” and the mortal terror I feel when I think about the upcoming Splatterhouse update has nothing to do with the game's horror stylings.

These announcements also make me wish that these companies would spend the budgets for these triple-A titles on something else. Base a game on a 14th century epic poem, or claim Jack the Ripper was saving the world from demons. Wait, both of those are actually being made, aren't they? Right. EA, you've got some wonderful, wonderful people coming up with totally batshit concepts. Now stop making third-person action games out of them.

But that's not going to happen anytime soon because, ultimately, it's all about the shareholders, and it's all about the money. I can't really see any executive approving a title that doesn't have some glimmer of mass-market potential, but I sure as hell can't blame them for it. Gaming is a business and these days there's a lot of money invested, after all. Still, whoever predicted that Grand Theft Auto 3 would spark a massive trend and ignite global interest in a series that – while not niche – was far from a household name, is  hopefully fabulously wealthy because of it.

Until someone takes a risk in a big way, we're going to continue with the deluge of entertaining-but-generic games. To use a film analogy I like, we have a lot of summer blockbusters but not much else. All is not lost, though. Hope doesn't rest with the big boys, but with the indie devs and bedroom coders who make the games we really want to play.

It's Stardock, I think, that has proven you can make niche games and still make a whopping profit from them. Galactic Civilizations II was made at a time when the 4X genre was all but dead. Demigod should have been niche but the graphical and gameplay styles ignited a surprising amount of interest. Derek Smart's 3000AD, too, is living proof of this; the Universal Combat, Galactic Command, and Battlecruiser games are all aimed at a niche audience which is still big enough that the company can turn a profit. There are successes when it comes to the big boys, too – Activision did unbelievably well out of Geometry Wars. [And don't forget Sony's Heavy Rain, which seems intent on deviating from adventure game norms - Ed] 

Solium Infernum. Dominions 3. Machinarium. Uplink. Aquaria. Braid. World of Goo. Elemental. Audiosurf. Osmos. Blueberry Garden. Time Gentlemen, Please. Armadillo Run. Dwarf Fortress. Toribash. Warning Forever. Within a Deep Forest. Facade. N. Mount and Blade. La-Mulana. Spelunky. Cave Story. Some of these games are utterly new, the likes of which we haven't really seen before; others are just clever takes on things that no-one is making anymore. Some are in ASCII, others have some of the most amazing art direction I've seen in a long time. The point is that they're all different.

The next time you start to feel like gaming is treading the same old ground, and that everything coming out is a rehash of what's been done before, spare a thought for the indie developers. In the end, they're most likely the ones to give us some of the next great innovations. After all, Portal came out of the student project Narbacular Drop...

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