note: This gets a bit rant-ish, but it was originally motivated by a lot of optimism… especially for some of the things that I’m seeing in this community right now. It was a rough (very rough) draft of a reply to a question that I received at UDM. It didn’t end up having a place in the magazine, but I wanted to share it.
Best Time to Start
EA plans to layoff 1000 and consolidate Back Box. Aspyr has confirmed that it may layoff as much as 1/3. Turbine is doing cuts at both studios. Midway closing Austin, suspending titles, cutting 25%. Factor 5 cutting half. Then there is the whole Take-Two looking at “redundancies” at Venom Games and drastically reducing forecasts for 2009. The list goes on and on.
Rough end to a year for a lot in the industry. My contention, however, is that there has never been a better time start-up as an indie:
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Risk. The big established guys aren’t going to be taking any risky moves right now. They have too much on the line and with limited resources, they can’t afford missteps. It is a different story for the indie developer. Making a viable business out of this is always a high-risk proposition, so your prospects of success or failure didn’t really change. Taking the incremental addition of risk to do something that might redefine a genre or create an entirely new one is something that only the little guys are going to be doing right now. During favorable market circumstances, the big players have massive resources at their disposal – but right now it is what you don’t have that gives you the advantage. You have nothing to lose.
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Talent. This may sound a bit cold, but when I hear about a major studio laying off a bunch of people, the first thing I think is that a bunch of talented people just got dumped back into the market. When big companies aren’t hiring, their prospects for immediate employment may look a bit slim. That is ok, by the time you are ready for it, you might be able to acquire game development talent that you would otherwise never be able to afford. When I hear “game industry layoffs”, I think “game industry talent just went on sale”. The flip side of this, for all of those people who just got laid off – your “worst-case” scenario just happened. Not only has there has never been a better time to take risk and go with a smaller studio or start your own, but you have connections to a lot of other talented people who are in the same boat.
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Audience. This is going to sound even colder. Yes, the global economy sucks. No, that isn’t the only reason that a lot of these studios missed sales targets. It is a contributing factor, I’ll give you that. Just like digital downloads are a contributing factor to record industry sales declines. But, just like the record industry has a hard time accepting that unfriendly business practices and force-feeding consumers a product that they don’t really want might possibly share some of the blame, there isn’t a lot of self-reflection going on that I can see in the gaming industry. When this kind of disconnect occurs, it creates an opportunity for the little guy to provide what people really want. I think we are already seeing this with the success of a lot of indie content. This can grow. I stand by the earlier analyst assessments of this industry as being relatively recession-proof. Cheap entertainment has a place in people’s budgets during hard times.
Ok, so I really think this is the best time to get started as an indie. But I haven’t given up hope on the big established players yet. Now is also a time where they can succeed, but it means doing some things that big companies don’t tend to do when things start to get messy. Business books are full of examples of companies who took risks in hard times and came out the other side ahead of all of their competitors. We’ve all read them, but the problem seems to be that it is a very counter-intuitive behavior when faced with a rough market. We know it in theory… but in practice?
Anyway, that is my rant. Like I said – it comes from someplace optimistic. I know from experience that when things are good they just sort of move along, but when things get a little bit tougher, exceptional people start doing exceptional things.