There’s trouble for small indie game development, as developers have revealed after talking to each other in the latest Game Developers Conference.
As reported by PC Gamer, some developers for smaller games are no longer being approached for exclusive deals by companies like Epic Game Store and Microsoft.
For companies like Epic, Microsoft, Sony, and others, signing up exclusives has usually been a boost to the business. The usual idea, of course, is getting big exclusives, such as Marvel’s Spider-Man, will convince gamers to buy the platform it is on, thereby making them a lot of money. However, for possibly a decade now, the big companies have been trying to coax exclusivity deals for smaller companies and smaller games.
Now, this can be a mixed blessing for these developers. If, for example, Epic Games Store signs your game up for exclusivity, you can become part of Epic’s marketing, especially if your title uses Epic’s own Unreal Engine to their best.
That means you will miss out on the definite bigger audience a game can get if it was published on Steam. But the money companies like Epic and Microsoft give is often upfront, and can immediately guarantee that those games get made.
Casey Yano, one of the leads at making Slay the Spire, said this in his GDC talk:
“I talked to at least five small teams, like 35 [members] and under, during GDC, and they’re like: Cuts, cuts, cuts, funding canceled, talks that were going on for a year, canceled.
It sounds like it’s shit. We’re definitely very privileged to be able to self-fund. [Otherwise] I’d be very, very, very scared right now.”
Chris Bourassa, on the other hand, who was director on Darkest Dungeon, had this to say:
“The Gold Rush is over. I come from the Northwest Territories. The town I’m from was built on gold, and then they found diamonds further north.
Maybe another paradigm shift is waiting for us, but I definitely think the scale of the deals I’m hearing about is significantly dimishese from the big swinging days. Certainly we got our Epic [deal] at the right time.”
Steam, Sony, and Nintendo are not being mentioned in this conversation, but maybe there’s a reason for that. These companies have better established platforms than Epic and Microsoft have. The gold rush for indies on Steam seemed to have recreated itself in the Nintendo Switch a few years ago.
Meanwhile, Sony maintains a competitive lead over Microsoft, not just in console sales, but overall reputation. That means, honestly, that they don’t have to worry about funding smaller games at all to attract users. The ‘smaller’ games they do support, are really closer to medium scale, and are initiatives for more developers around the world, such as Black Myth: Wukong and Stellar Blade.
But if these rumors paint an accurate picture, it sounds like Microsoft and Epic may have decided that this isn’t a winning strategy for them either. Now, Microsoft may be out there trying the stranger ideas out, but they may have both come to the same conclusion, that the budgets they have for backing exclusives may be better used elsewhere.
As for the indie game developers themselves? While this may sting as a loss of funding, they still have other strategies they can use to stay viable. The honest worst case scenario is selling games on itchio, the platform that has the best terms for developers at the moment. But itchio is, honestly, not a platform that has proven it can make game dev a sustainable livelihood for its developers. That platform is absolutely filled with passion projects.
They can also still find bigger publishers who will take them. Companies like Devolver Digital and Take-Two’s Private Division are still out there looking for games to fund, though they are also feeling the bite from prevailing business divisions. Unfortunately, we know that Riot Games recently shuttered their own small game publishing arm, Riot Forge. So that option may not be as lucrative as it had been before as well.
Most developers may end up publishing on their own. If they’re lucky, they may have enough of a budget to fund porting across multiple platforms, and/or paying for the marketing to make them more visible. Certainly, some indie games can still secure a lot of backing from crowdfunding or private investors.
We probably don’t have to worry about small scale independent games going away, but there should be some concern if the developers whose games we have known and loved for some time will end up just giving up and going away. That may open the door to newer developers in the future, but who wants to see developers go away? Hopefully we can see the business turn around, and hopefully new opportunities appear, for smaller game developers.
