Three lessons the industry could learn from successful independents

REDWOOD CITY, Calif. — It’s an amazing time to be a developer in the game industry. The distribution, public relations/marketing, and funding trifecta that kept the old guard of “big publishing” in power for so long is evolving. Now, everyone from the inexperienced dorm room developer to the veteran contract development house have a much better chance of seeing their dream projects become tangible products.

In turn, this era of accessibility has created some new challenges for content creators. The one pro of the old system was that, although big publishers had an incredibly lopsided leverage over developers, publishers handled getting the game exposure and maintaining the product’s life cycle for their developers. When the high barriers of entry of the old system began to crumble, anyone and everyone could flood the market with their ideas. This crowded and constantly evolving environment can make handling the issues of a product’s exposure and life cycle exponentially harder for anyone, let alone developers who traditionally were not expected to handle these issues on their own. It doesn’t help that the line between the independent and commercial markets are beginning to blur; where it may soon not be a question of who is the biggest fish in two separate lakes, but perhaps that there are too many fish vying for limited consumer attention in one large market.