Ultimate Game Design : Building game worlds

C H A P T E R 1 1
studio is covered with many perils. The days of opening an independent studio to
work on cutting-edge titles seems to be fading into history. Even those developers
with long track records on many prior consoles are finding it challenging to build a
strong bridge into the future.
Publishers will only sign up titles with developers who have deep commercial
track records. Based on the right connections to industry insiders and representatives,
a really solid showing of your own proprietary game technology, and a
top-notch team with solid title experience, you might get a low-paid shot at a lowpriority
title, but even this is becoming harder to secure.
Walking into a publisher as a startup developer with limited experience and saying,
“Hey there, we’d like to make a game for ya!” will not get you very far. In fact, the
walking-in part probably won’t even happen. It’s harsh for us game lovers, but
publishers want to deal in a world of knowns. At the starting line, they already face
too many unknowns for their liking. In short, they only want to risk development
money on the knowns. Now, even a known can become an unknown very quickly in
game development, but it will take the legacy of the known to get you close to a game
development deal. They want to “know” and “believe” that you can produce a hit
game for them. How will they come to know or believe this? Probably, it will be
because you’ve produced a hit game for someone else. Someone has to give you a
chance at some point, or no one would ever get to make that first hit game that allowed
them to get a shot at making another one, right? Well, sort of.
If you think about it, the independent game studios that have been making waves
recently are really just spin-offs from large publishers. This means that a team came
together under a publisher’s roof, learned how to work well together, delivered a
solid-selling game or two, and then decided to go independent so that they could
build games for more than just a single publisher (the publisher whose roof they first
formed under).
Another common pathway to building up an independent development house is to
gather together a group of developers who might have worked on games before as
employees of several developers or developer/publishers and have recently banded
together as a new development group. Often they must exercise their relationships
with former publisher employers in order to gain work. This can work too.
What this should be telling all of us is that if you want to start an independent development
studio, you’re probably going to have to make your way into the industry
first and gain some considerable experience before even trying. You can choose to go
direct, get some seed money and some venture capital (good luck explaining the revenue
model), but in today’s climate, this would be an extraordinarily difficult way to
launch a development house.
Does this mean that your dream of developing games as an independent developer
is shattered right here and now? Not even hardly. There are plenty of ways to go
about moving toward your goals. You can participate in the Independent Games
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Game Development Career Choices