The lottery definitely has worse odds, I just don't think that's saying much.
If you want to create indie games—and you can make it work without quitting your day job—go for it! But I don't think it would be smart for EA or Ubisoft to, like, stop making big-budget games and make indie games instead. If you can make a breakout hit, you can make a huge profit—but you have to make a breakout hit, and that comes down to a lot of luck.
---
Now, I do think it would make sense for EA/Ubisoft to try more mid-budget releases, which explore something new instead of continuing a 10+ year franchise. A lot of them will fail, but if a few are extremely successful, they could make up for the failures. It kind of felt like the publishers were doing this for a while (Grow Home, Little Nightmares) but my sense is that it has kind of stopped? Although caveat, I also haven't been following gaming as closely as I once did.
> A lot of them will fail, but if a few are extremely successful, they could make up for the failures. It kind of felt like the studios were doing this for a while (Grow Home, Little Nightmares) but my sense is that it has kind of stopped?
I think the problem comes from marketing budgets. For any given game a marketing budget can push some amount of sales, but applying a marketing budget to each game makes it much harder for the winners to make up losses on the rest.
Small releases also need to be 'lean' releases; management overhead is another cost that's hard to make up in scale.
Combined, large developers don't have any natural advantage at making small to mid-scale games, and their structures impose fixed costs that are hard to avoid. It would almost be better for large developers to get indie-scale games by funding partners who act outside of the corporate structure, but anybody can do that.
Hearthstone (Blizzard) is another rare exception of an indie-scale, in-house game that was a breakout hit that could not have come from the outside (because of the IP involved), but even that existed because it started as a "closet-scale" project with senior developers who insulated themselves from management pressures.
That's interesting, I think you're probably right.
> Combined, large developers don't have any natural advantage at making small to mid-scale games, and their structures impose fixed costs that are hard to avoid. It would almost be better for large developers to get indie-scale games by funding partners who act outside of the corporate structure, but anybody can do that.
The advantage would be funding. I love indie games but I do get tired of 2D pixel art. With just a bit more money—still an order of magnitude less than Call of Duty, mind you—the possibilities really expand.
I started playing Psychonauts 2 this week, and I think it's such an incredible game—and a great example of what can happen when an "indie" developer manages to secure a real budget. (I don't know if Double Fine is indie, but their games contain the sort of outside-the-box thinking I associate with indies.)
Perhaps some sort of YCombinator-esque model could actually work here.
> The lottery definitely has worse odds, I just don't think that's saying much.
Absolutely. People tend to assume that 95% of video games turn a profit, when it's the reverse. There are highly polished, incredibly high quality video games who simply just don't sell.
If you want to create indie games—and you can make it work without quitting your day job—go for it! But I don't think it would be smart for EA or Ubisoft to, like, stop making big-budget games and make indie games instead. If you can make a breakout hit, you can make a huge profit—but you have to make a breakout hit, and that comes down to a lot of luck.
---
Now, I do think it would make sense for EA/Ubisoft to try more mid-budget releases, which explore something new instead of continuing a 10+ year franchise. A lot of them will fail, but if a few are extremely successful, they could make up for the failures. It kind of felt like the publishers were doing this for a while (Grow Home, Little Nightmares) but my sense is that it has kind of stopped? Although caveat, I also haven't been following gaming as closely as I once did.