"I've watched and listened to several opinions over the last year dealing with Indie vs. Big Guy in a battle for the hobby. Having worked in both environments I have thought quite a bit about the claims that going Big destroys innovation. So I thought I'd break down the key points in a rather large post:
Process: --Bigs / ++Indie
Process gets in the way of so much innovation in a Big environment. The business as a whole is so afraid to lose anything, they aren't willing to risk new ideas. The rewards for doing so are usually at a minimum as well and the establishment tends to tout their credentials all day and ignore any Big ideas.
Investment: +++Bigs, --Indie
When it comes to new game engines, IDEs, pushing other industries and cross-business relationships the Bigs do so much that some of their tools seep into Indie developer toolkits. Without this investment, 3rd party tools would be crap, free evaluation supplies would dry up, and cross business skill sets would cost a premium. All of the innovation from the Bigs comes from these skills/tools overflowing into the masses.
Quality Assurance: +Bigs, --Indie
Because of the process you have that limits innovation above, the Bigs have a known quantity at launch. Whatever their process is, it puts plenty of hands/eyes on product before it goes public. It also spawns 3rd party QA methods that are purchasable by smaller houses for cheaper.
Exposure/Influence: ++Bigs, +Indie
Sure popular != good, but popular good or bad creates influence. The Bigs can market, implement and succeed/fail on a large scale. This influence allows features to be cherry picked to the niche's liking later. "You know I really liked X, but hated Y". Thus the Indie title is born. It goes both ways of course, the Indie products influence the Bigs as well and may get swallowed up at some point.
Maybe you hate the Big development houses and you'll never buy from them again. Maybe you feel like nothing new is coming out of these houses. At this point in my career, I'm not sure I'd pick one over the other at all. There is quite a bit of innovation coming from both though. If you have the chance, I'd try working in both environments as well."
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My replay was as follows:
I dont hate "big" gaming companies. I hate some of the devs and people who run them. Activision is only as good or bad as the CEO wants it to be. The only person or persons we should blame is the ones OKing all the games being created.
Which is why Bioware is looked at as one of the few "good" game developers still out there. Now you might not like big story driven games but that does not change the fact that they make damn good games.
Same can be said for COD or WoW. I personally find no enjoyment out of games that continue to bring you the same content over and over, like Nintendo's mario party, but whos to say there are not people who think COD is the best thing ever. Its not but I know people who think so.
We do not NEED big company's to keep the gaming industry alive. Does it help to have them? Yes. Do they make good games...from my point of view not so much. They seem to think that making the same game with cooler titles works. Granted I have not bought a new game sense portal 2. Why? Simple none of the games have made me go "holy crap I MUST HAVE THAT!". I find my self enjoying my N64 and Atari more then all the new released games. The reason, a lot of the older games are more inventive and challenging then a lot of the new titles out right now.
I think this is mainly due to gaming heading toward a more "casual" style of play. Ten years ago you would never have found a 70 year old grandma playing bowling with her grand kids. Thanks to Nintendo's Wii that is now possible. Sure the system is not "hardcore" but it allows a more larger audience of people to become gamers.
There are three main types of gamers:
Social
Casual
Competitive
The "social" gamer is someone who plays only when they have company over or are at someone house/event and they are asked to join in a game. Their hope in joining is to just have a fun with the group and nothing more. They are being social and making friends though a social experience.
The "casual" gamer are the people who play facebook games, Mario Kart with their kids, and buy the single player games to escape work. Maybe they even buy some of the multi-player games to only play when they are with friends.
The "competitive" gamer are the ones who play the game to get better, talk about it with friends, share better ways to beat a level, even compete to make money or just brag to their friends that they were in one.
Now there are so many different types of gamers out there but this is how i look at the gaming community. All of us have different ideas as to games. It is not the "big companies" who are needed. It is the gamer them'selves that drive the industry to what it is, what it is not, and what it will become.
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