Video games are big business. More than 3 billion people worldwide played games last year. Global revenue reached $184 billion, nearly triple sales of recorded music and the global box office combined. Analysts forecast gaming will be a $205 billion market by 2026.
While there's a lot of money to be made, it also costs a lot of time and money to bring a new game to market. AAA games — those from large companies with the largest budgets — like Cyberpunk 2077, for example, take about $174 million and seven years to develop. Cloud Imperium Games has crowdfunded more than $600 million since 2012 to develop Star Citizen,
a multiplayer space exploration game, with no official release date announced.
Players and critics often lament that as video games have become more expensive to make, companies have tended to play it safe by producing uninspired remakes and sequels rather than taking creative risks to make something original. This month's "Econ Extra Credit" selection,
"Indie Game: The Movie," follows four independent developers out to prove big budgets and huge teams aren’t always necessary to create compelling, successful games.
Whether a game is or isn't an "indie" depends on whom you ask, said Shawn Pierre, a Philadelphia-based designer and chair of the
Independent Games Festival, an annual event that is a bit like the Sundance festival for games. Pierre told Marketplace by email that the definition evolves every few years. "Some people say it’s the budget, others will say that if you have a publisher, then you’re disqualified from the ‘indie’ title," Pierre wrote. "People also consider the number of people working at the studio. The answer seems to be a mix of those factors and a few more."
Indie games can be made for as little as $50,000. Others, like Neon White and Shroud of the Avatar, still cost several million dollars to make. Jonathan Blow, the creator of Braid, said in the film that his goal as an independent developer was to create something that didn't look or feel like what big game companies release, something that reflected his own identity and personality.
"Big companies create highly polished things that serve as large of an audience as possible," Blow said early in the film. "That creation of highly glossy, commercial products is the opposite of making something that's personal." The personal is possible for an indie developer like Blow because the stakes are lower. A game that sells 20,000 copies for $15 a pop would be a financial failure for a large company — the average AAA game costs $60 million to $80 million to make
— but could be a huge success for an individual or a small team. But the pressure and the stress to complete the game are still high. Many of the developers in the movie lived with their parents while developing their games because they couldn't afford their own place. |