E3 wasn’t too kind to independent game developers, as the panel at the event told aspiring game developers to just give up, there’s no room in the game industry for their kind anymore. Perhaps the harsh reality is that most independent game developers won’t be able to secure funding and make a profit, but they are forgetting why most indies create games: passion. Most of the games they create are done either for fun, as a learning experience, or a combination of both.
“You have a zero percent chance of success,” said Warren Spector, a game industry veteran and the current president of Junction Point Studios, a company that develops games for consoles and PCs. “The barrier to entry in terms of cost, quality required, access to a market… forget it.”
I’d hate to see a bad omen like this stifle creativity in the industry. Independent game developers are the only ones willing to take risks these days, and without that, we face a period of stagnation. Remember when Serious Sam first came out? People mocked the name, they scoffed at the idea that a small team in Croatia (Hey, where’s that at? We’d say.) Then the demo came out, it was insanely fun, and the rest was history. It would suck to not see little treasures like that pop up out of nowhere again.
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Chris Crawford said the same thing 25-30 years ago is his newsletter. Maybe he should have mentioned it to the guys at ID. He then followed this up, after getting massive protests, that if by my saying that you did give up on your dream…then you wouldn’t have made it anyway. The only ones you will make it are the type that will tell the “Experts” to go stuff themselves.