In early 2011 the best-selling paid program on Apple’s new Mac App Store was a puzzle game called Braid, at £2.99. Edge found it seventh by revenue as well, between two of Apple’s own office programs. Its designer, Jonathan Blow, had first released it on Microsoft’s Xbox Live Arcade in 2008. He saw the Mac store as the latest of a growing number of platforms that let developers release their games independently, and told Edge that “an independent developer can make plenty of sales without trying to get on to the console platforms like XBLA and PSN. It’s a huge pain to go through the approval and certification process for one of the consoles, but Steam, Mac and the iPad are much more lightweight.”
Games made by one person or a small team and sold without a publisher are called indie games. The practice is as old as the home computer. What changed in the 2000s was that downloads let such games reach the whole world, and “indie” became the name of a movement.
Before the word
Home computer programmers sold their own games from the start. Jeff Minter formed Llamasoft in 1982 and sold his games by mail order and at computer shows from his parents’ house. In 1991 he gave away Llamatron as shareware and asked players who kept it to send him £5. Public domain libraries spread free games by post, and one of them, 17-Bit Software in Wakefield, turned into Team17. Amiga Power called its founders “ex-PD people”.
As games grew more expensive to make and to put in the shops, going it alone got harder. At the end of 2002, in a feature on studio closures, Edge wrote that life for “small, one-project indie devcos” was “becoming prohibitively difficult”.
Freeware and downloads
The games that revived the idea were free at first. In March 2005 Edge picked out Doukutsu Monogatari, or Cave Story, a Japanese action game made by one programmer and given away as freeware. It had, the magazine wrote, a “level of polish and depth that could easily elevate it from freeware”, and a fan group’s English translation made it “an essential download”.
Download services gave such games a way to be sold. Xbox Live Arcade on the Xbox 360, Valve’s Steam on the PC and later on the Mac, and Apple’s App Stores all sold small games with no disc, box or shop. Digital distribution did not remove the gatekeeper, though. It moved the job from publisher to store. In the same 2011 feature Edge noted that Positech’s political simulation Democracy 2 “was turned down by Steam, but is on the App Store”. And as Blow said, each store asked a different price in approvals and paperwork.
Paying for it
Developers tried new ways to charge. In 2010 the first Humble Indie Bundle offered several independent games for whatever buyers chose to pay, with part of the money going to charity. Talking to Edge in January 2011, Blow pointed to it as proof that independents did not need a backer: “Look at the Humble Indie Bundle guys – they’ve made almost $200,000 per game, plus a bunch of money for charity. That was not backed by anybody, that was them putting up a webpage.”
Markus Persson’s Minecraft took money before it was finished. Players bought it during what Edge called “a two-year beta”. When it reached version 1.0.0, Persson told the magazine that “with millions of sold copies, it didn’t really make much sense to call the game ‘pre-release’ any more”. He said he enjoyed the limits set by programming contests such as the Ludum Dare 48-hour competition, and he defended the game’s lack of a tutorial by pointing to an older tradition: “Roguelikes have been doing this for decades.”
Early in 2012 Tim Schafer’s Double Fine asked players on the crowdfunding site Kickstarter to pay for a point-and-click adventure. By the time Edge went to press it had raised more than $2.2 million. Obsidian, the developer of Fallout: New Vegas, joined what Edge called “gaming’s latest gold rush”, and its designer Chris Avellone said player funding was “proof certain genres aren’t dead”. Edge also found the other side: a small studio, Spark Plug Games, had raised $941 of a $25,000 target with 16 days to go.
Older genres, new audiences
Many independent hits went back to genres from the home computer years. In 2010 Edge grouped Spelunky with the roguelikes ADOM and NetHack, games that build a new dungeon every time you play.
Some of the older companies became indie publishers themselves. In 2013 Team17, the studio that had grown out of a PD library, went back to publishing other developers’ games. In 2019 Wireframe described it as “a British indie publishing powerhouse”, “valued in the hundreds of millions range”.
Sources
- “Opening the Macintosh”, Edge issue 226, April 2011, pp. 10–12: Braid’s position on the Mac App Store chart, Jonathan Blow’s quotes and Democracy 2.
- Edge issue 118, Christmas 2002, p. 64: feature on studio closures (“small, one-project indie devcos”).
- Edge issue 147, March 2005: Doukutsu Monogatari (Cave Story).
- Edge issue 213, April 2010: roguelike feature (ADOM, Spelunky, NetHack).
- Jonathan Blow and Chris Hecker in conversation, Edge issue 223, January 2011, p. 74: the Humble Indie Bundle.
- Interview with Markus Persson, Edge issue 236, January 2012: Minecraft 1.0.0, the beta, Ludum Dare and roguelikes.
- “Kickstarter”, Edge issue 239, April 2012, p. 10: Double Fine, Obsidian and Chris Avellone, Spark Plug Games.
- “Team17”, developer profile, Wireframe issue 8, February 2019, p. 50: “a British indie publishing powerhouse”.
- Wikipedia, “Humble Bundle” (web, secondary): the first Humble Indie Bundle, May 2010, pay what you want with a share to charity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humble_Bundle