2014 has been as much a year of the indies as has 2013, and 2012 before that. More indie games have come to the fore, and the audience has matured over time playing games. This audience continues to experiment with differently themed games.
This year had some pretty good indie mobile games like Threes, Monument Valley, Smash Hit and Crossy Road amongst many others – these were all good games, made by small teams of people.
Having said that, the number of indies across the world continues to grow – the competition is crazy, and we’re dealing with a huge discoverability issue. While some games are incredibly good, and worthy of attention – many others have slipped away, just because they weren’t visible enough.
So, I think that the bar for quality in indie games has gotten much higher this year, the competition has become much more, and the chance for success has become lesser. But even though the chance of success is lesser, if we do succeed – the rewards are insanely high.
With regard to Indian indies, I think we’re yet to see games that reach the bar set by international games. I hope to see that happen within the next couple of years. We’re still struggling, and finding our way through. We do have a few teams with a distinctive art style, narrative style, or gameplay format – but it should take a while before it becomes worthy to land the top pages around the world. Personally, I’m looking forward to seeing what ‘Studio Oleomingus’ cooks up, I like how they’ve approached their current game – and these are just students still.
Indian gaming community
We are beginning to see more Indian indies experiment with concepts that we didn’t seem to have the courage or expertise to do before. Trust has always been an issue for Indians, but we’re very slowly but surely moving towards being more open with one another. I’d love to see that speed up. Having said that, I’m proud to see some of this year’s games receive praise from people across the world. Even within India, some of our indie games have begun to cross the 1-million installs threshold, and that’s very good news.
Amongst the areas I think we really need improvement on, I wish we had more people volunteer within their city, and build the local developer community. We’re entering an era of game development where competition is getting harder, and we need to be able to goad each other into doing better. It’s only when we meet more often, that it becomes easier to trust and build better relationships with one another. More importantly, these relationships may finally be able to allow us to start giving the kind of feedback we all deserve to hear. We have the NASSCOM Gaming Forum, a large pan-India developer community; I think the time is right for members from each city to support the NGF by taking on some responsibility at the local level. First of which, has to be more meetings and game developer centric activities in our own cities. All that these members have to do is reach out to the NGF leadership team, and ask for some responsibility.
Various monetisation techniques
We’ve got the widest range of monetisation methods, ranging all the way from – pay to play (premium), free games(ad-supported/F2P), paying to play (Incentivized installs/User acquisition tied with in-app purchases/offer walls), and finally paying people outright (Games with real money payout). Monetisation is taking on a more critical part in game design than ever before. Game developers now have to think about what sort of monetization format best ties in with their game, and if that combination is viable enough to return sufficient revenue for them. It’s becoming much harder to just make a game free or paid and hope for the best. Or for that matter, place in-app purchases or ads and hope that money will come in just because you have them in place.
Game discovery
We’ve always known that the App store feature is a lottery. What else can happen when less than five games can be featured every week? In a time when a hundred games are released every day, editors on the app stores are facing a hard job choosing five that they think deserve to be made visible that week. Well, it’s not too hard a job since most of the games aren’t able to hit a quality threshold, but even amongst the ones that do – many are dying just because of the constraints of discoverability. Game discoverability on mobile now relies more on who’s got bigger budgets for user acquisition and marketing, so for the rest of us…. the objective is simple, make a game that Apple or Google can feature, so that you, in turn, can make tons of money. It’s simple, it’s definitely not easy.
Comic con experience
The buzz and energy at a Comic Con was pretty high. We found that people barely spend ten seconds just walking by the stall, and try to take as much in as possible. The games that were most likely to be played, and bought, were the ones that players could understand in less than ten seconds. Every other game needed patient playing, and hence could not hook the player given the environment.
Every now and then, when someone chose not to buy a game – we asked them if there was any particular reason for not wanting to put money down on a game. The usual response was a shrug, followed by the statement that most games can be gotten for free. So it’s not the fact that people aren’t paying because their credit and debit cards aren’t synced. It’s just that there’s a lot more things they’d rather spend the money on.
Circulets was one game that sold easily amongst this crowd, since it involved play amongst friends. Couples and groups of friends were likely to buy the game. There was something to being able to share the experience with people around you, which somehow resonated better with the Comic Con crowd.
(These are purely personal views of Independent Game Developer and Founder – Digikhel – Joel Johnson and AnimationXpress.com does not subscribe to these views)