Indie Games’ Trouble With Consoles

An opinion article in Gamasutra written by Game Developer and Gamasutra EIC and Independent Games Festival chairman Simon Carless on the advantages of setting an cross platform conversion standards for indie game developers. The piece starts out comparing independent filmmakers to independent game studios. Carless points out that the indie filmmakers’ chance of successfully marketing movies would decrease by about 66% along with their budget if they had to produce each movie they filmed in three different formats.

He goes on to illustrate that independent game companies developing downloadable games for consoles deal with just this scenario. Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo have vastly different consoles and have not thus far worked together to set any type of industry standards between them.

“I understand that hardware manufacturers want to have exclusive games, but that doesn’t stop them from making it easy for classic titles, or relatively platform-agnostic indie games, to appear on multiple platforms at the same time. This point is especially important for smaller and more independent developers because they ride a very fine line between viability and non-viability right now, since they pay their own development costs,” says Carless.

Some popular indie titles are Worms and Alien Hominid. We could see more cool new games like these if Sony and Nintendo would put aside their insularity and corporate control issues to work together with Microsoft to bring Xbox Live Arcade titles to the Wii and the PS3. Consumers could see more new non-retro downloads for all three consoles. The industry needs a standard for small independent companies to easily convert their games for multiple platforms.