Like UK studio Introversion’s indie-rallying clarion call at the 2006 Independent Games Festival, the announcement of an indie-led investment strategy — simply called the Indie Fund — could be the next watershed moment for the future of independent gaming. Organized by a consortium of indie devs that’ve seen breakout success (like World of Goo creators 2D Boy and Braid developer Jon Blow), the fund aims to maintain control of the funding cycle — keeping it out of the hands of publishers and traditional investors alike — and keep indies in charge of their own destiny. Opening the 2010 Independent Games Summit, 2D Boy co-founder Ron Carmel took to the stage to explain why the fund was needed, with Braid artist David Hellman illustrating the strange over-complex steamwork behemoth of traditional business models that no longer serve the indies best: the full hi-res gallery continues below.

Adding nuance to
the title of his session, Carmel admitted the real problem was
more specific: that the real problem was shoe-horning the new
world of digitally distributed indie games into the old regime
of traditional retail game publishing. As game development
has evolved over the past few decades, he explained,
traditional software engineering practices have come with it:
“waterfall approach” processes that emphasize doing as much
pre-production design as possible as early in the process as
possible, postponing the actual building. Throughout the 90s,
though, agile practices emerged that saw development models
being thought of as much more fluid processes, with studies
showing that this model isn’t just cheaper and better for
actually creating software, but maintaining it as well. The
indies are currently facing the same situation today in regards
to funding new games, said Carmel, as the industry still hasn’t
recognized the importance of creating a new mechanism that
takes the new digitally distributed landscape into full
account. The problems: publishers
give too much money for what should be smaller budgets.
World of Goo‘s development costs were in
the region of $120,000, Braid‘s at
$180,000: if publishers are giving out $500,000-$1 million
(presuming old model additional costs of manufacturing and
maintaining inventory, working with retail, marketing), they’re
taking on too much risk and can never hope to make up that
investment. “The machinery for triple-A retail games doesn’t
scale down,” said Carmel — it becomes inefficient and
developers end up becoming tenant farmers. 2D Boy saw this
inefficiency in effect first hand when they approached both
Valve and Microsoft to distribute World of
Goo on both Steam
and Games
for Windows Live. With Games for Windows, each step
of the process had to go through each of the above behemoth’s
component sectors: they’d talk to a business development agent,
which would then move up the chain to managers for approval
before being passed to lawyers, more engineers, platform
specialists, whereas at Steam, the business was handled by one
person. As a result, what
took Valve and 2D Boy one day of legal work and four days of
technical integration on Steam took two months of contract
negotiations and an additional two months of technical work to
prepare the game for launch. It’s not an entirely fair
comparison, Carmel added, with Games for Windows’ inherited
Xbox Live Arcade and retail business model and their newness on
the scene — Steam’s “been around for years” and simply
“figured out how to do this efficiently.” Live Arcade is not
the biggest console distribution platform by accident, he said,
“it takes iterations to get things right.” But in this new landscape
that’s emerged with Steam leading the way to Live Arcade,
PlayStation Network, Direct2Drive, Greenhouse, the developer
and publisher equation has been upended, said Carmel: indies no
longer need the traditional distribution channels publishers
once provided, they simply need the funding. And so, Carmel
said he and the consortium aimed to do for funding what Steam
did for distribution. And they’d do that
with the Indie Fund, founded by 2D Boys Ron Carmel and Kyle
Gabler, Braid‘s Jon Blow,
flOwer designer Kellee Santiago, Capy
(Critter Crunch, Clash of Heroes) studio
head Nathan Vella, Flashbang (Offroad Velociraptor
Safari, Minotaur China Shop) co-founder Matthew
Wegner and AppApove (Armadillo Gold Rush)
head Aaron Isaksen. Their goals: to make the submission process
shorter and more transparent, to make terms of funding deals
publicly available (“Developers,” said Carmel, “need to know
when they’re getting good or bad deals”), to maintain Steam’s
single point of contact and personal relationship, to allow
development flexibility and experimentation, and to allow the
developer both the full ownership of their intellectual
property, and no editorial influence over their game (“If we
provide funding, that’s a vote of confidence in the team.”).
When an Indie Fund game ships, Carmel explained, “we recoup our
costs first, and then for limited time get a revenue share from
that game — but that revenue share is going to be much smaller
than what you’d get with a publisher.” The first beneficiaries
of the Indie Fund haven’t yet been revealed, though Carmel
promises we’ll hear more soon — keep checking their
website to contact the team directly or to learn
more.