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Tag Games’ Farley on the messy, glorious future of independent game studios

Musings from the State of Independence

Tag Games’ Farley on the messy, glorious future of independent game studios
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This is a guest column written by Paul Farley, managing director of UK mobile games company Tag Games.

I'm in the beautiful city of York, but there's no time for sight seeing. I'm attending State of Independence, a one day conference exploring the state of independent game development in the UK.

The train journey here has provided an opportunity to reflect. Reflection is something everyone running a business needs to do as often as possible, but in the daily hustle and bustle it's often lost among project deadlines and the drama of the day.

Today though I've enjoyed the opportunity to reflect. It's clear we at Tag Games, like many of our independent peers, have a challenging time ahead.

Time for change

Recently we heard the news that the talented independent developers at Denki, our close neighbours in Dundee, were downsizing from a team of 25 to 6 due to its failure to sell upcoming Xbox Live Arcade title Quarrel to a publisher.

In his passionate and honest blog post, Denki managing director Colin Anderson clearly summarised the position: "If you are an independent game developer and you aren't selling direct to customers you need to change now."

It seems that despite Quarrel being virtually complete, no publisher was prepared to take a chance on a word game for XBLA.

I can see both sides of the problem.

The developer has sweated and toiled for over two years to create something that's innovative and highly polished, and which it believes will find a willing audience. But no publisher sees it. The XBLA market is the hardest of the hardcore, and Quarrel is just a word game. The perceived wisdom is that word games don't sell on XBLA.

It all boils down to the developer's opinion versus the publishers, and with the game sat in no man's land, the customer can't even choose who's right or wrong by paying for the download and playing it.

Going solo

Clearly it's madness to allow this kind of wastage to continue. The traditional developer/publisher model is broken and the games industry is facing the biggest transition yet. If you thought 2D to 3D was painful you ain't seen nothing yet... This is going to get messy!

Those of us that have been in mobile gaming for a while have at least one advantage over those working in more traditional gaming spaces.

Mobile gaming has always been a digitally distributed product, and guess what, we've had just as many gatekeepers (maybe even more) between us and the customer than retail gaming. The small group of survivors like Tag that have come through the last few years have had to adapt our business models, create new routes to market, and generally duck and dive, wheel and deal, in an effort to claw out the working capital to create original IP and continue to grow.

We're still in the game and I believe we are stronger, wiser and more robust than ever.

Direct to gamer

As I share a thought for those affected by the Denki restructuring, I am reminded that this is a familiar story, one that has played out a number of times already in the last few months and one which, I'm sure, will play again and again in the months to come.

At least Denki has survived. The penny has dropped, and it has the chance to rebuild around a business model that reflects the changing nature of the games industry. That's the beauty of being small. You can adapt, move quickly, even start again if you have to. If you can't do that then you're dead in the water already.

This is the Facebook and iPhone generation and the way games are made, consumed and monetised has changed for ever. There is no going back.

Rip it up. Start again

So as State of Independence comes to a close, it's been a time to remember what has gone before and, more importantly, look ahead to what is to come.

The key themes from the event have been self-publishing, funding and monetisation.

At a few points I had to pinch myself, but I'm not dreaming, this was a game development conference after all but yes we've been primarily talking business. This fills me with hope. Sure we've talked about games and product, but the focus on the nitty gritty of making money indicates a new found maturity in grass roots game businesses.

The air of optimism and confidence is palatable. Who knows the future Playfishes, Zyngas and EAs might be here among us? It's an exciting thought.

Messy success

The room is packed with all manner of game developers both large and small, and talking to various people it's clear almost everyone is making money and growing their businesses, plus they are having fun doing something they believe in at the same time.

Rather than kill off the small independent developers platforms such as iPhone, iPad and console download are offering new opportunities for innovative content and emerging business models, which the smaller teams are moving quickly to exploit.

They are rising up and taking control of their own destiny. It's a bit messy. We really need to define the industry on better terms than simply publisher and developer, but regardless of what label you want to use, the only businesses that need to worry are those that can't or wont change in time.

It's good to be here now.


To find out more about Tag Games, check out its website and Twitterfeed.

You can contact Tag Games via biz.dev [at] tag-games [dot] com.