Indie development is back in a big way – an abundance of small-scale, short-play games now floods XBLA, PSN, WiiWare, iPhone and web portals. But while certain barriers to entry have come down, others have shot up. How do you get noticed in such a swelling sector – first by publishers and distributors, and then by the buying public? As a one- or two-man team, do you have the resources to commit time to marketing and self-promotion? With platform holders doing a poor job of filtering downloadable content, publicity is one of the largest hurdles between a bedroom coder and a successful game – but it’s not the only one: all kinds of issues stymie small developers, from a basic lack of business experience to gaping holes in a team’s skillset. Blitz Games’ new 1UP scheme hopes to break down those remaining fences between the market and ambitious indie devs – and it’s a programme which reflects bigger changes in the way the industry is approaching development for small and large games alike.
“It started out quite opportunistically,” says Blitz business development director Chris Swan. “The Stickman Studios guys were doing freelance artwork for us, and we just bumped into them in the kitchen and discovered they had a game that we could help them out with. We realised that, well, we’ve already gone to the effort of getting lots of distribution contracts in place, we have PR departments, we have creative departments. It doesn’t seem to make much sense just to let them sit there when there are all these other people ringing on our front door who we could help out. So we formalised it in November last year, and that’s how the 1UP program came about.”
1UP's Chris Swan
Blitz’s production model reflects shifting development strategies across the industry: a move from large, centralised teams to a more atomised form of development in which discrete, external teams orbit around a central production studio. The 1UP program therefore seems like an inevitability – but Blitz, to its credit, has got there ahead of the curve. Swan is reticent to compare the scheme to the so-called ‘Hollywood model’ of development, if only because Blitz’s particular flavour of production is geared towards small, short-play games: indie in process and aesthetic. It’s been this twist that has proved to be particularly successful for the company – a matter of timing as much as anything else, coinciding with a resurgence of interest in indie games, not just by developers but by publishers,too.
“The bedroom coder’s coming back,” says Swan. “You’ve got the platforms like the XNA Community area and the iPhone and of course the ever-growing PC market – you’ve got all these areas where people can have a go at doing it by themselves and actually get money back. Before, people were only doing it as a pure experiment, really – getting their games out there and known but not making any financial profits from it. And publishers and distributors are interested in our programme because they don’t have the capacity to deal with so many individual indie gamers, but they do want what the indie game movement’s offering – so they like having Blitz as a filter.”
Stickman Studios' tall ship battler Buccaneer, the first game signed up to 1UP
Swan may describe the 1UP process in altruistic terms – a way of Blitz reaching out and helping small developers – but he is also candid about it being a two-way relationship.
“It’s definitely a business model for us,” he says. “I think when developers look at it, they’ll realise that’s the only way they would want it as well. If we weren’t incentivised for the game to do well, then we might not push it as hard as we could. So there is some sort of payment model – whether that’s payment up front or, more often, some kind of revenue share. It’s very much a bespoke service, as it depends how many resources you need from Blitz; if we supply funding, give you art advice, design advice and do your localisation and voice recording and organise your route to market, then we’re going to take much more of a share than if you have a finished game and just want help with distribution.”
Swan says that Blitz has been approached by 50 applicants so far, but the numbers are increasing with every week as word gets around. Where has the interest been coming from? “There’ve been two main types so far,” says Swan. “We have veteran developers who… I don’t want to say they are jaded, but they have left the commercial industry to strike out on their own. And we’ve had university graduates who are starting up their own companies and the first step is to develop their own small-IP indie game.”
We wonder if Blitz won’t find itself swamped with emails from Idea Men, demanding Blitz fulfil every other role in development. “I must admit,” says Swan, “I expected more of that than we’ve had. Some people have come to us at concept stage and asked us: ‘How can I put a team together?’ We’ve tried to help where we can there, but if we do that too much then there’s a risk that we’ll be flooded from that end. We’re not trying to take concepts and have Blitz develop them – it’s more the other way round: we drop in where we can and someone else is doing most of the groundwork on that game idea. We’ve tried to position it so that, if your game’s getting near completion, that’s where Blitz is looking to step in.”