Notgames Fest

Bride the Gap – Right now there seems to be a substantial gap between the very successful Indie developers and the unknown ones. Indies can’t rely on marketing. So success depends a lot on chance. You need to win awards or get featured on one of the large blogs. Only very few can make a living off it. Getting started is difficult too. Most often than not, you will need to fund entire projects on your own. As if development wasn’t difficult enough.

There are private indie funds coming up which can help bridging those gaps and cultivating a healthy middle-ground. The European way to do this is to use arts funding from the government. The governments are starting to notice. We need to approach them and let them know that we are here.

Emancipate – The traditional games industry is in the process of disassembly. Social Games, Mobile Games, Casual Games – the traditional channels are failing at spanning the spectrum of this increasingly growing medium. Something is not right when reviews of games like Flower appear right next to reviews of God of War – complete with a “review score” implying comparability.

We need to complete this process on the development side. The fundamental reality of Indie game development barley resembles the traditional industry. Why are they expecting us to pay for the same, over-priced business conferences just to meet up? Why are they expecting us to publish our games through the same cumbersome, bureaucratic channels? We need alternatives that aren’t designed for multi-million dollar franchises. And we need to control them ourselves. The Independent Games movement offers the unique opportunity to establish a relationship between the authors and channel owners that actually empowers content-creators and not the middle-men. This configuration led other media to maturity. We should take this path as well.

Synchronize – Finally, we need to come together on an ideological level. Right now, we are just separate people each doing their own thing. That’s also how we appear to our audience. Of course, this individuality is an important aspect of our work. But there are also similarities between our projects we shouldn’t disregard. We should reach out and recognize ourselves in each other. We might be able to establish common threads and cultivate common identities around them.

This is especially important for us European developers. We have a smaller local audience and a lot of competition from overseas. But we live and work close to each spatially, mentally and culturally. We should aim at coming together and starting to build a common European understanding as developers. One that does not mimic our colleagues from overseas or the mainstream industry. One that pays tribute to who we actually are and who we aren’t.