In a New York Times op-ed piece today, Irreplaceable Exuberance, Henry Blogdet talks about the typical industry life-cycle:

During the boom phase, the success of a few visionary companies like Netscape inspires frantic experimentation and speculation, as entrepreneurs and investors try to cash in on the trend. Early entrants usually enjoy temporary success, but the number of competitors soon comes to exceed the initial opportunity, leading to a collapse. After the shakeout, a handful of survivors enjoy an extended period of growth and profitability. Finally, another technology shift leads to an era of decline, and giants often find themselves reduced to the stature of today’s buggy-whip makers – or worse. (emphasis added)

Actually, I’m predicting more of a casual game bust, but since so many indies have hitched their wagon to the casual game gravy train, when the casual game market peaks and passes, it’s going to take a lot of indies with it.

Less than 5 years ago, most game developers wouldn’t be caught dead playing a casual game, much less designing one. That all changed when the mass market logged into the Internet and started playing Hearts online. Add to that new companies like PopCap making millions, and game developers decided that casual games weren’t so bad after all.

In the last 3 years, the phrase “game portal” was added to the lexicon. When I started writing The Indie Game Development Survival Guide in late 2002, Real was the only prominent example of such a beast, and even they were more interested in “real games”, none of this silly “casual” stuff.

My, how things have changed.

It’s arguable that indie developers created the casual games market. Though retail publishers have created casual games throughout the years, they never pushed them. The so-called “core market” for video games was seen as young males and young males didn’t want Freecell, they wanted photorealistic gore, breasts, and BFG’s. Indies, with their limited resources, though, latched onto casual games as something they could do. And they discovered that people would pay them for their little games. Lots of people. Thus began the boom.

During the Internet Boom people wanted to believe that the Internet Boom had redefined business and that the old rules didn’t apply. I think many indies delude themselves similarly.

Ever since I saw EA buy into the casual game space, and after I attended the casual game summit at GDC 2004, I’ve been convinced that’s it time for indies to do what they do best: Find a new market. Since that time, the cost of building a casual game has ballooned. The cost of finding a market for that game has exploded. The demands of game portals have become nearly identical to those of the retail publishers. And the slice of the pie allocated to the game developer has become smaller and smaller as everyone in the value chain insists on a bigger and bigger piece.

I think that indies will always be able to create smaller, more intense, more personally significant, games than their larger-staffed, better-funded brethren. I think a single, cohesive vision will always be more powerful than anything built by a committee. I think the tools for making games will only get more powerful and easier to use. But I also think that indies had better get used to the idea that they will create markets that they will eventually be too small to operate in profitably.

There’s more to indie game development than casual games. That niche is no longer a niche. It’s a full-sized market and consolidation is well on its way.

Boom boom boom. The bust is coming.

-David

I earned my first independent dollar in 1996. After that, anytime I interviewed for a job, my independent projects would catch the attention of the hiring manager. There were a couple of reasons for this attention. First, some of these indie projects were video games. To corporate IT programmers, game programming is like a holy grail, something they would like to do themselves–if they could only “find the time.”

Second, and more ominously, because of what those projects represented–independent income–the hiring managers sat up and realized that they were talking to someone who had a source of income separate from an employer.

Nothing, it seems, scares employers more than employees with independent income.

Why? Because independent income removes one of the primary levers employers use to control their employees: the paycheck.

A question I had to answer over and over was, “So…what happens if one of your games takes off?”

My typical response was, “Woo hoo!”

This did little to comfort them.

In the 21st century workplace, employees who think that their employer will “take care of them” are…well…adorable. And ignorant of history. The last two decades of the 20th century demonstrated how little employers regard their employees. Massive layoffs opened every recession or market slowdown. When profits lagged, employers got rid of their largest expense: people. Lots of people.

Independent free agency is the future of employment.

Someday employers might actually understand that they did this to themselves.

Why employers shouldn’t be worried about employees with independent income:

Let go of the master-slave employment mentality. It’s not necessary for employees to work for the company. They could work with the company, to the benefit of both.

-David

Dr. Andrew Davison gives advice gleaned from writing his book Killer Game Programming in Java here:

I particularly liked:

#3 “Plan Your Book” is also good advice. Myself, when I was estimating how long it would take to write my books, I used the following simple formula:

1,000 words/day x 5 days/week x 4 weeks/month = 20,000/month

Assuming a 100,000 word book (roughly the length of The Indie Game Development Survival Game [which is, really, short for a computer book]) that comes to 5 months.

Then, accounting for “programmer optimism” and a need to edit, I padded that out to 9 months.

The 1000 words per day was both a daily goal and a “targeted average”. So long as the average could be kept up, the schedule could be flexible and account for things like…oh…attending conferences in October and getting almost nothing done in December.

Davison’s #7 is “Writing is Hell”, which ties back to #1. If you don’t believe in what you’re writing, the hell will stop you.

When you’re in the bowels of a project it’s easy to lose sight of the larger goal and forget not only where you’re going buy why you thought that was a good location to end up. The book proposal you created to sell the publisher on your idea can help you remember why you started the book. A game design document can serve the much the same purpose for game developers. It’s good to remind yourself of the big picture, and remember that you really do believe in your project.

-David

This past weekend I read Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Spehen J. Dubner. This book is an information junkie’s dream. It has obscure facts and presents lots of strange relations between those facts (like comparing teachers in US schools to Japanese sumo wrestlers).

One story struck me as being particularly relevant to indies. Paul Feldman, an economist who worked for the US Navy analyzing weapon expenditures, became known as the “bagel guy” for his habit of bringing bagels into work every week. To recoup his costs, he put out a basket for money and posted a suggested price. By his own estimate (he kept detailed records), he generally took in about 95% of the suggested price per bagel.

Feldman eventually quit his job and went to work fulltime delivering bagels to office complexes. He used the same approach of making the bagels available, with a suggested price and a basket to collect the money. Sounds a lot like early shareware, neh?

I liked the evolution of his money collection method. He started with a simple basket to put the money in, as he had used before, when bagel selling was still just a hobby. But without being there to oversee the operation (and, at the same time, deter theft), money had a way of disappearing from the basket. His next idea was a coffee can with a slot cut in the lid. This didn’t fare much better than the basket. So he created wooden boxes with slots. Now he drops off about 7,000 boxes per year and only loses one to theft. Sounds even more like shareware, doesn’t it?

His collections average just under 90% of the estimated take (again, based on the suggested price), and he’s built his business to the point where it earns him as much or more than his previous office career. 90% is better than any shareware conversion rate I’ve ever seen.

Bagels and software aren’t a one-to-one comparison, of course, but it’s still impressive. Feldman managed to create enough incentive with a good balance of low-key anti-theft deterrent.

-David

I’m a huge believer in what one person alone can accomplish. I don’t admit (or accept) any limits. Given sufficient time, I figure I can do anything. After all, so often the only thing holding us back is ourselves and our (too small) thoughts about what we can do.

But lately, I’ve begun to realize that while there may not be limits per se, there are…well…limits: to what one person can do, to what can be built with limited resources. And those limits aren’t just in our heads.

Where I’m seeing these limits loom most often is when I consider new directions for business and/or marketing. There comes a point, it seems, when the next step for a product can’t be accomplished with an incremental change (my favorite kind). Slow evolution must give way to a quantum leap. Instead of being something you can pull together and code/create in a month, two months, or even six months, you’re now looking at manyears. You’re looking at a need for a dedicated team.

In short, you’re looking at a whole new level of risk.

And by “you”, of course, I mean me.

Maybe the path to the next level begins with accepting that I can’t get there by myself.

-David

Paul Graham wrote an essay recently, “What Business can Learn from Open Source”. Overall, the tone and message of the article makes it applicable to indies, and worth reading. Here are some comments of my own on what he had to say.

Can’t disagree here. I’ve always considered the Web one of the 3 pillars of the modern indie. I quote the passage to reiterate my firm belief in its truth.

Graham spends quite a bit of time extolling the virtues of amateurs, defining amateurs as “people who work for the love of it.” It’s somewhat inspirational, but his enthusiasm leads him to this bit of nonsense:

Yah? OK, I agree that Firefox has definitely notched beyond Internet Explorer, but IE became the dominant browser because Microsoft paid enough people to create a better browser than a bunch of inspired hackers had built. (And that bit of history no doubt plays strongly in why Graham wastes no pleasant emotions on Microsoft. But that’s beside the point.)

The logic that amateurs will always outperform paid professionals is ridiculous on the face of it. Dedication and skill will trump bureaucracy and staff meetings, but let’s not get carried away.

Graham next focuses on the joys of working at home. I liked this quote:

I tend to agree, but not for his reasons. This section of the essay comes across as a rant. Must’ve had a bad experience in corporate America. Me, my first job out of college was for a health insurance company, the epitome of corporate America. I wore shirt and tie to work each 8-to-5 day of the 5-day workweek. I had fun there, though, because I liked creating the software required by the users I supported, and I had a great manager who knew how to handle and channel the energy of programmers like me. My next job, at another health insurance company, was nowhere near so nice. It was, in fact, indicative of much of the worst of corporate America. Insert your own stories of corporate stupidity here.

Here’s an example of his rant:

It’s kinda funny and, depending on your manager or supervisor, might have a grain of truth in it, but it makes it hard to take this section of the article seriously.

In fact, just skip that section of Graham’s article unless you’re really bored.

Here are some reasons he kind of alludes to for why working at home is good:

I like working at home. I’ve done it over 6 years now. However, I don’t recall being less productive at the office or unable to concentrate. My schedule-keeping skills waxed and waned over the years, but for the most part, I came in on time and didn’t leave early.

Just like working at home, to be productive at a full time job requires good time management, self discipline, and enough backbone to stand up for what you know needs to happen and/or is the right thing to do. If you don’t have those at the office, perhaps it’s not the office’s fault, and taking yourself home won’t make much positive difference.

I like being my own boss much more than I like working at home. Where I work has very little to do with how much I enjoy it or how productive I am. The key thing for me is choosing my own projects.

Moving on to the “Bottom Up” portion of the article:

I agree with the assertion that more people should make what they want to make, and put it out there for people to use/play/see. But the idea that “the best stuff prevails” is…well…naïve, and completely discounts the realities of modern marketing. And this statement has similar issues: “open source software is more reliable precisely because it’s open source; anyone can find mistakes.” As if.

Next, Graham talks about the benefits of a multitude of scrutiny and feedback in finding bugs and errors in writing. I’m a huge fan of getting, and listening to, feedback. Software, articles, music, and just about anything else can be improved through attentive listening to your users, readers, listeners, and other audience members. But without a unifying vision held by someone (or a very small collection of someones), you don’t get an improvement. Instead, you end up with a mishmash of conflicting ideas and implementations and no coherence. So…I think he overstates the value of this aspect.

So, Graham eventually comes to something resembling a conclusion:

And:

I agree with this hugely. I think more people need to stop thinking of themselves as employees, stop looking to  other people to pay them and give them benefit packages, and realize what is possible when they follow their own paths to success.

-David