Press Pass: Going Indie
Is the game press paying enough attention to obscure games from independent developers? Press Pass investigates.
11/24/2008 8:42 PM | 8 Comments | Page 1 of 3
Imagine that you've got the best game idea in the history of game ideas. You don't work at a major videogame publisher, but you do have a modicum of programming and artistic skill, so you set yourself to many long nights of work in order to get your vision out of your head and into an executable file. Finally, after months of toil, you're ready to share your wholly original, accessible and eminently playable creation with the world. You upload your creation to some free Web space and ... despair as a grand total of 10 people download it in your first month. Hey, at least your mom said she liked it.
Independent games -- generally, games released without the support of a major publisher -- can't rely on major marketing campaigns or
months of hype to generate interest. For these games, the challenge of convincing people to download a demo or buy a copy only comes
after the challenge of simply making people aware of your game's existence. This is where the videogame press can help, turning readers on to the best under-hyped indie gems. So, how well is the press performing this vital function? Well, it depends on whom you ask.
Introversion's hacking game
Uplink was rescued from obscurity by almost evangelical press coverage.
"A passionate games journalist who loves your work will get you more coverage than an entire PR department," said Kieron Gillen, one of four people behind indie-friendly PC gaming site Rock Paper Shotgun, in a
2005 essay on the vagaries of marketing indie games. And Gillen should know -- as the essay details, his review of
Uplink for the UK's
PC Gamer helped pull the game out of obscurity and push it towards a modicum of success. Seven years after
Uplink's release, though, the indie game coverage is in a very different place. "I wonder if it's in a transitional phase," Gillen says in an interview with Press Pass. "We're still trying to work out what we want indie games to be -- [and by "we" I mean] everyone: readers, journalists and developers."
Gillen is particularly concerned that some outlets are reluctant to cover indie games because the readers themselves haven't shown much interest. "It seems that all the major Web sites are going through a belt-tightening phase ... I'm worried that people running Web sites want to maximize their money into page impressions. And if spending the money on an indie review will get less page impressions than spending it on a feature comparing the frame rate of an Xbox 360 and a PlayStation 3 game, they're going to spend it on the latter."
GameTunnel's Russell Carroll says
The Spirit Engine 2 is one of the best indie games you've probably never heard of.
Indeed, the difficulty in getting readers to care about under-hyped indie games is enough to make even committed indie boosters despair. "To be honest, I've come to the conclusion that the lack of [indie game] coverage is due to a lack of interest," says Russell Carroll, editor-in-chief of major indie games portal Game Tunnel. "If you watch posts on popular game sites like Joystiq and Kotaku, there are a lot fewer comments on the posts about indie games than on the ones about just about anything else. That's really disappointing to me, and shows just how big of a marketing problem indies have."
