Can an indie studio be a publicly traded company?

Then again, I’m just a gamer.

Am I missing a point here Psychochild?

Is “independence” based solely on some intangible notion of control over corporate and creative direction? Why should the amount of funding a team raises have anything to do with it? Accountability to someone for how vast sums of money are spent should be a good thing, especially for inexperienced studios and doesn’t necessarily mean that someone is going to be there on a daily basis making demands over the creative direction of a game. Anyway, the money for development has to come from somewhere…gone are the days where two or three people can quit their day jobs and work in a garage to create a AAA. Does it matter if it is from “friends and family”, a bank, angel investors or a venture fund? Or does it all boil down to the requirements that are tied to the funding?

And what about publishing? Are you an independent if you refuse to take funding (advances against royalties) from a publisher until the game is finished? Or is it simply a matter of making sure you have full creative control? Even then, if a publisher gives you funds, you know they are going to be all over your budget spending just as much as a VC would, to protect their investment. I didn’t mean to imply that you must go without a publisher to maintain independence (obviously ID and Blizzard are pretty damned independent, although they work quite closely with publishers).

What is the general perception out there? How is the mark of independence similar or different in other industries, like pop or hip-hop, or even movie studios? Is it about creative control? Financial freedom? The percentage of volunteer/hobby team members? Whether or not you work with a publisher? Even so, does it matter how much money a publisher gives you, or when? (before or after development).

I’m not satisfied that there is a decent definition for independent right now. I feel like anyone who calls themselves independent is likely to be unfunded and working out of a garage, or may have some small amount of funding from friends/family or even some very small revenues from a casual game or two.

Anyone else want to take a stab at defining independent?

Robert / Nicodemus

But, even if you are tied to a publisher does not mean you are not independent. Blizzard was able to maintain a lot of independence despite being bought by a large studio. id is another company that has managed to remain mostly independent even if they work with publishers. The secret is to not need to rely on the publishers entirely. id, for example, was a well-known shareware developer when they hit it big with DOOM. Publishers were falling over themselves to distribute DOOM, giving id the income they needed to survive in the long haul and be able to dictate their own terms. A lot of the terms publishers demand from small studios these days are, frankly, intended to prevent another id (or Blizzard, etc.) from happening.

I’ll also echo what Jeff Freeman says above: launching a game is only a fraction the battle. Maintaining the game and providing services is a large responsibility, too, and that can demand even more resources than development in some cases. A studio that can launch a game isn’t necessarily a studio that can support the game.

My thoughts,

For now, the best place for updates is the game site: http://www.immortaldestiny.com A fat update and some news announcements are coming real soon.

–J.

(*) Not too much at least.

CCP originally had a publisher, Simon&Schuster, so they wouldn’t fall into the indie category. Although now that they are doing things on their own, you could easily call them independent (they did take funding from external sources early on as well).

There are a lot of indies out there making games (casual, mobile, PC, online, etc), and I think that is a good thing. Personally I think the old publisher business model is outdated and handicaps the industry a bit. There needs to be some change and innovation there.