So, let's talk about indie development a bit

When you hear the words: "indie developer," what comes to mind? Minecraft? Steam? Kickstarter?
There is an indie development community that I think all small developers should get into.
Why?
The "community" has their own Steam-like client for distributing and buying games called Desura.
Of course, I probably haven't convinced anyone to even check this out as a means of distribution, but what if I told you that this client also supported alpha-funding?
http://www.desura.com/games#alpha
Any game listed on that page is currently in alpha development, but you can purchase and play the games as the developers work on it! This is similar to Kickstarter and a feature that Steam really needs to be truly indie-friendly, in my opinion.

So what is alphafunding?
Games such as King Arthur's Gold (previously reviewed here) and Minecraft are just two examples of games that are currently in alphafunding and that were previously in alphafunding.

So why choose alphafunding, what about publishers?
As a developer who hasn't published a game, I do have a niche fanbase (Island Defense/Hero Arena fans may remember me as an editor from Warcraft III) and I do not have the previous work to get a publishers attention. So where does this leave me? Alphafunding. Alphafunding, with the proper amount of people, ensures your game is going to be made without harassment from a publisher, threats to be dropped by a publisher, and it's just nice to have people give feedback and criticism on the game while you are developing.

DRM, DRM.... WHY!?
Another thing to worry about when choosing a publisher and hoping to be accepted is, what do they require? Currently, it seems that any game EA decides to publish gets thrown onto Origin. So, why is this bad? Not many people like Origin and just flat out hate publishers like EA. Take Kingdoms of Amalur as an example: amazing game. What is there to hate about it? Oh... EA. Now, luckily, EA did not obtain exclusive rights to this game so you can actually purchase it off of Steam. From what I have seen (remember, this is only from what I've seen, no data was collected for this) Steam sales of Kingdoms beat out Origin sales of the same game.
Steam has been generally accepted as the go-to DRM for PC developers. You can see this just by looking at the concurrent users on Steam's homepage.
So why am I talking about DRM and publishers? To be honest, protecting your game is worthless. Steam and Origin games are generally hacked within a day - DRM free, baby! Your game will be held back trying to implement DRM, there will be licenses needed to obtained (unless you program your own... which... why reinvent the wheel and delay release even more).
To be honest, I prefer using Steam even though I preach about why DRM sucks. I don't purchase games off Steam though because of the DRM I purchase them because of the convenience and social aspect Steam provides - something that most DRM's ruin for you.

I want to make games for people using community ideas!
Oh, you're being cute, right? Oh... you're serious?
In my experience this generally does not work during the game's production. Once a game is released then this is an acceptable way to please your fans and attract new members to the community. I always enjoy when companies listen to good suggestions and implement them relatively soon, it makes me feel like we have a say.
This is the primary cause of feature creep from what I've seen. Stick to your design document, a working final product is what people really want. Banana monsters who throw flaming balls of dung are not necessary... upon release at least.

Let's talk a bit about some of the business aspects
As an indie developer, I have realized one thing: people are cheap... very cheap. The more free it is, the better. What do I mean? Two examples I always use are the business models for the games of Heroes Of Newerth and League Of Legends.
Heroes of Newerth at its launch had about 30,000 users on at once at its max. While League Of Legends never really publishes their numbers, they had substantially more active users on the forum and matchmaking queue times were shorter (meaning more players). Why is this? The major complaint of Heroes Of Newerth wasn't that it was harder to learn or that the community is utter garbage when it comes to courtesy (which it is), but that the game was a whopping $30! Holy shit, talk about bank breaking expensive! People didn't want to dish out the $30 because there was a competitor, League, which was released for free. Like I said, the more free, the better.
So how did Heroes Of Newerth fix this? They went free-to-play... too late. Heroes now can reach 70,000 users at once (not at max either), they effectively doubled their numbers... but where is League at? 1.3 MILLION users at once as of November 18th, 2011 (the Escapist).
The way I see it, microtransactions are the payment model of the future. Just two examples of this are League of Legends and Runes of Magic whose success almost solely comes from their business model.

But... I want to be a mobile developer, this all doesn't matter!
Actually, this all matters quite a bit. Although many potential customers are willing to dish out $0.99 for the next Doodle Jump clone, they are also willing to dish out $5 worth of "little $0.99 addons," also known as... MICROTRANSACTION PRODUCTS!
The hardware gap between tablets and PC's is closing. Tablets can now handle a lot more and can output some amazing graphics. In my opinion, people shouldn't be thinking: "We are making a mobile game!" They should be thinking: "We are making a cross platform game... how can we go about this?"
Game engines such as Unity, GameMaker, Construct, and Stencyl all support cross platform compiling... what is to prevent you from launching to multiple platforms?

That's all I really have for now. I may be following up on this as ideas come to mind... but I feel like I covered enough for one post.



Source:
Chalk, Andy. "League of Legends Muscles Past World of Warcraft." The Escapist. 18 Nov. 2011. Web. 21 Mar. 2012.


Notable links:
http://www.desura.com/
http://www.indiedb.com/
http://na.leagueoflegends.com/
http://www.heroesofnewerth.com/
http://www.stencyl.com/
http://www.yoyogames.com/make
http://www.scirra.com/construct2
http://unity3d.com/