Was it really a surprise to anyone that the recent edition to the Call of Duty series changed nothing but the artwork on the cover? Or will it be a surprise to anyone when the next big MMO to come out from Bioware turns out to be the same as its pointy eared companion over at Blizzard? Now through the tumultuous "teenage" years, the gaming industry has settled down to the steady life of a 9-5, content with what it has, and who can blame it? Call of Duty: Black Ops has now become the highest selling game of all time.If Treyarch had decided they wanted to push the boat out by introducing a Sims type needs bar, where once every few missions you had to take a break from headshotting Russians and find a nice diner to chow down and relieve yourself, they would probably recieve a mild golf clap from the press for trying to change a bread and butter linear shooter, and then swiftly get the boot from Activision because they've just ruined the multi-million dollar money spinner that is the Call of Duty franchise.
Like it or not, that's what it's generally all about now, money. You can't have an industry sky rocket in popularity without having those who will seek to gain profit off it, and indeed if it wasn't for those people the industry probably wouldn't be the titan it is today. Are these people the scourge of video gaming? Should we go back to the days where our developers worked from their basements in cotten slacks and Metallica t-shirts? Who knows, this isn't what this article is about. Main stream games have gone past their experimental phase for the most part. If a developer risks producing something new, something genuinely different; if it fails he now has a lot of angry people who gave him a lot of money to answer to. This however does not mean the death of all things innovative, there are still people out there willing to experiment, people who don't have the huge financial pressure of a corporation bearing down upon them. The indie dev!
Over the last few years indie developers have flourished under the changes to the games industry. Mainstream games companies are now releasing their tools, engines and platforms on which to advertise and sell games, all this means that more and more independent developers are able to create and show their work. These developers don't have to adhere to any higher authority meaning they can create their own game, in their own time without worrying about whether or not it will turn a profit. When you couple those two facts together, you get the re-emergence of the old experimental phase in games development. In the last few years alone we've gotten titles such as Sleep is Death, World of Goo and Minecraft, all extremely different games to most of the titles you'll see in the mainstream. So do we leave it at that? The high production, multi-million dollar games will use the safe, tried and trusted methods we've all seen before, and the homemade low budget games will be there if anyone gets bored of shooting the same Vietnamese soldier over and over again. Or could these two opposite ends of the spectrum combine every once in a while to create something brilliant.
Since indie developers don't have the pressures of the high-budget guys why not let them test the water, with the growing exposure on low-budget games it's quite easy to see what people like and don't like. Then, when an indie dev has created something that has a large following, the big corporations can sweep in and hire these guys and give them access to all the resources at their disposal to create something bigger and better. I'm not for one minute suggesting that all indie games actually need a large brand name to come in and pick it up, many of the lower budget games are brilliant in their own right. But for every indie developer who just wants to create something small and unique, there should be another who wants to see their work taken into the big stage. Valve are great at this, back in 2005 they spotted Narbacular Drop, a game created by the students of DigiPen institute of technology. They spotted the potential this game had, so they hired the team and gave them all the resources in Valve and we now have Portal because of it. The same happened for Turtle Rock with Left 4 Dead and Icefrog with Defence of the Ancients 2.
It's pointless to criticise games like Call of Duty for sticking to what makes them money. Tell a developer at Treyarch that they didn't have the balls to make any significant changes and they'll just quote their sales figures back in your face. But Valve also have outstanding sales figures, and they could happily vomit out Half-Life sequels every year and be rich because of it. But they don't, the release date for the latest Half-Life sequel remains a mystery because it simply isn't ready yet. Instead, they're happy to experiment and try new things, giving indie developers a chance to make their work famous at the same time. I wonder if Activision will hold off on a Call of Duty sequel next year because it's not "ready".
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