ExtraCredits3-Innovation

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仅作为个人兴趣和练习听写使用。

Is innovation dead in American game industry?

No.. Because they actually have two industries at odds with each other, neither of them is fully equipped to bring innovation to the masses.

Growing indie community bewails its unrecognized genius and shout “Sell Out!” whenever someone in the community actually manages to make a hit.

Mainstream AAA industry, often claims it can’t afford the risk that innovation requires. 3A games are expensive, it better to pay it safe. And yet, the manage to make multi-million dollar flops all the time anyway.

The indie scene doesn’t have a great track record when it comes to sales. When something does sell, a segment of community tends to go into clone override. It’s often driven to innovate by its lack of resource as much as by any particular urges towards innovation. Indie developers work within much greater constraints, requiring ingenuity.

The publishers and 3A studios are often more concerned with guaranteeing a good game rather than aiming to make a great game. This means a responsible AAA studio will try to mitigate risk (one way to do this is to emulate things that are popular).

Many members of the indie industry are genuinely interested in moving the medium forward and the constraint they work under can help to generate some brilliant ideas. They are more rugged.

AAA studios only need a big budget and are masters of polish. They take diamonds in the rough and reveal their true potential.

All the major publishers have established indie branches. However it’s rare in the game industry. Bringing these two sides of industry together would solve multiple problems:

One of the biggest drawbacks to the indie development: lack of support. They usual have great ideas but lack ability to polish it or get it to a great audience. Having the distribution channel, marketing, funding, and quality control groups of a major publisher on their side will be a huge help.

Innovation is a big risk for AAA studios, not for indies. Having an indie publishing arm would allow AAA developers to safely test the waters at low cost and only commit large investments towards the innovations that prove themselves worthwhile.

What’s better for the consumer is, in the end, better for the industry.

Beside the red a publisher would get for putting out all these innovative games, an indie publisher arm would provide some titles to fill those post-holiday doldrums. A publisher could easily play up its success, while letting the failures vanish into obscurity.

The most important part of making this a viable business model is making sure the publisher gets total ownership of everything the indie branch publishes, allowing them to hand the successful ideas to their main AAA team so they can run with it.

The indie branch must have room to breathe and create.

The industry tradition of only hiring experienced people isn’t going to cut it here.

Keep these indie project budgets aggressive and tight.