[promo title=”Are Indie games the new battleground for consoles?”]Rob Clarke from Curve Studios speaks to Alex Lemcovich about Microsoft’s parity clause and good business practice, and describes how the lines are gradually being drawn between the console giants in the indie sector.[/promo]
It’s hard to imagine how indie games will define this new generation of consoles. Microsoft’s and Sony’s respective approaches to the indie sector are disparate, to say the least, with Sony opening the gates to numerous PC ports and completely new projects, while Microsoft stands next to a velvet rope and scrutinises a VIP guest list before letting anyone in.
At EGX Rezzed, Birmingham, the results of these two approaches are clear to see. Rob Clarke, PR Manager at Curve Studios – a company that publishes and develops indie games across all platforms – sums things up:
“We’re here at Rezzed and about twenty percent of the show floor is being taken up by Sony – and about ninety percent of that is indie games. And I think a lot of people say, ‘Oh, yeah, we’re going to support indies, we’re going to do this…’, like Nintendo and Microsoft. Everyone will say ‘we want to do it’ and I think the only people that I’ve personally seen backing that up with action is Sony.”
Microsoft’s Xbox One is notable at EGX Rezzed this year for its absence. There’s a Titanfall section, where a tournament is being held, and it’s also possible to play the Alien: Isolation demo with the Xbox One, but that’s just about all the contact the viewing public can have with the console. Sony, meanwhile, have over twenty titles available to play on the floor – including some recent high-powered PC hits like Shadow Warrior and The Swapper.
At the heart of this matter is indie studios’ willingness to deal with Microsoft’s self-publishing programme, which involves a parity clause that basically means any indie game release on Xbox One must not come after a PlayStation 4 release of the same game.
“To us, being able to play on any system that you choose to own – whether it’s an Xbox or PlayStation – is the most important thing: choice.” says Clarke. “We want our games to be on [Xbox One]. And, in a way, so do Microsoft – but they’re not making it easy for any sort of indie developer to get onto the platform.”
In spite of this, Clarke is emphatic that he doesn’t believe Microsoft is making a bad business decision by having independent studios adhere to its parity clause.
“From a perspective of business, I think that’s quite fair. They just want to make sure that if they’re taking the time to choose indie developers, that they’re not getting a game that’s been on PlayStation for six months. With the PC side it’s different, because it’s a different audience, but with the console side it’s not so different and they want to make sure they’re not being seen as trailing behind Sony.”
This all ties into the difficulty of releasing games on multiple platforms, which is a very long process of quality control and, more often than not, downscaling. While some indie developers might be able to handle a full-on multi-platform release schedule, it’s highly unlikely that a team consisting of a couple of fulltime developers could manage.
“We worked with Mike Bithell on Thomas Was Alone and Ed Key on Proteus,” Clarke explains, “because those guys don’t want to do all the boring production and [quality assurance]. And we have our own in-house QA guys just to manage the console launches and this is on games that have already been released and patched many times on PC. We still need an in-house QA team just to get through submission and that’s a part of working with any console.
“But if you have all that and you’ve got a release on Vita and PlayStation, and then you’ve got to do it again on Xbox, it’s very difficult for a one- or two-man studio to justify the amount of work that is. I mean, we struggle with three full-time experienced producers just to do all that, so expecting them to manage that launch is crazy.”
This all lends considerable weight to the idea that some indie studios will simply choose to offer exclusivity in an effort to avoid development complications. Born Ready Games are going to release their PC port of Strike Suit Zero on the Xbox One, while Mojang have already secured Minecraft‘s future on the platform with an exclusivity deal. In terms of post-release support this strategy makes a lot of sense for developers looking to be on the Xbox service, given the current difficulty in patching games.
It’s easy to forget that Microsoft have opened the gates for indie developers before with Xbox Live Indie Games. A section of the Xbox Live Marketplace that has since become a dumping ground for Minecraft clones, mediocre zombie shooters and half-baked ideas. There are good indie titles there, too, but they are far outweighed by the dross.
“I think that scared Microsoft a little bit.” says Clarke, who believes there is also an element of financial management at play here: “If you look at the sales figures alone, they’re selling millions of copies of Titanfall and that’s one little account manager you’re talking to. And maybe you’re selling tens of thousands of copies of indie games, but you’ve got to talk to fifty or sixty developers to get all that managed. It’s a lot of work for them.”
The parity policy appears to be Microsoft’s line in the sand; a statement encouraging exclusivity rather than flat-out demanding it, and it’s hardly a surprise that independent studios would like to see it disappear altogether. Still, the reality of good business sense versus the impracticality of most teams trying to handle timed multiplatform releases feels like an ongoing fight between a mountain and gravity. If a winner is going to emerge it will take a very long time to see who triumphs.
“I think what we’re going to see is that indies become a new battleground for exclusivity,” Clarke states, “There’s less and less triple-A games that are exclusive and for good reason: they cost a lot of money to make and saying you’re not going to support half the audience is getting crazier and crazier.
“With indies, they’re cheaper. Exclusivity is definitely a thing that we can embrace, especially if there’s funding and help to get onto the systems. So ‘new’ exclusivity is based on who’s got The Swapper, who’s got Minecraft and all that sort of stuff. It becomes much more important for every platform holder, so hopefully Microsoft will very soon start moving the cogs. They’re a big company; they’ve got a lot of staff, corporate lawyers and things they’ve got to get through before this can happen. But I think it will.”