Indie games (Independent video games) are on the rise. This rise seems to coincide with the growth from digital downloads. Because this increasing medium more self-sufficient makers of content can find a market without the overhead of having to create physical copies of a game. This in turn leads to innovation since these new creators can act within their own creative styles without the influence of a large company that just wants the game to appeal to the largest demographic possible.
One such vehicle that these games have found is Steam. This client can be easily downloaded to either Mac or PC and offers a large quantity of titles both indie and mainstream. Another way indie games have succeeded is over services like Xbox Live. Here games like Bastion thrive. In its first two weeks after being released on Xbox Live it was downloaded over 93,000 times. And at about $15 a pop that comes out to be almost $1.4 million. However when put up against the more major titles these figures seem pretty insignificant. Games such as Skyrim can come up with numbers double that in the first weekend alone. For Skyrim the exact numbers shows it selling 3.4 Million copies making an estimated $450 million. It would seem that in this scenario goliath is the clear victor especially since it has the edge of both being sold in major retail stores but also over services like Steam. An article published in 2006 by Make It Big in Games mentions that these smaller games companies will make 30% of the money earned off their game. The same article does explains that this is usually only top selling games so in the example of Bastion this can be a way to make a living for Supergiant. But this only happens after you found success in the market which is usually build failed game after failed game. An article by Opposable Thumbs references Sequence as such failed game. The game only sold around 2,000 copies becoming a huge flop. Luckily the creators did manage to recoup the cost of development, but that was due to Kickstarter; a campaign that raised $2,600 on an original goal of just $600. But this failure doesn’t stop current new developers from going into business.
In 2010 Supergiant games revealed their first game Bastion and PAX Prime. This small company describe themselves as, “We’re supergiant in name only. We’re seven people whose headquarters is the living room of a house in sleepy San Jose. But we make for a superstar team. We walked away from our jobs building major franchises for huge publishers to make original downloadable titles for people who love games and their loved ones.” This description of the small company shows that what they lack in size a company can make up in appearance. Here we can see a reemergence of the “mom & pop” type of business that Americans in the fifties were so fond of; a company that cares about games themselves and not the money of a major developer.
That same feeling can be found outside the digital market with smaller retail stores with less overhead than major chains. When comparing stores like CD Game Exchange and a larger chain like Best Buy the customer will have a very different experience shopping. When walking into a CD Game Exchange you’ll notice a far more casual atmosphere. The customer usually must depend on their own knowledge of the store in order to find the product they’re looking for, and if a customer can’t find something they’ll notice that rather than typing the product title into a computer and automatically having the answer the employee will actually have to walk around the store with the customer as they also try to find it. With CD Game Exchange the customer will also be able to witness the effects of supply and demand much more directly. If the store has an overabundance of a single title each copy will be individually priced lower and lower. In Best Buy it doesn’t matter how many copies of a title they have each will be priced the same. This can create a connection with the costumer because of the more varying stock of products. A costumer will have to visit the store repeatedly to see what’s currently in stock. 