You've probably never heard of Narbacular Drop, but you might have played it. The videogame was the earliest version of 2007's sleeper hit Portal, developed by undergrads at game-design school DigiPen Institute of Technology and turned into a phenomenon by Valve.
After a year defined as much by breakout hits like Portal as it was by blockbuster titles, 2008 is shaping up to be the year that indie games take off. The makers of the big three gaming platforms are eyeing inexpensive, downloadable games as the next big thing, with Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft all using this year's Game Developers Conference as a launch pad for indie titles they've snapped up.
"Customers have shown us that there's plenty of room for going out and buying $60 epics at retail, but there's also interest in downloading a $10 game. They're like hors d'oeuvres," says John Hight, director of product development at Sony.
Game Developers Conference, the world's largest event for game-industry professionals, is expected to draw more than 16,000 people to San Francisco's Moscone Center this week. It's an excellent place for publishers to spot new talent, mostly because of the Independent Games Festival that runs concurrently with GDC.
Titles that make a splash at the indie fest, like Narbacular Drop did when it won a student showcase award in 2006, stand a good chance of capturing major publishers' attention. (Read Wired.com's continuing coverage of GDC all this week on Game|Life.)
Keynoting GDC will be Microsoft Vice President John Schappert, who is expected to make big announcements about the future of the Xbox 360 business. It's more than likely he will discuss how Microsoft plans to court independent developers with the platform's Live Arcade downloadable games service.
Nintendo will use GDC to launch its WiiWare service, which will enable original downloadable games on Wii, according to the company.
The emphasis on simple, downloadable games makes indie developers' creations more desirable than ever.
"All three console manufacturers need content to help differentiate their consoles, and indie games can be an important part of that content," Michael Pachter, an analyst at Wedbush Morgan Securities, says in an e-mail interview.
Another attractive element: Hungry indie developers are also likely to cut exclusive deals that could translate into a hit that draws gamers to a particular platform.
"Most independent developers are grateful for an outlet for their creations ... and would sign an exclusive if asked," Pachter says. "I do think you'll see more exclusives with independent developers, as there are fewer and fewer of them every year."
Establishing relationships with indie developers can also pay off in the creativity department. Sony's Hight calls indie game creation "a great training ground for fresh new talent."
"New ideas tend to come from people who have some grasp of the whole picture: technology, design, art, sound," he says. Gamemakers working on massive games like God of War aren't able to get their fingers into every pie, says Hight, because on such huge projects, jobs become "very specialized."
Hight, who teaches a seminar on game production at the University of Southern California, introduced Sony to two students who had created a game called fl0w as their master's thesis.
Sony helped them port fl0w to the PlayStation 3, where the game sells for $10 as a download. It's "very profitable," Hight says -- the game's creators are already raking in royalties.
Not all games are as successful as fl0w. Hight says that most of the indie games produced by Sony's Santa Monica, California, studio are merely breaking even.
But for a company currently taking it on the chin as Xbox 360 and Wii outsell PlayStation 3, having cool indie games on its system gives Sony boutique street cred. While Microsoft's and Nintendo's services have been much more walled off to smaller developers, PS3 has become a hotbed of indie content.
For example, 2007 Independent Games Festival winner Everyday Shooter, a one-man project, was picked up by Sony for PlayStation 3. Its designer, 25-year-old prodigy Jonathan Mak, ported the PC game to PS3 himself, with support from Sony's engineers.
"We try to find people with great ideas and work closely with them," Hight says. "We have seasoned producers and engineers who will give feedback.
"They're the editors to these young authors," he says.
