Quote: "At first, you'll see that indie's will have to team up more often and organize."
Well if that's true, I guess you're safe then hehe
I don't think Activision Blizzard, or EA, or Ubi, or any of the other big studios could kill off indie developers, even if they wanted to. Every time they buy an indie studio, two more fill in the gap. As indie developers, we only have one real bottleneck... dev tools. Companies like TGC make fantastic development tools for us to work with, capable of creating intense gameplay experiences at a fraction of the cost and with a fraction of the manpower and resources that mainstream studios use to develop similar products. With FPSC X10, you can make a game of similar quality to that of almost any mainstream game around. So long as companies like TGC keep us well stocked with fully capable development tools, and so long as indie developers are willing to work their tails off to make games of their own, I think the indie world will be around for as long as the mainstream industry.
I really think indie developers SHOULD team up. We SHOULD be more organized. I apologize for my recent string of MISoft conversation, I know it must be really annoying and I'm trying to cut back before it gets on anyone's nerves, but last night I sent out our "State of the Studio Address" to our team members and people we consider close friends of the team. Shortly after sending it out, someone emailed me and asked this question. I'm directly quoting them here:
Quote: "Why are you guys so serious about this stuff? I mean you only sold what like five copies of EE and why do I need a NDA to know about new games?"
I think the answer is clear... if you go around treating yourself like a lowly bedroom coder, guess what you're always going to be? Yep, a lowly bedroom coder. We have every single member of our team sign an NDA, an art release contract, and a team membership contract. We have a "constitution," sort of a super-expansive business plan. We issue an ID code to everyone on the team for security reasons, keep extensive "employee" databases, and track every single penny of our finances, in and out, regardless of how many units we sell. If you're thinking all of that is unnecessary, guess what: you're dead wrong! If we didn't have all of those things, we'd fall apart like any number of other indie teams. Every time someone leaves our team (and that's a VERY rare occurence) we review the system and try to figure out what needs to be adjusted. If these documents are designed to benefit the employees/ team members equally as much as they're designed to benefit the company/ team, then every possible outcome of employing such documents will prove absolutely positive and useful. And it's organization like that that indie teams need to start utilizing
