5.13.24

 

How can thinking about the types of communities people are seeking help us fix the games industry?

And what does this have to do with this month’s theme of Creativity?

A decade ago, a very bright designer I know pointed out to me that the massive increase in the number of gamers around the world means that there is an appetite and an audience for almost any game you wanted to make. His point was that if it is exciting and interesting to your team, or to you as a creator, then that is probably a good indication that there are other people in the world who will be excited about it.

This reminds me of being a teenager and hiding my Dungeons & Dragons books and dice and fantasy novels (even my Commodore 64 computer) when my first high school girlfriend came around. This kind of nerd stuff was best hidden in the shadows in Austin at the time. I remember friends who would shamefully admit to collecting comic books around the same time. And, of course, Marvel and video gaming have been two of the pillars of the entertainment industry over the last decade. It turns out that our little niche subculture was far more widespread than we thought.

I think about the successful business that some creators have made out of building “work simulator” games. About a CEO I heard from a few days ago who is relentlessly focusing on RTS games and busy smirking at “execs” from big publishers who tried to tell him that there’s not a big enough market for these kinds of games.

The point here is that creating something for a small audience can be a viable business provided the team creating it can keep their budgets in check. And, as my trip down teenage memory lane reminds us, sometimes niche markets can explode and become incredibly popular. (For some reason I’m thinking of the rise of vampire fiction, Sookie Stackhouse and Twilight last decade.)

So one option for many of the creators who are worried about the huge costs and instability of gargantuan two hundred million dollar game projects and teams might be to focus instead on working with smaller teams to build smaller games.

This could yield a couple of benefits: First, there is little more joyful than a tight-knit group of collaborators who are obsessed with a shared vision for something they want to create. Small teams can be such fun, move so quickly, and create a sense of belonging, shared purpose, and esprit de corps that can be so very hard to establish or find on massive distributed AAA projects. Second, niche audiences for these kinds of games can end up being quirky, fun communities that are small enough for creators to interact with in a way that can be very hard (or unwise) to do on massive commercial projects.

There are disadvantages here; I’d be remiss not to mention. But since the goal of this post is to keep people creating, I’ll do no more than list them: Greater professional instability, fewer & worse benefits, complex market fit economics, losing the thrill of having huge audiences love your game.

One option I’d suggest to those creators who have lost the joy of working on big games with big teams for big corporations is to partner up with a smaller group focused on delighting a niche community.

I’m not sure that’s what I personally want. But it could be one solution to the angst some folks have expressed to me about their roles in the games biz.

Above all, I suppose I want to tell these folks not to lose hope. Keep making things. 

The things you create don’t have to target a massive audience to be fulfilling or financially rewarding.