Indie Designing Paths to Success
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8. Use alternate sources of funding
Once you significantly reduce the amount of resources you need to develop a game, the number of opportunities to find different methods of funding rise exponentially.
Mount & Blade is a medieval combat simulator/manager/role playing game. Developed by another husband and wife team from Turkey, the game has developed an incredibly enthusiastic community following. The game is in a constant state of development, and while there is always a free demo -- players can purchase the full game for a rising cost as the game develops more features. The earliest of adopters might have gotten the game for as low as $6 where as the price of the most recent release is $22.
Once you have purchased a license to the game you always have access to the latest version. Amazingly, these developers have replaced the role traditionally filled by game publishers with the gamers themselves. As of this writing, it has even supported them enough to grow their team to six full time developers along with a number of contractors. It would be hard to imagine this method of operation being very viable if the developers were not limiting the amount resources needed to support development.
Unknown Worlds Entertainment, an independent company made up of two full time developers and a collection of others spread around the world are working on sequel to their Sci-Fi Shooter/RTS hybrid Natural Selection. In order to offset some of their development costs, the team created a casual Sudoku game in 10 months (though they started selling a beta after 5).
Charlie Cleveland, Game Director of Unknown Worlds, in a presentation at the 2007 GDC, admitted that creating the game took more time away from their core development than planned, but found bootstrapping through a casual game much more attractive than pitching their main game to investors, writing business plans, or trying to convince others to give them the resources.
