On the surface of the ocean you can see large companies releasing AAA projects every year. Hundreds of millions of dollars are allocated for them, and millions of players around the world are waiting for them. But what is hiding down there – at the bottom, relatively speaking, of course. And there is a springboard consisting of hundreds of thousands of small developers and small indie studios, which allow those guys on the surface to remain powerful and lean.
You can always give up indie. There are many people in the world who play exclusively major releases, whose advertising budgets sometimes exceed the costs of the development itself. But at the same time, we should not forget one simple truth – the gaming industry can really die if, at one point, let’s say, all the indie studios suddenly disappear, leaving us alone with toothy monsters – Take-Two, Ubisoft, Electronic Arts, etc.
Competition
You can remember a lot of examples when small studios or a single developer “outplayed” large companies with their releases. From the latest: Lethal Company and Palworld. The latest project completely broke all conceivable and inconceivable records. In fact, the same Baldur’s Gate 3 or HellBlade can also be classified as indie, but more expensive and brilliant, but this does not change the essence.
One way or another, large companies pay attention to such successes and strive to repeat them, surpass them, or use interesting mechanics that appeared in these projects. And the competition here is, rather, not financial, but professional, which is also not bad. Although this aspect must be attributed to developers, and not corporate bosses.
New mechanics
Major releases rarely take risks. It’s not often that you see something original and unique in an expensive project. As a rule, AAA games come out already polished and understandable; you won’t be able to find something new and interesting there. There are also plenty of examples: from Ubisoft games to Sony exclusives.
Small studios are constantly taking risks. If you are not ready to offer something completely new, if you are not ready to present to the world an updated concept of old ideas, then you are unlikely to be able to swim to the surface of Steam.
Nobody does this
If we now remove all these small studios from the gaming industry, would the world see projects like Sea of Stars, Disco Elysium, Pizza Tower, Limbo, Cocoon? Of course not. Now the same type of releases from large companies are diluted either by medium-sized companies, or by enthusiasts with relatively small budgets, or by those same indie developers.
Influx of new blood
Big football would die if there were no poor little teams or lower leagues. A huge part of the current top football players started playing in the Brazilian, Argentine, Czech, Hungarian, and Japanese leagues. So, they paved their way to the top. In short, the influx of new blood is an extremely important aspect.
Also in the gaming industry. Many developers who create some kind of explosive project may later be promoted to work on a large and expensive release. Thus, blood constantly circulates through the veins of the industry, which has a positive effect on the emergence of new ideas.
Of course, there is also the opposite story, when developers from large companies go to small ones or create their own indie studios, but that’s a completely different story.
