4 ms·

Whenever I hear one of these articles about idea exchange and location's impact on innovation, I always wonder if indie game development is a notable exception.

Whenever I hear one of these articles about idea exchange and location's impact on innovation, I always wonder if indie game development is a notable exception. Indie success stories frequently suggest one lone developer (like Stardew Valley's Eric Barone) or an extremely intimate team (like Celeste's Matt Thorson). It seems like breakout hits happen in completely random cities/locations and no one area is the definitive "epicenter of game design". I highly doubt game design is some notable outlier - it's simply a union of software development and creative industries. I think the only reasonable explanations is that the vibrant community and exchange of ideas happens through the internet. If so, I think there are lessons for other entrepreneurs/industries to follow so they can be less geographically bound.

patagurbon 7y ago
Game companies often seem (to my eyes) to cluster around major CS universities, and incidentally many of these universities have vibrant arts/creative communities (especially the juggernauts like UC schools, Toronto, Vancouver, MIT, etc etc). I think if you scraped even the top 500-1000 indie games you’d see some pretty serious clustering. But there are, of course, also very large communities for gaming online, from development to consumption. Most (if not effectively all) "core-CS" innovation takes place at university research groups, corps, and conferences, a much higher barrier to entry than itch.io for instance. CS innovation really requires a large amount of experience in a very limited subfield to make progress. Game design is just less esoteric than the frontiers of CS imo.
- Retric 7y ago
  I suspect when adjusting for the respective population you get a reverse effect as people graduating from top CS programs tend to have significant debt reducing their willingness to take risks. On top of that they have high opportunity costs. In areas like AI that’s countered by the benefits of an elite education. But, game designers need to be generalists which is harder for schools to teach over short time frames. PS: That’s not to say CS graduates from top schools are under represented, just that they had a gap and likely left the area.
Spooky23 7y ago
It's about where the money comes from. It's easier and cheaper to bootstrap or get money for a project with a deliverable and end-date than the funding required for other types of companies.
mntmoss 7y ago
Game development eras and their style have a substantial correlation to locations and the teams assembled in them, but as you allude to, increasingly the demographics don't seem to matter as much as the culture, because the capital requirements have dropped so much. A surprising amount of stuff, for example, came out of Chicago between the 80's and 90's. Why? Because amusement manufacturing was located there, so there was a direct crossover from solid state pinball to video games. Williams, Gottlieb and the rest all operated in the area. For similar reasons the bulk of Japan's game output in the 80's came from its three largest cities. As the industry became more software-driven, it got easier to spread out, and with the merger mania of the 90's pooling up capital, you got the existence of studios with multiple offices in different cities. But you still needed some infrastructure and financing to run a studio, and so most large game studios are in "hip metros" even today. But when you get down to the realm of current indie games doing digital distribution and Twitch streaming, your physical bottleneck is approximately the same as a writer: fast internet and basic city services. But writers benefit from having a creative circle, salon or similar gathering, and that creates an effect in indie games which I will forever remember from a TIGSource forum thread as the "globetrotting international hipster clique": creators who live very far apart and only see each other at big conferences. Often this ends in people from the same city learning of each other's existence by flying to a different city where a conference is. After you hit a critical mass of people aware of each other in a city, it's just a matter of running a regular local event. And what I've noticed personally in some 9 years of attending or helping host those events is that while the games scene in a city will derive most of its people from other industries(e.g. in SF you get a lot of tech workers with a hobby project) the way in which it's shaped depends on the type of regular events held and their focus. Some events are focused on business or technical lectures; others are co-working of some form; still others are public-facing showcases. Each of those has their purpose and you do need a sufficiently large city to experience all categories, since without a balance you end up with an average game output that has too little creativity, is poorly shaped as a product, lacks in technical ability, etc. There is a lot of wasted time in indie games that results from someone, somewhere retreating into the work without other eyes on it.
- adventured 7y ago
  > A surprising amount of stuff, for example, came out of Chicago between the 80's and 90's. The Dallas / Ft Worth area has a similar cluster story around early 3D gaming, thanks heavily to 3D Realms and then id Software. Companies like Ritual, Hipnotic, GOD Games, ION Storm, Gearbox. Then you also had Ensemble Studios, Terminal Reality and others in the area. DWANGO down in Houston was heavily built on what id Software did. Dozens of small indie companies spawned in the DFW area thanks to the foundation put down by some of those companies. "Commercial real estate firm JLL found gaming companies are on the rise in North Texas. According to JLL, nine colleges offer gaming degree programs that help build a labor pool in North Texas. The firm counts 87 gaming companies in North Texas. That’s nearly a third of all gaming companies in Texas, which only trails California in the number of design and development studios." "It used to be that Austin was the de facto answer for game development in Texas. But actually, Dallas has a rich history of game development companies going back to id Software," explained Bettner. "That spawned a bunch of studios in the area." https://www.nbcdfw.com/news/tech/Gaming-Gaining-Ground-in-North-Texas-494553621.html https://www.nbcdfw.com/news/tech/Gaming-Gaining-Ground-in-No...

patagurbon 7y ago

Game companies often seem (to my eyes) to cluster around major CS universities, and incidentally many of these universities have vibrant arts/creative communities (especially the juggernauts like UC schools, Toronto, Vancouver, MIT, etc etc). I think if you scraped even the top 500-1000 indie games you’d see some pretty serious clustering. But there are, of course, also very large communities for gaming online, from development to consumption. Most (if not effectively all) "core-CS" innovation takes place at university research groups, corps, and conferences, a much higher barrier to entry than itch.io for instance. CS innovation really requires a large amount of experience in a very limited subfield to make progress. Game design is just less esoteric than the frontiers of CS imo.

Retric 7y ago
I suspect when adjusting for the respective population you get a reverse effect as people graduating from top CS programs tend to have significant debt reducing their willingness to take risks. On top of that they have high opportunity costs. In areas like AI that’s countered by the benefits of an elite education. But, game designers need to be generalists which is harder for schools to teach over short time frames. PS: That’s not to say CS graduates from top schools are under represented, just that they had a gap and likely left the area.

Spooky23 7y ago

It's about where the money comes from. It's easier and cheaper to bootstrap or get money for a project with a deliverable and end-date than the funding required for other types of companies.

mntmoss 7y ago

Game development eras and their style have a substantial correlation to locations and the teams assembled in them, but as you allude to, increasingly the demographics don't seem to matter as much as the culture, because the capital requirements have dropped so much. A surprising amount of stuff, for example, came out of Chicago between the 80's and 90's. Why? Because amusement manufacturing was located there, so there was a direct crossover from solid state pinball to video games. Williams, Gottlieb and the rest all operated in the area. For similar reasons the bulk of Japan's game output in the 80's came from its three largest cities. As the industry became more software-driven, it got easier to spread out, and with the merger mania of the 90's pooling up capital, you got the existence of studios with multiple offices in different cities. But you still needed some infrastructure and financing to run a studio, and so most large game studios are in "hip metros" even today. But when you get down to the realm of current indie games doing digital distribution and Twitch streaming, your physical bottleneck is approximately the same as a writer: fast internet and basic city services. But writers benefit from having a creative circle, salon or similar gathering, and that creates an effect in indie games which I will forever remember from a TIGSource forum thread as the "globetrotting international hipster clique": creators who live very far apart and only see each other at big conferences. Often this ends in people from the same city learning of each other's existence by flying to a different city where a conference is. After you hit a critical mass of people aware of each other in a city, it's just a matter of running a regular local event. And what I've noticed personally in some 9 years of attending or helping host those events is that while the games scene in a city will derive most of its people from other industries(e.g. in SF you get a lot of tech workers with a hobby project) the way in which it's shaped depends on the type of regular events held and their focus. Some events are focused on business or technical lectures; others are co-working of some form; still others are public-facing showcases. Each of those has their purpose and you do need a sufficiently large city to experience all categories, since without a balance you end up with an average game output that has too little creativity, is poorly shaped as a product, lacks in technical ability, etc. There is a lot of wasted time in indie games that results from someone, somewhere retreating into the work without other eyes on it.

adventured 7y ago
> A surprising amount of stuff, for example, came out of Chicago between the 80's and 90's. The Dallas / Ft Worth area has a similar cluster story around early 3D gaming, thanks heavily to 3D Realms and then id Software. Companies like Ritual, Hipnotic, GOD Games, ION Storm, Gearbox. Then you also had Ensemble Studios, Terminal Reality and others in the area. DWANGO down in Houston was heavily built on what id Software did. Dozens of small indie companies spawned in the DFW area thanks to the foundation put down by some of those companies. "Commercial real estate firm JLL found gaming companies are on the rise in North Texas. According to JLL, nine colleges offer gaming degree programs that help build a labor pool in North Texas. The firm counts 87 gaming companies in North Texas. That’s nearly a third of all gaming companies in Texas, which only trails California in the number of design and development studios." "It used to be that Austin was the de facto answer for game development in Texas. But actually, Dallas has a rich history of game development companies going back to id Software," explained Bettner. "That spawned a bunch of studios in the area." https://www.nbcdfw.com/news/tech/Gaming-Gaining-Ground-in-North-Texas-494553621.html https://www.nbcdfw.com/news/tech/Gaming-Gaining-Ground-in-No...