View source for 5 Minutes Worth of Observations about AAA Indie Games

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One great thing about doing a 4 minute and 44 second talk is that it takes very little time to sync to audio and upload!

This is my 2011 Independent Games Summit Rapid Fire Indies lecture from this afternoon, titled ''5 Minutes Worth of Observations about AAA Indie Games''.  I talk about some observations I have about what I call '''AAA Indie Games''', which I define as indie games that have three important characteristics:

* '''Polished to Perfection'''
* '''Clearly Contains Lots of Love'''
* '''Highly Anticipated Before Launch'''

I list some examples, like ''Braid'', ''Castle Crashers'', ''World of Goo'', ''Limbo'', and ''Flower'', among others.

I focus the talk on the last characteristic, '''Highly Anticipated Before Launch''', because I think it's often thought of as external to making the game, and is not well understood.

I studied these games, and came away with one common denominator.  Every AAA Indie Game has:

<center>'''A Long-term Slow-burn Grass-roots Awareness-building Campaign'''</center>

I say that building awareness takes a lot of time, and so you have to talk about your game '''early''' and '''often'''.  Furthermore, when doing this, you have to play to your strengths.  I go into how three of these games did this.

Then I give an example from [http://spyparty.com '''SpyParty'''] of how hard it is to build awareness, and how long it takes.  This is what scares me so much about the iPhone as a game platform for indies, because the development cycles are shorter than the awareness cycles.

Finally, I talk a bit about the press, and make two observations:

* They are very indie friendly.
* They want interesting stories.

Here is the synced audio and slideshow.  This is from a rehearsal right before the session; I didn't tape the session since it was on somebody else's laptop.

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I gave a sequel to this talk in 2013, called [[No One Knows About Your Game]].

Here are the [[Media:gdc11-Awareness.ppt|ppt]] and [[Media:gdc11-Awareness.mp3|mp3]].

[[Category:Lectures]]
[[Category:Opinions]]