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 Independent Games Summit Microtalks lecture from this afternoon, entitled 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 in the list, 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:
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 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.