Innovation in Games: The Old Model

Gaming isn’t as innovative as it seems. People like to pay lip service to the idea of innovation rather than the reality. The reality is difficult to define, difficult to do, and often involves working counter to popular opinion. This article focuses on innovation in the past while another will address the future.

Why might independent developers say they are innovative when they are not? Innovation is not always rewarded. Innovations in gameplay can be copied and enrich someone other than the inventor. Cloning may be frowned upon, but opprobrium is not a sufficient deterrent. It is also unclear what kinds of imitation are acceptable. Vampire Survivors’ success spawned enough imitators to plunge the price of new entrants to zero seemingly overnight. Indie devs do not seem to be above replicating success if it seems profitable.

Mainstream opinion also reflects a half-hearted commitment to innovation. Developers can’t get enough ‘weird tricks’ to make their game a success, and the takes industry is only too happy to meet the demand. This is a vain hope that the old approach will work if only you get on TikTok. Another example is the persistence of the ‘harsh truths of game development’ genre of failed project postmortems where the authors decry success as effectively random because they did everything right.

Most readers of these posts would point to evidence that the authors did not, in fact, do everything right, but this critique is a variation of the same problem. If the steps to success are codified in such a way that a critic can point out where the formula was not applied correctly, then it does a lot to explain why games are struggling to distinguish themselves and how we’re not as innovative as we like to imagine. The authors are applying a two decade old model of game development, and the critics are applying the same model with the tweak that they hope the right influencer plays their game.

Developers seem to be living in the shadow of the flourishing of indie games in the mid 00s and the innovation that enabled that success appears to be largely misunderstood. Studying this past example with fresh eyes might give us a hint of where to look for tomorrow’s innovation.

Any single explanation for the indie boom of the mid 00s is unsatisfactory and reflects the ‘one weird trick’ preference. An example is digital distribution. Digital distribution was a contributor, but it also predated Steam without equivalent success. Steam took on indies relatively late, and when they did open up, people complained. Xbox Live Arcade and Flash portals are often ignored in these explanations too.

Game quality also isn’t an answer. The indie boom was not a unique period of product innovation except as a byproduct of something more fundamental which we will address shortly. This is not to diminish the games of this period, only point out that today’s problems are not a question of quality or uniqueness. Quite a few representative games from the boom can be considered games by people who enjoyed NES games and grew up to make their own take on them (Braid, Super Meat Boy, The Binding of Isaac). They are excellent games, but product innovation in gaming includes periods with games that defy categorization being released beside ones that are considered the foundation of their genre. Indie boom games were good, just not so good they silence all other explanations.

Another factor might be the decrease in the cost of development tools. X-COM: UFO Defense was made by a team comparable to an indie today, but it cost $370,000 (CDN) after adjusting for inflation. The same game would unquestionably cost less today. Programming has gotten easier and more productive and there are dedicated tools like Unity, Torque, and XNA (now FNA) to enable game development. Falling costs are sometimes pressed into service for the argument for digital distribution (Unity benefitting from the opening of the App Store for instance), but cost is not convincing on its own. Businesses are always looking to manage costs and the changes have been so gradual that we simply take them for granted.

The innovation of the mid 00s is best seen as a process innovation that combined all of these things. The innovation was a new way of making games. An intuition might go something like this: affordable tools mean a set of games that was previously unaffordable are now commercially viable. Digital distribution makes the potentially specialized audience for such a game more accessible. So far, so good, but so far this is all about costs (mail order indies presumably would have sought a specialized audience out if it was affordable to). The innovation comes in understanding that this kind of project also means all the ‘must haves’ of development may no longer apply. The innovation is that extra step that deletes all the old job titles and responsibilities and divides them unconventionally over a smaller group of people.

One happy side effect of this kind of innovation was that people were inspired to take on different kinds of projects (product innovation), but the indie boom of the mid 00s is still best thought of as the widespread adoption of a new process. This explanation is preferable to a more conventional account because it fits the past while also accounting for today’s problems.

This model has had two decades of application to have all the inefficiencies competed away. It is now the status quo that benefits incumbents and experienced developers more than the upstarts we associate with indies.

Tomorrow’s upstarts need a new model. The insight we should draw from the indie boom is that it took updates that might have simply augmented the old model and instead built a new system around them. The search for such a system today is the subject of the next article.