With so much talk about the potential of an ‘Indiepocalypse’ – where the video game market reaches a saturation point of indie-developed games that it forces many studios to close – it has crossed our minds on how we would protect Monocool Interactive and our upcoming products, such as Castaways, and survive what may or may not be coming.
WHAT IS THE ‘INDIEPOCALYPSE’?
In short the Indiepocalypse is the extinction of games developed by indie studios, despite the fact that there are more indie games on the market and in development than ever before.
The projection from some industry analysts and insiders is that the indie developed games market will become too competitive because it is easier than ever to develop and publish games – thanks to Steam, Unity, Unreal, etc. There’s also more ways to play and access games in addition to the tradition of buying a disc in a box – whether it’s playing a mobile/tablet game, digitally downloading on Steam, PSN or Xbox Live, or even watching games through Let’s Plays on Twitch and YouTube. There are more games and more ways to get them, but still the same amount of hours in a day – meaning something’s got to give.
There are various opinions that independent game developers will be the victims in this situation, and you can read one detailed theory about that here: Steam Spy – What Is Really Killing Indie Games.
How does this relate to us? Well, without stating the obvious, we are an independent game studio undertaking the daunting task of developing our first game for release in what is a very competitive market. A survival game no less. Who’s idea was this again?
CASTAWAYS IN THE INDIEPOCALYPSE
When we first began working on Castaways, the survival genre was already in full swing. Many big survival games had already been released and even more were in development. It was already a somewhat risky move developing a game for a market that is highly competitive, but we feel Castaways brings something new to the genre and to gamers – plus, we really love a challenge.
The ‘threat’ of an ‘indiepolcalypse’ makes little difference to our plans – we believe in the game we are developing, and it’s up to us to create the best product we can.
For Castaways, we first have to concern ourselves with making sure our survival game survives the survival genre (yes, the irony is not lost on us).
Looking at Steam Greenlight today, there are countless clones of Survival Games that use similar settings to Castaways – you find yourself stuck on either an island or a huge landscape with nothing but a backpack with a days food and water and one objective: survive the onslaught of battle royale and the abuse of buggy AI.
Now we don’t deny that this is fun and all, but we believe Castaways can be bigger, better and more relevant than the survival games that are being released almost daily.
SURVIVING THE FLOODS
We already knew that we were going to be a little fish in a sea of sharks and the only way to survive this was to have new ideas in a game that no other survival game had done yet and to this day, are still not doing. Our class system, is completely original and has a variety of mechanics that can be taken to any genre, not survival specific. You can read in more detail about our Backstory Class system here, or watch the Pre-Alpha footage below and listen to Rhys talk about the game in full.
