Red White and Blue

The producer, Bob Portal, of the American indie film Red White and Blue made an interesting point in regards to genre. The film itself isn't easily genre definable. It straddles the lines between horror, thriller and drama. Bob Portal made it clear that in terms of genre, big budget films are by rule of thumb only agreed upon on the strength of how close they are to genre conventions. He said that a non-genre specific film like Red White and Blue could never be made with a big budget because big studios like to stick with formulas they know work.

This has got me thinking about the role of genre in game. It is well known that the most commercially viable genre is the First Person Shooter, with Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 being the largest selling form of media in history. The games market is flooded with shooting games, mostly because the large studios know they will sell well. It seems that the larger studios are now focusing on emulating Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 to the point that many people have pointed out, a lot of the FPS's coming out are becoming more and more homogenized.

Courtesy of Cracked.com

Meanwhile two of the most original games out on the PC right now are very non-genre specific and infact aren't backed by large developers at all. One is Minecraft a game in its alpha-stage right now. Originally coded by one man, known as "Notch", he has gained enough money to hire more coders to help him out. Infact this independant game has earnt "Notch" in excess of $3,500,000. The game itself is best described as a Sandbox/adventure/survival/mining simulator/block building game.

Minecraft

The second game is a completely independantly coded one. It is Dwarf Fortress. Coded by "Toady One" alone. It has made over $30,000 a year from donations alone as the game is free. This game is also genre straddling going from adventure/simulation/strategy.

Dwarf Fortress

It is interesting to see these small independant coders/developers making such large amounts of independant games that you would never see from EA or Activision Blizzard. It certainly makes looking at the developer and to an extent publisher of a game to see what there is to be expected. Whether a more "by-the-numbers" approach by the bigger corporations. Or an entirely new/unique experience from a single bedroom coder.