While looking up Infinity Ward as an example of a large studio to contrast with smaller independent studios I found an interview with Robert Bowling, Infinity Ward's community manager. He provides an interesting insight into how the studio behind the highest grossing game of all time developed Modern Warfare 2.
Back when developing Modern Warfare 2 Infinity Ward was a relatively small when say compared to DICE, the developer company behind Battlefield Bad Company who have approximately 300 employees.
Infinity Ward had a fairly limited time-frame to develop Modern Warfare 2, but apparently they used that to their advantage as a tool to drive their development. They also looked at the importance of all aspects of the development, spending a good portion of their budget on audio, hiring Hans Zimmer to provide the score.
Infinity Ward had the advantage of having such a big budget behind them. They could do something that no independent game could compete with. Despite the limited time-frame in which to work they managed to turn that into an asset as well.
I've mentioned before on my blog the differences between big budget titles and small studio developments.
I spoke about how with smaller studios there is less of an obligation to provide money to stockholders thus giving the independant game developer the chance to break genre boundries and be more experimental.
Looking at Mojang Specifications (the small developer of Minecraft) first. It began with just the head developer known as Notch (Markus Persson) creating a game in Java called Minecraft. During its alpha-stage it was available to download and play for a small fee. It became so popular that Notch was able to hire 5 additional coders and form his own Company (Mojang Specifications) to focus on the development of the game.
This is quite an unusual overall development strutcture or "pipeline". First off the game was the product of a single coder working alone. The alpha being released online available for download is a very unusual step, but it raised awareness for the game and gave the creator enough money to funnel back into the game to actually create a game studio around it.
Here is an example of Minecraft
In a similar vein there is an independant game courtesy of two brothers called Dwarf Fortress. This game was designed by Toady One (Tarn Adams) and his brother ThreeToe (Zach Adams). Toady One is the sole coder of the rogue-like Dwarf Fortress and similarly to Minecraft this game was released during its Alpha stage of development after 4 years. It is still being worked on today by Toady One alone. The game was released for free and people who download it only have to make a donation to the development if they feel like it. Like Minecraft, Dwarf Fortress is still having updates released for it periodically by Toady One available to all those who are playing it.
In Dwarf Fortress the simple ascii graphics hide a deviously deep gameplay experience
Both of these games have produced a significant income for both game designers. Largely due to the non-conventional means by way that the game is distributed.
One example of such is that one weekend the servers for Minecraft went down. This resulted in the game being available to download for free. Notch encouraged people to do this to try it out. The downloaded version of the game during this period suffered from a couple of bugs, namely sound issues. The number of downloads for the game jumped during the weekend when it was free. However this didn't mean that actual sales of the game when it cost money went down. After the free weekend Minecraft saw a boom in sales, namely from people who downloaded the game when it was free and were so impressed they bought the proper downloaded version when the servers came back up.
The fact that both of these games are located on the internet exclusively and are created by small teams also has an effect on the developer/consumer relationship. Both Notch and Toady One are easily contacted. Both have taken fan ideas and concepts into account when creating their games. This is a level of interaction that generally isnt seen with the bigger studios. Because of the smaller teams behind these games they have the time to check fan input and can change/add to their games accordingly. Although this is due in part to both of these games still being in beta-stage testing. Large companies also hold beta-tests but for the most part these are small affairs with randomly chosen participants. With Minecraft and Dwarf Fortress anyone who is playing them is a beta tester and such anyone's input is important.
With big studios consumer input is relegated to open beta tests, which aren't generally the norm. Instead big companies publish limited demos or hold massive marketing campaigns usually in relation with a website. These methods can work, but they are one-sided. There isn't a dialogue with the consumer, just a one-sided campaign to raise the consumers awareness about the product.
