Indie Video Game Development Work

This chapter discusses the shift in economic policy from traditional industrial production to what has been referred to as innovation-led growth, that is, the active support of knowledge-intensive professional corporations that develop and produce highly complex products and services, in many cases demanding transdisciplinary and boundaryless collaborations. Examples of innovation-led industries are life science ventures, high-tech companies, science-based companies, computer science-based businesses, and digital media industries. As many of these companies are relatively young, they need to raise funds, but as the outcomes from business activities are oftentimes uncertain, the state may serve as the provider of sources of funding, including, for example, R&D grants and various subsidies and tax exemptions. Critics argue that the state acting as a financier of private business entails political difficulties, fails to generate net economic welfare, and tends to crowd out private money. Nevertheless, in many cases, there are few alternatives as current risk management models demand the capacity to determine various risks in nominal and commensurable terms. Policies supportive of innovation-led growth are therefore associated with debates.

This chapter examines the social and behavioural conditions that entice industry participants to pursue careers in thinly capitalized and innovation-oriented industries. Drawing on the literature on meaningful work and theories of motivation, indie developers and other “high-commitment workers” share an intellectual and emotional commitment to their day-to-day work. In many cases, developers reveal a lifelong commitment to gaming and a fascination for digital media and computers and/or games and storytelling as in the case of visual media such as movies. This commitment to both the end-product and the community-based activities that precede the launch of the game and that is part of the “community management” work is the primary motivator for most developers. The chapter reviews relevant literature and points at some of the difficulties involved when running commercial businesses on the basis of passionate commitment, including the risk of burn-out, disappointment in the event of unsatisficing outcomes, and other unanticipated conditions.

This chapter examines how an innovation-led industry such as video game development, which markets itself as community and norm-based industry wherein the gaming experience and the video game as a digital artefact are located at the centre of activities, related to more conventional business practices. For instance, the indie scene includes a number of stories about solitary game developers who have “made it big time” on the basis of inventive and entertaining video game concepts and design (the multimillion dollar business derived from Marcus “Notch” Person’s game Minecraft being perhaps the most well-cited case), but at the same time, the community is largely not business-minded inasmuch as developers enter the industry with the intention to make money. The chapter thus examines the tensions associated with money-making on the basis of a social theory of money that stipulates different classes of monies. More specifically, developers discriminate between making money as an ex ante ambition (which is frowned upon and sanctioned by social norms as it would compromise the video game as a freestanding manifestation of developers’ skills and aesthetic preferences) and money-making as an ex post outcome (which is tolerated, even encouraged, as that builds the funds that enable further development work, attracts new entrants, and creates a “positive buzz” in the industry). In the end, when all is said and done, the indie community maintains a diverse view of monetary compensation, which preserves professional ideologies, yet recognizes the business opportunities provided by their collective expertise.

This chapter of the volume examines how developers finance the video game development work. All entrepreneurial business are by definition (in the Schumpeterian view) indebted, but the finance capital market for video game developers is thin, that is, there are few qualified professional investors with the sufficient degree of expertise needed to make qualified investments. In lieu of a professional investment market, developers use a variety of options including self-financing (at times on the basis of student loans, not exactly consistent with the legislator’s intentions), outsourcing work, research grants from the state or regional or local governments, or smaller investments made by other game developers or publishers with a positive cash flow. The video game industry is on aggregate level running at a profit, and the industry has been commercially oriented from the outset, that is, it has not been subject to subsidies or other policy-related support. Developers largely take pride in being “in the money” from the outset, and tend to describe, for example, the Swedish film industry as an unfortunate case of statefunded media production that undermines the integrity and creative freedom of participants as film production includes a considerable degree of red tape. Nevertheless, developers are concerned about the lack of a more qualified understanding of the video game industry and its significance for the economy in policy-making quarters. They would have appreciated at least less complex rules regarding, for example, international recruitment as the industry currently suffers from a shortage of qualified developers, that is, programmers.

The chapter examines how indie developers elaborate and experiment with the video game concept, how they seek to establish new ways for thinking about video games, and how to use game technology. The epistemological, perceptual, and aesthetic bases of the digital objects are thus central to how the video game is enacted and how video games can model and reconstruct meaningful human experiences. The chapter includes a review of the scholarly literature on the social and cultural significance of play and games, and how various games can serve a variety of purposes in human lives, including the introduction of an element of chance in an otherwise predictable life, create novel experiences, develop new individual skills, reduce the tedium of everyday life, and so on. Video game developers were in many cases fascinated by games from an early age and are grateful for what the video games have contributed within their lives, and they are now committed to the idea that more people and new groups will be involved in gaming. Consequently, there are new genres and aesthetic expressions being developed in the industry, not the least in the indie developer community, being a laboratory for new video game concepts.

The final chapter of the volume summarizes the empirical findings and re-connects them to the overarching question of how innovation-led growth can be accomplished on the basis of venture capital investment in small start-ups and studios that have the incentives and the competence to develop, for example, new digital objects. Whereas traditional manufacturing industry was oligopolistic and based on economies of scale, which resulted in relatively large production units and corporations, the innovation-led economy is primarily relying on smaller scale units wherein the flow of expert know-how and information is short and closely knitted. For policy makers, this means that there are not only a handful of corporations with whom economic policy can be negotiated, but the novel situation demands a different approach, and economic incentives and motivational factors are oftentimes separated. Indie video game development constitutes a smaller sub-set of the video game development industry, but the activities involved in developing games on the basis of smaller means include a variety of conditions that are representative of the innovation-led growth regime. The supply of finance capital and a passionate commitment to video games are two relatively separated conditions that policy makers need to attend to, and yet they are both part of the capacity of an economy to generate new products, goods, and services.