Too Big to Fail (Gaming)

by slycrel , Wednesday, April 06, 2016, 12:47 (3160 days ago) @ Cody Miller

Sources, please.

History.

Portal, Rocket league, MineCraft, and Limbo are recent games that come to my mind that were very innovative and successful, and made by small teams with small budgets.

Of those, only Portal pushed gaming forward in a meaningful way. Limbo did not advance the puzzle platformer and was actually a regression for the genre. Rocket League is standard party game fare. Minecraft is bested by any 3D modeling / CAD app ever.

Portal was developed by Valve using the Source Engine, which they spent tens of millions of dollars creating. There's nothing small or cheap about the tech that went in to Portal.

From an indie game dev standpoint, you are irreversibly wrong here.

Minecraft was created by a game dev who loved writing video games. He quit his day job working in the game industry, to try and make his own game. It was 80% of a clone of a bunch of other indie games at the time. Right place, right time, and all that. Minecraft in particular is interesting because Notch handed development off in the middle and backed off -- because he wasn't done yet, the game was super crazy popular, and he didn't understand why. He was afraid he would ruin it. Had he not released it in a pay for the alpha/beta kind of way, minecraft as we know it likely would have never happened.

Portal was conceived and developed as a final project in a college by IIRC 4 people. Gabe newell interviewed them, had them show it off, and hired them all on the spot. Then they re-made it into what is now the first portal.

Both of these were essentially home-grown due to the love of games, by gamers. Not by big studios. Big studios did what they did best -- publish and finance at some point.

Dunno about rocket league or limbo, didn't play those.