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[moi]

I would like to see what would happen if we took 1-2 millions and give them to a prolific indie, someone who has a good record of releasing good games all by himself (someone like derek or cactus or whoever), and make sure that the money is used solely on game production assets (not cocaine or stuff).
The result would probably be awesome.

Hmmm. The only way for a one-person indie team to usefully spend that money would be to get more people involved, by hiring, subcontracting, or outsourcing extra work. At that point, the whole thing starts to look fairly indistinguishable from a team which is about a quarter of the size of Double Fine.

Or were you thinking of seeing how many one-man games you could get for $1m? Just pay for Derek or Cactus to live comfortably for the rest of their natural lives, and get 40 or so games of out Derek, or a couple of million from Cactus? That'd be pretty cool.

GTA IV was rumoured to cost $100 million. For that money, I reckon you could cobble together a rudimentary cloning facility for indie developers, and have them make more games than the whole of humanity could ever play.

You can hire people without putting them in a team, freelancers.

[dongle]

I would like to see what would happen if we took 1-2 millions and give them to a prolific indie, someone who has a good record of releasing good games all by himself (someone like derek or cactus or whoever), and make sure that the money is used solely on game production assets (not cocaine or stuff).
The result would probably be awesome.

Hmmm. The only way for a one-person indie team to usefully spend that money would be to get more people involved, by hiring, subcontracting, or outsourcing extra work. At that point, the whole thing starts to look fairly indistinguishable from a team which is about a quarter of the size of Double Fine.

Or were you thinking of seeing how many one-man games you could get for $1m? Just pay for Derek or Cactus to live comfortably for the rest of their natural lives, and get 40 or so games of out Derek, or a couple of million from Cactus? That'd be pretty cool.

GTA IV was rumoured to cost $100 million. For that money, I reckon you could cobble together a rudimentary cloning facility for indie developers, and have them make more games than the whole of humanity could ever play.

Because clearly Derek or Cactus et al are going to want to live 'comfortably' (which would take in excess of $3 mil, fyi) while generating several times that value for someone else :/

[LemonScented]

You can hire people without putting them in a team, freelancers.

Yes:

outsourcing

Because clearly Derek or Cactus et al are going to want to live 'comfortably' (which would take in excess of $3 mil, fyi) while generating several times that value for someone else :/

My bad, I suck at currency conversion.

[dsilvers]

I got to meet a bunch of the Double Fine guys at PAX East. Not only are they the nicest, coolest devs ever, but they're having so much fun with their new approach. Now, instead of releasing one game every five years, they can focus on making smaller projects to release one game every six months! Their new projects show a lot more focus in the design than their old stuff. As much as I loved Brutal Legend, I admit it tried to do too much. Compare that to their upcoming Trenched, which knows it's a turret defense game and gives you four kinds of turrets and puts you in a mech. It's simple and a lot of fun! I definitely think they're taking the right approach and it's helping them stay afloat.

[superflat]

$1 - $2 million is the square root of fuck all as modern non-indie game budgets go. A lot of AAA studios can burn through $1 million in a month, on staff wage bills alone.

I'm loving what Double Fine are doing. It seems like Schafer has always been about doing stuff with interesting and risky new IP, and I guess he's found that that's been less viable as budgets have risen. To solve the problem by reducing the budgets, whilst simultaneously mitigating risk by working on so many games simultaneously (i.e. "If Costume Quest doesn't go so well, it's okay because Stacking is just around the corner") is a smart thing that other studios should be looking to emulate. The AAA business model as it stands is unsustainable - if the PS4 or Xbox 4pi came out right now, the budgets required to make games for it would likely kill most of the major games studios. So, working out how to do more things, where each thing is cheaper, makes a lot more sense than trying to do one ever bigger, ever more expensive thing.

Quoted because this is exactly how I feel on the subject.

[InfiniteStateMachine]

I would like to see what would happen if we took 1-2 millions and give them to a prolific indie, someone who has a good record of releasing good games all by himself (someone like derek or cactus or whoever), and make sure that the money is used solely on game production assets (not cocaine or stuff).
The result would probably be awesome.

I think that if we let them spend the money on cocaine the result would be even more awesome.

+1