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[Rudolf Kremers]

With all the controversy regarding their presence at the IGF they did themselves no favour whatsoever by putting up a giant mega bucks 6 foot monitor which obviously no other exhibitors could afford. And then not even manning the booth...

Just really cackhanded and offputting in my opinion.

[Alex May]

Yes, I agree with that. It felt like a slight that they weren't around, and the huge TV felt really obnoxious. I hope you read this, Dylan. I might email Dylan about that actually.

edit: the pj site message service only supports a very short email length, so I can't say what I want to say. Anyone have an email address for Dylan?

[Bennett]

Maybe the best thing is for there to be 'junior' and 'senior' competitions. I agree with the PixelJunk guys that they are basically just successful indies. And this was always going to be a problem once IGF started to meet its goals - promoting indie developers so that they could gain financial success without being owned by a publisher.

So maybe there should be a league for dudes who have a successful game under their belt, and a league for success virgins. That would solve the whole problem.

You wouldn't need there to be hard rules about who counts as 'successful' and who doesn't. Just make it so that the senior league has a $2000 entry fee, and put the entry fees toward a bigger grand prize.

[Alex May]

Maybe the best thing is for there to be 'junior' and 'senior' competitions. I agree with the PixelJunk guys that they are basically just successful indies. So maybe there should be a league for dudes who have a successful game under their belt, and a league for success virgins. That would solve the whole problem.

How do you define success though? Also, say I work in the industry and have shipped several "triple-A" titles, like the Valve guy who worked on Brainpipe. Would that stop me entering the junior competition? I just think it's getting into a very controversial area, like defining "what is indie" that causes so many arguments here. People should use their discretion; clearly Dylan et al have slipped up by entering and made life difficult for themselves by alienating much of the rest of the community. They entered perfectly legitimately, let's not forget that.

Personally I think he is right and people should try to be as inclusive as possible, and I am trying my best to be on everyone's side, but one should also play fair and rocking a 6-foot TV and not attending the kiosk is pretty ugly IMO.

[Bennett]

How do you define success though?

You can't. That's why you do what I suggested, and put a fee for entering the senior league. If $2000 is nothing to your company, you shouldn't be competing in the junior league.

This also covers people who don't have a successful game, but who have a family fortune of billions of dollars. I think we would all be annoyed if Bill Gates' kids turned up and entered IGF to win the grand prize of $30,000.

[Eclipse]

World of Goo made a shit-tonne of money, but those guys are still indie. This isn't the answer.

yes but they did it on their own, not being published exclusively by Sony. Also they didn't joined IGF after releasing the game.

What pixeljunk did is:

- they started to make games for sony
- they took their latest game, already published and well funded, and joined IGF to have a bit more exposure for a low price

For me the word "independent" means that you've not only artistical control over your game, but that your game IS NOT exclusively published by a multinational company, even more if it's a giant like sony.

[Alex May]

World of Goo made a shit-tonne of money, but those guys are still indie. This isn't the answer.

yes but they did it on their own, not being published exclusively by Sony. Also they didn't joined IGF after releasing the game.

What pixeljunk did is:

- they started to make games for sony
- they took their latest game, already published and well funded, and joined IGF to have a bit more exposure for a low price

For me the word "independent" means that you've not only artistical control over your game, but that your game IS NOT exclusively published by a multinational company, even more if it's a giant like sony.

Check your facts: They had full artistic control. They're self-published on PSN. They don't make their games for Sony.

[Eclipse]

i was not talking about artistic control, it looks that they have an exclusive publishing deal with sony to me anyway.
You can even say "hey so even nicalis isn't really indie because cave story and night game are going to be exclusively published by nintendo" and yes, for me it's just like that. The therm indie is so wide that there's an huge limbo beetween indie or not, they're just not as indie as i intend, someone even call valve software an indie developer because they do everything on their own, this is only my 2 cents opinion about them

[Ivan]

Damn, I also thought this was a new pixeljunk game.

I'm sorely disappointed.

[Lynx]

Maybe the best thing is for there to be 'junior' and 'senior' competitions. I agree with the PixelJunk guys that they are basically just successful indies. So maybe there should be a league for dudes who have a successful game under their belt, and a league for success virgins. That would solve the whole problem.

How do you define success though? Also, say I work in the industry and have shipped several "triple-A" titles, like the Valve guy who worked on Brainpipe. ...

I think the idea is that people would feel encouraged to enter the highest bracket they could reasonably compete in, because otherwise other people would look down on them for grossly outweighing their competition.

[Alex May]

OK, and then you also say people can only enter one competition and not both, and then someone with the means to enter the 2k competition enters the indie one anyway. What now?

[Peevish]

Then, theoretically, they stand to win a smaller prize and probably less media attention. That's their prerogative, I suppose.

But, by that logic, I'd fear that the Senior competition would pull a lot of attention away from the Junior. Hard to tell while this is still just an idea.

[Lynx]

A wise man once said, you can't fix a social problem with technical means.

[Bennett]

A wise man once said, you can't fix a social problem with technical means.

He can't really have been that wise. We fixed the social problem where people have competing financial interests by developing a system of laws. They frequently fix a social problems where line chefs don't like taking orders from lowly waitresses by having a rotating order rack. If you have a social problem where everyone wants to have male children so that they can tend their farms, you can fix this by providing cheap farming machinery. And so on.

[Matthew]

To be clear (because there are some muddy facts in here)--all PixelJunk games are self-funded, not just Eden.

I don't feel like beating a dead horse, so I'll only make a few points.  Eden was certainly created by a larger, more experienced company.  But the game itself, and the team that made it, are both quite manageable in scope (it's not hard to see how a simpler version could even be a Flash game).  It's not like Eden was so technically miraculous that it was only possible through a personal relationship with Sony's engineers.  There is nothing in Eden that you couldn't create.  The concept, idea, and execution are what make it so tight; not the resources.  I'd be surprised if it were past the halfway mark on invested man-hours in this year's lineup.

And there were larger teams in the IGF.  There were many (winning!) single-man teams, too!  There were teams with more money, and teams with less money.  The 22 finalists were a very diverse bunch, and we should all celebrate that diversity instead of point to the teams least like ourselves and demand they declare themselves non-indie.  Eden-like games/teams/companies are a rare sight; it's not like they dominate the IGF landscape.

[Alec]

Adding more regulations to the IGF entry process would probably not improve it, in fact it'd be more likely to ruin something about it. (the freedom for example)

[Zaphos]

Matthew ... from this thread, the thing that annoyed people was not the technical distinctions of project scope, but rather that Q-Games didn't seem to need the money or exposure, or at least didn't stand to gain from it in the way the other teams did.  Because they already easily get press and distribution without winning any awards.  It feels like they're taking something that could change someone else's life, when the most they could get out of it is something nice to put up in the office.  That feels like a pretty negative thing to do, and what you're saying doesn't really address that feeling at all.

Their behavior re the show floor reinforces this sentiment that the opportunity they won was something they apparently saw as a waste of time.



One answer that *could* address this complaint is that the IGF is simply not intended to be a 'need based' award, and it does not matter how the award will benefit people.  And I think that's the right approach as far as the formal rules of the competition.

But the value has been so great for the teams that really did need the IGF to get off the ground ... that I think social pressure will continue to push people to treat it as if it were need based.

[Eclipse]

and I totally agree with Zaphos 

[Alex May]

https://twitter.com/dylancuthbert/statuses/1425025404

[Bennett]

found out who ranted about PixelJunk at IGF - Phil Fish - you're an arsehole, we're all in the same boat, you had a mic and you did that!?

Well, it's not really true to say that they're in the same boat as Polytron or anyone else for that matter, but I tend to agree that we don't gain much by tearing them down except a reputation for jealousy and petty rivalries.