A games business model for the rest of us?

Thanks for the Comment LoganCDN. I agree that this is something that has been working at some level since games began. I have a few friends that have made great money creating mods for AAA games as yet another business model. I find I have an affinity to those people like you, that decide to make content this way and have decided bigger isn't necessarily better. We also see this in film. A favorite example of mine is the Saw movie franchise. The first movie was made for about 1.2 million dollars total and made about 103 million. Hard to argue with a hundred fold return. I don't think you'll ever see that from a hundred million dollar movie. I certainly don't think the bigger budgets of the sequels made for better films. In the end being lean and mean usually means you can make a living off of a much more moderate success. It all just seems to go wrong when people decide that throwing more money and resources at something automatically makes it better.

This is very similar to what the 'indie' games market is doing now. Small teams (1 to 10 guys), a dream and limited resources, but they producing some very fun games making not just successful 'casual' game titles for online portals and the AppStore, but also awesome AAA like games that get rid of the fluff and clutter that perpetuates today's realm of sequel releases and just returns to what made a game fun to play. Much like your article says, its not hard to get a great Return on Investment going with even 1000 or 2000 sales producing enough to make the next title viable and in the process creating a fanbase and name for yourself.

As an example my team is completing an open-beta of a MechWarrior like game called Lore Aftermath (which is electronicly distributed and played through the browser on instantaction.com) , we are all huge fans of mech games and don't necessarily think that the genre deserves the cold-shoulder that the AAA market is giving it. There are plenty of other games on the site like this as well. Another great example is a company called Flashbang studios who produce about 5 or 6 great AAA type games a year for their site.

So there are lots of examples of this business model working and succeeding. Its successfully employed me for the past 7 years and I have no complaints about it (and of course we rely on Autodesk based software to do our work).

I saw you post this on your twitter and found it to be a very interesting article.