Get to know in detail about the Pros and Cons of Indie Game Development.
One of the most hyped out areas of Game Development, the Indie Game Development Industry is a huge community of finest game developers with immense talent and dedication. As the name suggests, the word “Indie” is regarded as the game made by an individual or a small team especially without any support from the publisher. This means Indie Game Developers make their way without any support from big-titles. The experience is seamlessly productive and independent of any time limit. However, it starts to get harder when we go deep into the Game Development Industry.
Here in this article, you will get to know all the Pros and Cons of Being an Indie Game Developer!
Advantages
Freedom of Work
One of the major advantages for which developers choose to go indie is not to bind themselves with the time limit and not to work on someone else idea. Developers choose to stay out of this and focus on working on their idea instead, by taking sufficient time to finish it. This helps them to freely accomplish the work and the ability to improve decision making. It provides enough time to the developer for experimenting with various ideas which can turn their fate.
Improving your Skills
Indie Game Developers tend to polish themselves as they go on developing. However, they get a great chance of improving their skill-set as they fly on. Having sufficient time for development without any restrictions allow them to experiment with various ideas and help them to learn new skills. As you go deeper into the development process, you will start to explore different areas of Game Development which includes, game art, sound design, and lot more while advancing you towards a new level.
Credits
Who doesn’t want to get his name pitched out when all the hard work pays off? When you are an Indie game developer, you can proudly say that “I made it”. This is, however, considered as a good reason when developers choose to go Indie for developing the entire game from scratch with their idea.
Ability to Set New Industry Trend
There is always a huge possibility of getting an innovative idea which has never been seen before, and this is why Indie Game Development is a huge industry today. With thousands of developers entering into the Industry with their unique ideas make this whole community grow and excel with innovation. The reason you have enough time gives you the ability to explore deep into the Game Development and come up with something that may set a trend in the Industry.
Disadvantages
Limitation or No Funds
One of the major failures of any sector is funding. The monetary system is, however, always important to get anything done. Funding is always a great hurdle in the Game Development Industry and it is also considered as the prime reason for which developers quit the Game Development. Being an Indie Game Developer, it always becomes difficult to cope with the expenses of the assets that we use during the Game Development and later the basic things we need to survive our livelihood. As no one is paying for the development, a developer might lose motivation to move on and later ends on quitting. It gets even worse when it comes to marketing the product, and as we all know marketing without an adequate budget is very tough.
Lack of Experience
A lot of Indie Game Developer lacks the experience of Industry workaround and rather stay in their zone. This restricts them to gain several important skills they could have learned while working with major titles in the industry. However, it takes huge time for an Indie Game Developer to acquire the skill-set and earn experience in each particular field of game development.
Lack of Management and Poor Marketing
It is quite obvious from the facts we have discussed above that an Indie Game Developer has a high chance of facing Poor Management and Marketing. As they are limited with the funds and lack of experience, they turn out to do poor marketing at first. However, this is somehow not the case forever for a developer to face, as he starts to learn from the mistakes he made and further, improves it to give it a shot. But it gets worse when your team has no clue what they are doing. Lack of proper management will eventually kill the productiveness and demotivate.
Time and Expectations
So far we have seen that Time is a great factor for an Indie Game developer and acts as a positive agent, but alternatively, it ruins the situation when we expect to complete the project with the given deadline. It becomes demotivating when nothing goes according to the plan and we miss out dates more frequently. This is quite common, as small teams or solo developers fail to achieve the deadline as the tasks on their shoulders rise.
Indie Game Development is quite fun and limitless with innovations. There might be several hurdles you face while development but it’s very essential the way you dodge them and get your goals. Don’t forget the reason you have started! With a good plan and flexibility of learning new things will lead you to success. Until now, we have seen the Advantages and Disadvantages of Being an Indie Game Developer and it is completely a matter of choice to choose what to go for. Working with a Game Studio will no doubt improve your skills and make you learn new things, but it will surely take away the freedom you have with your ideas. It has its Pros and Cons for which it becomes essential for a developer to choose at the start before proceeding into the Game Development.
With Love From VOiD1 Gaming
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