More Barnson, 'Cause We Love Reading

That's right, we love it. We love games, we love reading, and we love Jay Barnson. So here's part two (and end) of the giant Jay Barnson interview.

Anyway, some isolated comments about the whole thing.

As you can probably tell, one of the areas I really wanted to know about were marketing and fan communication in the indie world. By the pure virtue of 'being indie', indie developers often have a sort of aura about them: we immediately assume that they will be a lot more responsive, that our feedback will have a lot more impact, and that their target audience will nearly always be you (because, well, there isn't much else). With some, like Age of Decadence, that is the case; with others... well, it's a lot harder to know. I actually suspect that some indie devs have less of a grip on what their potential buyers want than 'big suity corporations', simply because they're trying to code and make the damn game on their own while juggling a day job, and they don't have the time to scour the web so comprehensively.

Barnson himself is more positive about the issue. He points out that the key thing about indie games (indie anything, I guess) is that it's not institutionalised into formulaic codes of action. You don't have the archetypical PR-man who's never played a game in his life breathing down your neck telling you to go another centimetre on that chainmail bikini cleavage. (Instead, they'll go on the forums, talk to people who are talking about chainmail bikini cleavage, and go add another centimetre.) I don't know. The general rule is that the more direct your lines of communication the better; but the better an indie dev gets at this communication, and the more savvy they get at marketing and PR (which Jay says they need to do), wouldn't they become more institutionalised as well?

The recent ad campaign for Penny Arcade's RPG was pretty 'mainstream'... in terms of style, method and scale. Not that that's bad.

The biggest issue for indie games, I think, remains that of reaching your potential audience. Unless you're pretty into the field and actively looking, it's still difficult to come across indie games in general - and even more difficult to come across indie games that you like enough to shell out the standard $20US for. When I asked Jay why there weren't any major indie game 'hubs' that let you find indie games easily, he said:

Well, at one point, we looked like we were getting one. Or three. Then they jacked up their royalties to the point where they are taking the lion's share of the profits, limited their games genres to just a few that brought in the most concentrated income, and left the developers with the fuzzy end of the lollipop. Not that I blame them - business is business after all.

But that's the problem with centralization. That's the opposite of "indie," really. When you've got some kind of centralization, it means you are surrendering power and control to those guys. And they can't possibly be all things to all people. For an indie, the whole point is to do your own thing. If it makes sense to work with these guys, great. If not - screw it, you can do your own thing!

Well, that's a good point Jay - although I was meaning more of pure network hubs (rather than, say, something like Steam). Probably should have worded it better. I suppose it's an eternal dilemma; the very thing that makes indies great makes them a minority. (Lacan/Zizek anyone?) It's a real pity; I do wish I had found games like Democracy 2 earlier (and that I had a credit card to buy indie games with).

Democracy 2. Yes, I know you can't read that.

There's a lot more packed into the interview, but those bits stood out most for me, I think. It also complements our previous interview with an indie developer, Age of Decadence's Vince D. Weller. Many thanks to Jay for answering my questions - all the while quitting a job, starting another one, and playing a crapload of Wizardy 8.

Update: Jay Barnson has made a sort of response-post in his own blog. Got to agree with him, really.