How indie developer compete with the "Big Boys" out there?

I really like the concept behind innovatty's retweet group on twitter, whilst sure it won't mean we can compete with the big boys, I like the idea that it's all indies uniting and helping each other out.

 

It's great, its not a question of each indie just out for themselves, but using combined amounts of tweeting to reach thousands! You should join, great way to interact directly with people playing your games / apps too! What's your twitter username?

 

Shoot me the link and I'll do a tweet shout out

 

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Not sure how you expect to get a successful game without good graphics and sound on top of great gameplay. The best advice I can give you is stop thinking you're an "indie developer" and just be a "developer".

If you can't afford the graphics, try to team up with someone who'll split the back end income with you.

Sound is probably cheaper than you think and if you're serious about this then you can afford it. (Coupla hundred bucks should cover a shitload of decent sound effects and maybe a short music track)

Getting advertising and noticed generally is one thing, but if what they eventually see is sub par then you'll still get no sales. By far and away the best way to compete with the big boys is to have a great experience waiting.

 

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I'm looking for good ways to marketing FREE games. I'm on twitter, can you explain more about this and what each person has to do.

Cheers

 

that's the major problem when you decide to publish yourself the game.

If you don't have the right money, you're engage a war with little guns.
They are a lot of technic but thoses technics didn't always work.

I believe "indies" or "new developers" MUST join forces with Publisher, good Publisher. (our next polished game will be published)

and never trust PR agency for few hundred dollars

Even if your game is really good, if you're new and unprepared, you will lost lots of motivations to try to reach, websites, good people etc. and trust me, it's very not an easy task.

sometimes only few writers from famous website can give a chance to your game and can jump drastically your apps. I believe the story of "tiny wings" start like this.

 

I don't feel like it's that big a problem. If you take a look at what's on the frontpage of touchArcade, you find most of the heavy hitters are made by indie developer (including those successful ones that turn out to be "new big boys"). Despite of being indie, those successful games have extremely high quality and fun gameplay.

I think it has not much to do with how much money you can throw on polygons, skinning animations and markting campaign. Don't you find most of (if not all) so called big boys game are just some soulless duplication of titles on other platform? How do you get any fun out of those games? If you choose your game design carefully you can easily create games with much more fun and still keep the cost low. If you don't get noticed, in most of the case your game is not good enough. Just keep working on it and learn the lesson. You can also find enough information about how to market your game without big amount of money on the interweb. Crying about can't compete with big boys is just a lame excuse.

I'm half indie developer half employee in AAA game industry. Let me tell you something. The AAA game industry is suffering so badly. I can only see 20 studios worldwide have enough talented people (for both employees and directors) to make something real good. All other studios are doing bullshit, struggling to ship their title before deadline, wasting talents due to the poor management. And for all AAA game studio, getting money from publisher is way harder these days thanks to the worldwide economic crisis.

Trust me if you think indie developer's position is bad, "big boys" should suffer so much more because they have to pay high salary to their employees who don't necessarily want to make a great game, but more like they just want to feed their family; because they have to pay so much on the marketing campaign to help selling their soulless boring games.

Sorry for text walling... it almost feels like I'm so not happy about the industry... but I'm actually pretty happy with being at an indie developer's position. Just keep learning keep working keep being creative. The motivation of create something by yourself(or your small team) for yourself rules it all.

 

I think some of this is plenty achievable with an indie budget. While I admit 3D contracting and developers are expensive, musicians and pixels artists are very affordable, imo. Marketing is tough. But word of mouth and a good game can get you enough to recoup your budget if you keep your costs down.

I suppose it just matters what your metric for success is. As long as my little LLC is profitable as a whole and showing some signs of growth, I'm happy. But I admit, I'm not living off it -- yet!

 

Whats your twitter username? Basically you retweet other peoples tweets and in return when you make a tweet you want retweeted, other users retweet yours.

Some of these users have thousands of followers and you can reach loads of people

Im @attollos_devs if you want to be added to the group or ask @innovatty

 

My twitter name is @stacword.

I have a quick question. How do you know that someone is part of the group and needs a RT if people post at different times of the day?

 

You ahve to request a rt in a special format ive asked for you to be added to the group

 

Cool. So what happens now, do I get a confirmation that I've been added and instructions etc?

 

I think your listed?