Independent developers will soon be able to rival publishers

Apr 22, 2014 08:41 GMT  ·  By

Oddworld creator Lorne Lanning believes that video game developers should try to become independent entities and escape the grasp of large publishers like Electronic Arts, for example, in order to make sure that they have more freedom in concern to their projects.

Lorne Lanning has been heading Oddworld Inhabitants for quite some time, and the studio almost went bankrupt after the not so successful release of Oddworld: Stranger's Wrath or Munch's Oddysee.

However, in recent years, things have turned around as the studio, together with fellow independent developers like Just Add Water, remastered those classic experiences in high definition and generated quite a bit of profit.

Lanning has now attributed this turnaround to the fact that the teams didn't try to work with a big publisher, like Electronic Arts, which initially helped release Stranger's Wrath.

"I don't want to be a slave to the big ships, and that's what was happening with AAA, with publishing and with game devs," he told GamesIndustry. "Every game dev that I know that's still doing AAA retail products is trying to figure out a way to get out of it."

"Those deals are just getting worse and worse, even though your expectation of the money is getting higher and higher. Labor's getting more expensive and the rewards are getting smaller. So that's why we decided to stop playing for a while until we could start getting our games up digitally, see if we could build our own business. It's working, it's funding new content."

Lanning exemplified his train of thought with Battlefield 4, the new first-person shooter from prestigious studio DICE. While the team had been known for releasing great, high-quality titles, Battlefield 4 was plagued by all sorts of problems and continues to surprise owners with many glitches and issues.

"Why did a title that was so incredible ship prematurely?" Lanning asked. "Now I know, without talking to anyone, if you look at the quality of that title, and if you know how games are built, you know how much hard work went into that, you know how much love and pain and sleepless nights the developers put into it. And you know they were devastated when someone made the decision to release that project before it was ready. Because they're smart enough not to do that."

Even with such decisions, Lanning believes that large publishers aren't going away, but he hopes that independent developers, thanks to digital distribution and various other services, will be able to compete with them in the next few years.