IndustryGamers - Informing the Games Industry

GDC 10: Ron Carmel of 2D Boy Talks Indie Funding

Posted March 9, 2010 by David Radd

[IndustryGamers would like to thank EA Sports for sponsoring our trip to GDC this year]

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2DBoy's Ron Carmel today spoke at GDC about indie game funding and why it is "a system that never worked.” He noted that software was first approached from a heavy-handed design perspective, like other engineeering fields. It was found that more agile methods that are iterative are a much better approach than upfront design.

“I think we're facing the same kind of situation in the game industry today in comparing retail games to digitally-distributed games," said Carmel [thanks Gamasutra].

The problem, as Carmel sees it, is that publishers actually give too much money. These smaller games are less efficient to be built on large budgets and ultimately the publishers take too large a cut of the sales. Carmel said this arises from the traditional retail publishing deals, where they commit to fund and develop a game, along with marketing and distribution for it.

"All of this means it's a huge up-front risk," says Carmel. "[So] it makes sense that the publishers keep all the profits."

For 2DBoy's World of Goo (which took $120,000 to make), Carmel noted that the game had a contract that a lawyer had to review and an executive approve before making a change. A producer supervised the whole development and a QA occurred between legal and technical at the game's launch. "That's a really big piece of machinery for one small developer to deal with," said Carmel.

Carmel said that Steam was "far more efficient" to work with than Games for Windows – Live. Working out the contract and integrating the various achievement and high score features took four days over Steam, compared to four months with Games for Windows – Live. While Microsoft's download service isn't as well established as Valve's, he says that going digital is a far better option for indies.

"How do we do for funding what Valve did for digital distribution?” asked Carmel. “The answer, we hope, is Indie Fund.”

This recently announced model, funded by 2DBoy and other prominent indie developers, is designed to be more transparent than traditional models. "With the process that we're planning, it's going to be a lot shorter than the regular approval cycle for publishers," said Carmel.

He said that the deal terms will be publicly-available, so that better negotiating can occur. They'll offer a single point of contact to avoid conflict of interest and they'll also grant flexible development. "Anybody who's been in the game industry for more than a year or two realizes that when you start working on a game, you don't necessarily know how it's going to end up being.”

The developer will submit builds to the fund in addition to a change list, allowing them to judge how the game has evolved "not on where we think it should be," says Carmel. "[This approach] respects the game design process as it should happen.”

One of the largest changes compared to most traditional publishers is that the Indie Fund will not seek to own or control the IP. "We want for the developer to own the IP and for the developer to be master of their own destiny," said Carmel. "We don't want to tell you how to make your game. If we provide funding for a game, then that's a vote of confidence in the team that they have a vision and that they can execute it. If I do know better than you what's right for your game, then we probably shouldn't be funding your game."

When Carmel was asked what size the funding pool is, he responded that it "doesn't matter."  He concluded, "The bottleneck is how many games can we find that we think can make good use of the investment. If we can find 20 games a year that can make money, then we can raise money for 20 games a year."

David Radd has worked as a gaming journalist since 2004 at sites such as GamerFeed, Gigex and GameDaily Biz.