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[Chandos]

Hi everyone,

I'm doing a little research on the business side of indie game development. My focus is examining business models that are good at balancing risk management and design ingenuity, as well as marketing. Some of the examples I have are Mount&Blade and Minecraft (both alpha releases with significant input from gamers to shape the final product and reduce the risk of consumer rejection). Can you think of any other examples?

Can you also think of indie games and their developers who have used innovative/alternative/successful methods for funding, development and sales?

I'm planning to share the findings of my research freely with the indie community. Thanks in advance!

[Biag]

Check out Wolfire Software- they've been chugging along with nothing but preorders for their current game for probably three years now. Weekly alpha builds for preorderers, with constant update videos and blog posts. Also they came up with the Humble Indie Bundle.

There're also Terraria and Lords of Uberdark, who were linked by Notch and subsequently became much more successful than anticipated. Getting noticed by the big names is some of the most effective advertising there is.

[Enzo]

I think this is a really interesting subject, so kudos for doing this. Obviously, you'll want to look into digital distribution services (Steam, and maybe those other ones that no one cares about), it had a big impact on the practicality of distributing small-budget games. Dredmor comes to mind as a recent game that did extremely well and topped the steam sales for a few days, despite being a very small-scale title. I think the Xbox Live indie games are a pretty big deal too, but I don't own a 360 so I don't really know. There's also the donation model, I'm pretty sure I could think of a game that does reasonably well using that.

[Rooster]

Terraria x2 again
They did a very interesting thing, mainly, they have given alpha versions for free to people that would do a let's play on youtube