Depending on where you’re standing, the video game industry is in a state of caterpillar-like transformation into something new or a full-on crisis. Funding is scarce. Companies are rife with mismanagement. If a big game flops, execs often ensure that it takes entire studios with it. But perhaps, some observers have suggested, this is merely a course correction. Last year was a goldmine of breakout indie hits like Balatro, Manor Lords, Palworld, Animal Well, and 1000xResist; maybe it’s time for the meek to inherit the industry. Problem is, indies need money, too – a lot more than you might think. On the latest episode of You Are Error, we discuss that not-so-little stumbling block and how one of gaming’s foundational myths, the solo indie dev, helped get us here.
We’ve arrived at a point in time when, more so than ever, “indie” means a lot of different things to different people. As it turns out, many games players refer to as “indie” now cost hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars to make. And as big companies struggle to find funding, it’s not like small developers are suddenly flush with cash. Where does this disconnect come from? Why do so many fans – knowledgeable and engaged ones, no less – still view indies as solo operations running on passion, a pocketful of pennies, and a dream? And did independent game development ever truly work that way? Or were we all swindled by the glitz and glamor of Indie Game: The Movie back in 2012?
My guest today is Mike Bithell, head of Bithell Games, the studio that brought us early indie hits like Thomas Was Alone, as well as recent, more mainstream fare like John Wick Hex and Tron: Identity. In many senses, he’s one of the original “solo” indie devs, even as he now runs a whole studio and tries to educate people on the time, resources, and manpower it takes to make smaller commercial games these days. In selecting Mike as the focal point of this episode, I was hoping he’d be down to take a look in the mirror and grapple with potentially pernicious elements of his legacy. And he was!
You can hear us talk about all that and more on Spotify, Apple, or wherever else you prefer to listen to podcasts. If you enjoy the show, please consider leaving a review so that Aftermath can amass the necessary resources to sustain itself – which is still a fraction of what you’d need to fund many modern indie games.
Here are a couple excerpts from our conversation (edited for length and clarity):
Mike: I think there is still a perception that indie games are independently funded, and I think that’s a reasonable expectation given where indie comes from and the word “indie” itself. But if you look at most of the indie games the average player has heard of, they’re perhaps not completely independently funded by the development team that’s making them, and I think that’s probably the root of it: We’re more dependent on the industry at large than the average player probably realizes.
Nathan: Let’s dig into that. I saw some conversation online where people were discussing the amount that it costs to make an indie game these days, which I think if you’re pulling your perception of how indie games are made from an earlier time, that [cost] might have changed. I saw Cara Ellison, who does writing for video games, say that these days it can be $500,000-$1 million. When you hear the word “indie,” you probably don’t think $1 million. But does that seem accurate to you based on your own experiences or observations?
Mike: I agree with Cara on a lot of things, but I would say it’s broader potentially than even she’s laying out there. Obviously there’s indie games that cost nothing except the time of the person who’s making them; that still exists. But then on the upper end of things, I would say it can go into the multiple millions. We’ve certainly worked on games that are multiple millions of dollars just in development costs. If you’ve got a group of people coming together for a game, and it’s a sizable team, then that’s gonna cost [a lot].
I think that’s another aspect of this that people maybe don’t fully understand: The most expensive thing in games, rightly so, is people. It’s the salaries of the people who gather to make the game. So if you just do some math yourself: If there’s 10, 15, 20 people on that kind of money for X number of years, those numbers suddenly come to bear. A million dollars is a lot of money on an individual level, but in sustaining the salaries of a group of people, it’s actually not a lot of money over those timelines and at that sort of scale.
I think indie – and this is definitely true of conversations I’ve seen around filmmaking as well – because indie is so intrinsically linked to this idea of the hobbyist, or the person working on their own, the solo developer, it can create this sense that you fund it in the same way as you’d fund a hobby. If you want to make games as a hobby, you’d have to buy an OK computer, basically. Or you’ve already got one. And then you just invest your time in it. There’s a big jump from there to a professionalized kind of development process.
We kind of blur that, and I think arguably, indies, we’ve done well from intentionally blurring that a little. There’s that kind of plucky underdog story. I remember when my first game started, lots of thinkpieces were like “Sell your narrative. Sell the story of you. Sell that heroic underdog story – the little dev that could.” We all kind of framed ourselves in that way because that’s what the audience wanted from a satisfying story point of view. It would be hypocritical to be offended that they then come to the assumption that that was a completely honest depiction of how games are made.
***
Nathan: It strikes me that this notion of the solo indie dev as kind of a formative myth for the video game industry – sort of the default of how a lot of people perceive indies – [gained traction with Indie Game: The Movie]. It focused on these individuals as a way of at the time humanizing developers, which I think was useful because there wasn’t as much of that back then. But it also created this archetype. That movie didn’t come out of thin air, though. It’s not like somebody creates a documentary and thinks “OK, I’m gonna craft this entire narrative from nothing.” Where did the seeds of it come from? What did [the documentarians] see that made them think “This is the story we’ve got to tell?”
Mike: To an extent, it was true. I’m a big believer that no work can exist because of one person. Even if you’re on your own, you still have teachers, you still have peers, you still have a community. But back then, a lot of those games were made if not by solo devs, then maybe one person who was focused and fixated on it and satellite people who would help out. Thomas Was Alone was me in terms of the core of it, and then I had Dave [Housden], the composer, and Danny [Wallace], who voiced the narrator in it, and that was it.
On a basic level, I think it’s true. It was also good marketing. From a storytelling point of view, we got to do Rocky, basically. We got to sell ourselves as these individuals fighting the system, and we were encouraged to do that by the games journalism of the time as well. They were good stories, for sure, and fair enough.
I think what I’ve certainly tried to do– despite having a company called Bithell Games, which I’m very aware of; at the time, it was just me and my mate Daz [Watford] in the company, and we were talking about names for the company, and he was like “I would like to coast on your name if I could.” He was like “You’re the one they’ve heard of. Can we just call it after you?” I wish I hadn’t listened to him, because once you’re 20 people, it’s so embarrassing to introduce yourself as “Mike Bithell, the owner of Bithell Games.” It’s awful.
But yeah, I think what I try and do is always emphasize the group. Whenever I do interviews or I’m talking like this, I will always mention the team as much as I can. But people like simple stories, and there is always gonna be a chunk of the audience who plays our games that think of them as the sole expression of me. I even started, 15 years ago now, putting opening title sequences on our games primarily so I could just have the names of people working on the game come up before you even start – and even that didn’t really push through too much.
So we do what we can. I think it’s true, though, of most things – definitely of music. Movies, we think of in terms of [for example] Spielberg. We don’t think about the enormous number of people [who contributed]. And often it’s a good shorthand, because a director, say, may work with the same editor, the same this, the same that every film, so it becomes a shorthand. Literally it happened to me with a friend the other day. We were talking about Tron: Catalyst; we’d released some screenshots, and they were saying “It looks like a real Mike Bithell game.” And it’s like, it looks like a Daz Watford game. He’s been doing my art for a decade now. That’s the distinction. That’s the kind of stuff you try to correct for.
But ultimately, I think it’s a good shorthand for marketing. It’s a good shorthand to protect the team. If one of our games is badly received, I want to be the lightning rod for that. I don’t want the team to be getting angry messages. It’s always a balancing act. It’s incredibly embarrassing to be perceived as egotistical, so I’m terrified by that at all times.
But yeah, I think you’re absolutely right: This does play into the conversation. People don’t think about the team with any game, and most devs nowadays – definitely my generation of indie devs – are making games at this kind of scale. Five, ten, fifteen, twenty [people]. There are new generations coming up that are doing the solo dev thing, often successfully. But what’s interesting there and what I’m finding interesting in the discussion surrounding that generation is, that generation’s using a lot more things like asset packs and resources that have been built by other people and sold to them – and they should take advantage of anything that’s available to them. So technically they’re not solo. They’re using assets made by other people, and there’s all of those hands that have touched that game.
It’s a weird one. Unless you’re making a game about rectangles, you’re probably not a solo dev. There’s probably someone else who’s had an impact. There are exceptions to that rule, but it’s much rarer than the average person believes it to be.
