Indie Video Game Development Work: Innovation in the Creative Economy

252 Pages·2020·2.185 MB·English

by  Alexander Styhre

Alexander Styhre
Indie Video Game
Development Work
Innovation in the
Creative Economy
Indie Video Game Development Work
“With his characteristically open-minded approach, drawing on perspectives from
economic policy through anthropology all the way to the space where the green
ants dream, Styhre is in search of the elusive and ephemeral indie video game
industry. Such an approach proves to be indispensable in order to do justice to a
world where the passionate love of video games and the social norms of the indie
scene on the one hand are paired with industrial logics, financial forces, and calcu-
lative, commercial action, on the other.”
—Thomas Lennerfors, Professor in Industrial Engineering
and Management, Uppsala University
Alexander Styhre
Indie Video Game
Development Work
Innovation in the Creative Economy
Alexander Styhre
Gothenburg, Sweden
ISBN 978-3-030-45544-6 ISBN 978-3-030-45545-3 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45545-3
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P
reface
“The problem with fiction, it has to be plausible. That’s not true with
non-fiction,” Tom Wolfe, American novelist and one of the pioneers of the
New Journalism school, once remarked. This is an inspirational dictum for
social science scholars inasmuch as we should not shy away from what
appears to be implausible or even absurd. I believe that theoretical frame-
works need to be “plausible” in the sense of being understandable and
appear to be reasonable, but, when it comes to empirics, some results are
“too good to be true” inasmuch as empirical conditions may vastly exceed
what even the most imaginative mind would have been able to anticipate.
Think, for instance, of the various evidence of opportunistic behaviour
when it comes to executive decision making during the first decade of the
new millennium, including the fabled Enron bankruptcy in 2001 and the
AIG rescue activities in 2008–2009, offering inroads to a world wherein,
for example, economic compensation in the form of bonuses is not so
much a matter of performance as it is an entitlement, an attitude that rep-
resents a return to medieval or pre-modern aristocratic norms regarding
God-given authority and privileges justified thereupon. Also when it
comes to the effect of new digital media, some empirical outcomes are
simply mind-boggling. Consider, for instance, the once relatively small
Finnish video game company Rovio, which developed the massive hit
Angry Birds, a casual video game that had been downloaded in excess of
1 billion times when my colleague interviewed a company representative
in early February 2014. Tom Wolfe did not provide a yardstick for actually
measuring degrees of plausibility but, for me personally, such unexpected
(but not unanticipated) outcomes do not qualify as “plausible” in the
v
vi PREFACE
conventional sense of the term. Yet, implausible things happen every now
and then.
This is what is so deeply intriguing but also vexing about video game
development, that the sheer creativity and ability to organize product
development activities so that they result in a digital object that eventually
are distributed all over the globe, and at the speed of light (financial capital
also amass at an almost equally high speed) is the primary driver of the
industry: video game developers can de facto emerge from obscurity, being
socially, culturally, and not the least financially marginalized figures to
become international superstars and overnight sensations. That was the
case of Markus Persson, better known under his developer non de plume
Notch (programming is a species of writing, even authorship, after all),
whose company Mojang developed Minecraft that became a major hit as
soon as it was released in 2011. Persson was suddenly a multi-millionaire
who did not have to worry too much about the next game to develop (for
two accounts of the Minecraft phenomenon, see Arnroth 2013; Goldberg
and Larsson 2012). In September 2019, The Guardian listed Minecraft as
“the best video game of the 21st century” (Stuart and MacDonald 2019),
an accolade that is indicative of the significance of the video game. “With
more than 175 m copies now sold on an array of devices from smart-
phones to virtual-reality headsets, Minecraft has transcended the idea of
what games are and what they can achieve,” The Guardian stated. In
2018, Mojang reported a turnover in excess of 200 million euros and was
named the most profitable developer studio in the entire industry (Swedish
Games Industry 2019: 7). Such highly “implausible” and infrequent, yet
not impossible, scenarios are what fuels the indie video game industry.
Needless to say, most indie video game developers do not reasonably
anticipate a career trajectory comparable to Notch’s. Instead, video game
development is initiated and justified by the love of video games and the
video gaming experience, the ambition to turn novel gaming ideas and
game concepts into functional digital objects through collaborative efforts
with other individuals sharing this commitment to the “digital arts.” Yet,
there is a lingering thought that when the conditions are right and luck is
surfacing, huge commercial successes can result in what is unexpected
(but, again, not unanticipated), that is, “implausible.” This ambition to
make money is arguably not the principal motivator, but it is a form of
icing on the cake or the sugar-coating on the pill that is hard to fully forget
once the thought has struck one’s mind. Especially in a world totally
determined by digital distribution channels and online real-time reporting
PREFACE vii
on sales, the chance of commercial and financial success is a constitutive
feature of the industry.
So who are these “indie developers”? Keogh (2015) introduces the
indie developer community in the following terms:
[A] far more diverse range of creators, audiences, and modes of video games
production and consumption has emerged with the rise of digital distribu-
tion and a proliferation of platforms. International corporate publishers now
compete with—and draw influence from—smaller teams of individuals that
are finding their own critical and commercial success in vibrant independent
scenes. (Keogh 2015: 152)
This volume will report empirical materials from a study of indie develop-
ers in Sweden to better explain how what is called innovation-led growth
is in fact predicated on the individual’s ability to commit him or herself to
innovative activities that are uncertain (not the least in terms of estimating
market demand) and beset by the difficulty to raise money to finance the
development work. Economists have consistently argued in favour of
developed economies changing their production activities so that more
sophisticated and knowledge-intensive work is conducted, while allegedly
less demanding production activities are offshored to “developing econo-
mies” with lower production costs. One of the consequence is that profes-
sional work includes activities that are determined by a high degree of
uncertainty, for example, basic research, new drug development, and the
creation of new technologies such as “green energy,” all of which are uni-
fied by the difficulty to anticipate market conditions and the wider socio-
economic consequences of the new technologies (say, the development of
automatic transportation systems, no longer demanding skilled and expe-
rienced drivers). Such development work may be part of the R&D activi-
ties of large corporations, generating the finance capital through their
regular business activities, or on the basis of state-controlled investment
agencies in, for example, basic research in the life sciences. At the same
time, industries such as video game development fall outside of these reg-
ular financing systems inasmuch as the industry is relatively new, having a
short history that stretches back to the 1980s or 1990s, and therefore has
not yet accumulated the funds needed to support innovation work in the
fringes of the industry, in, for example, indie development communities
and businesses. Furthermore, video games are not yet consecrated to the
level where it is eligible for state funding and subsidies, as in the case of the
viii PREFACE
liberal arts (dramatic theatre, visual arts, literature, film, etc.), which makes
video game development an exclusively market-based activity, operating
outside of stated political interests and responsibilities. A current eco-
nomic doctrine stipulates that small and enterprising industry sectors pro-
pel the capitalist economy and push it into new equilibrium, but policy
makers and politicians, otherwise concerned with job creation and stable
economic growth, are surprisingly reluctant to support industries that
have the potential to carry such responsibilities. Until policy makers are
presented with a fait accompli, they are largely unable to detect the weak
market signals and respond to them in ways that support innovation-led
growth. This is the predicament of the innovation-led economy: busi-
nesses at the fringe of the economy do not yet have the contacts with
policy makers who would help them ensure a place on the political agenda.
In practice, this means that especially financial concerns are left in the dark
by policy makers, transferring the responsibility to raise the money needed
to finance the development work to individual market actors.
This might sound like an overtly negative scenario, but, as a matter of
fact, the Swedish video game is a success story in terms of job growth,
turnover, and status and prestige on the global arena. “I think this is a very
inspiring industry,” an indie developer (Company M) remarked: “There
are jobs and there is know-how that can be used elsewhere. If you are not
directly involved in developing games, you can still participate in gamifica-
tion, and such things [in other industries].” Most of these accomplish-
ments have been made without any defined finance capital infusions,
subsidies, or exemptions granted by the state. Instead, the Swedish video
game has emerged and consolidated outside of a supportive economic
policy framework. A study of indie video game developers therefore not
only must include the behavioural and motivational factors that industry
actors refer to when justifying their choice of career, but also should
address the broader issues of economic policy and dominant economic
ideas regarding the differences between, for example, imitation-led growth
(as in the case of the expanding Chinese economy) and the innovation-led
growth in many developed economies. The former category of theories is
introduced and examined in the third chapter of this volume, whereas the
latter issue is addressed in the second chapter. Under all conditions,
innovation- led growth of the kind that, for example, the video game
industry is representative of is fuelled by a passionate commitment to
video games and digital media and gaming more widely, but it would be
inadequate to ignore the economic conditions wherein such human skills
PREFACE ix
and resources materialized into video games. Everyday work demands
finance capital to pay salaries and acquire the resources needed, and there-
fore the formula for innovation-led growth necessarily includes both
human resources and finance capital. A management studies view of video
game development therefore needs to incorporate both production fac-
tors to fully understand how the innovation-led growth doctrine easily
understates either of the two production factors. By the end of the day,
innovation-led growth is not some kind of naturally occurring market
phenomenon, emerging as some auxiliary benefit of liberal pro-market
legislation, lenient regulatory control, and the presence of wise finance
capital investors willing to commit their capital to enterprising activities.
This free-market scenario is not the operational model for industrial pol-
icy. Instead, this volume simultaneously stipulates and substantiates the
idea that innovation-led growth is based on a combination of economic,
financial, legal, social, and cultural conditions that are complicated to dis-
entangle when explaining specific successes in sectors of the economy,
after the fact. This means that innovation-led growth cannot be a heavy-
handed subsidizing of certain sectors and industries as such lack of dis-
crimination between promising ventures and less viable business activities
easily overprices entrepreneurial ventures and oversponsors low-quality
entrepreneurs. For instance, in video game development, it is virtually
impossible for industry actors to anticipate market success, and the chances
of state-controlled innovation agency business developers and counsellors
making predictions with higher precision than industry insiders are small
and unreasonable to assume. Instead, innovation-led growth needs to
operate through a variety of mechanisms to better assist local initiatives
and to exploit emerging conditions. Expressed in more prosaic terms,
industry policy conducive to innovation-led growth is a complicated pur-
suit, which demands an open-ended attitude towards emerging market
properties. In showing these features of one of the current high-growth
industries, this volume hopefully makes a more substantial contribution to
the management studies literature than to merely report an empirical
material that apprehends the nature of indie video development work. At
least the volume is written with that intention.
Gothenburg, Sweden Alexander Styhre
x PREFACE
references
Arnroth, T. (2013). Ett år med Mojang: Minecraft bakom kulisserna.
Stockholm: Publit.
Goldberg, D., & Larsson, L. (2012). Minecraft: Block, pixlar och att göra sig en
hacka: Historien om Markus “Notch” Persson och spelet som vände allt upp och
ned. Norstedt: Stockholm.
Keogh, B. (2015). Between Triple-A, indie, casual, and DIY. In K. Oakley &
J. O’Connor (Eds.), The Routledge companion to the cultural industries
(pp. 152–162). Abingdon: Routledge.
Stuart, K., & MacDonald, K. (2019, September 19). The 50 best video games of
the 21st century. Retrieved September 20, 2019, from https://www.theguard-
ian.com/games/2019/sep/19/50-best-video-games-of-the-21st-century
Swedish Games Industry. (2019). Game development index 2019, Stockholm.
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