EXODUS II: Let My Coders Go! How will Pharaoh respond to a summer of Free Love indie gaming?

Right now there is a movement in gaming an exodus of gamers away from walled garden platforms, be they consoles, iOS or Android and yes even Valve may finally be running out of Steam.

The exodus of gamers away from consoles is not just a longing for new hardware these gamers expect new ideas and innovation , so along side this exodus there has to be an accompanying exodus of games developers chained by the games development Pharaohs ...

All the major publishers are worried, worried not by the impact of Windows 8 store apps, worried not by the death of retail or existence of piracy. They are worried about the exodus of coding talent away from their cookie cutter game production conveyor belts . With everyone coding their own fudgemallow scrumptious delights who needs Willy Wonka anymore ? Dig?

What did it take to shake the game development Pharaohs? Well plagues of Angry Birds , Green Pigs and Cut The Rope Frogs have been implicated ... but also the promise of freedom  from walled gardens offered increasingly by independent coders....

For 2012 is the summer of free lovely gaming .. free of Steam , free of iOS , free of Android , free of Flash even, free of large corporate leviathans, free of OS  and there is no finer example of the poignantly  named Free Love which you can download from the authors site here  . .

Recently I was touching on the exodus of coding talent away from from traditional multi million dollar funded and mostly stale sequels. In fact I would go as far to say that many of our coding heroes following a corporate dictated conveyor belt release of sequels to games that were cool in the 70s, 80s and 90s directly led to many a staff meltdown in once talented teams from iD,Epic, to Infinity Ward, Rare to recently Psygnosis. It was the constant mandatory conveyor belt release of sequels that killed them as creative forces ,killed their creative forces. Consider the once great talent that gave us Attic Attac ,Saberwulfe and  Goldeneye is now doing what  ... Kinect demos? As the likes of pretentious Edge editors would say they suffered for their art and Ultimately Played the Game of corporate greed to it's inevitable conclusion: redundancy.

Today of course there is other hope, for any one can code any one can reach out to the largest number of gamers in gamings history. The author of Free Love is just one such hero to be that independent coders , launched through the power of the Internet and social media, without the need to go through publisher + PR enslavement, or even the need to submit to iTunes or Google Play or the upcoming Windows 8 store or Steam for that matter...

At the Oracle of thegameveda I foresee many a coder or team leaving the corporate conveyor belt and setting up independently, that much talent does not simply exist because they work in an air con plush campus riding around on scooters and getting free veg meals and coffee . All these things are designed to tie you down to the corporate machine. That machine stifles creativity in the long run .Just check on the status of Rare, Infinity Ward, Psygnosis , Bullfrog , the great Japanese coders currently on their 15th Final Fantasies, Res Evils, and Metal Gears... All of which are going to sell less than some phone app some dude or dudess comes up with in school right now ..

The gaming publishers of old will not just have to deal with changes in content delivery through cloud ,browsers and social media but also more importantly they are going to have to set their coders free , free to code and free to release in many different ways that the old way of doing business cannot understand . In fact this would be a good point in time to cut your PR , advertising and other now pointless departments.

In a world where social media can create stars in the music and film genres , why not  games developers too ? And you gamer  can even contribute to  development by interacting with the developer via social media. Free Love is just one example of 1000s of games being developed out there , do you need to play this through Steam?Do you need to play this through iOS?Android or even as a Windows 8 App? No you can just go to the authors site and play, no walled garden and this is what has the likes of Steam Greenlighting 1000s of indie games.

As much as I love Steam and Valve this is the Man just again deciding what can and cannot be published and taking a cut. They are already creating controversy about censoring  certain games .. what is the difference then between Steam and all those now dying physical retail stores that were dictating to developers which releases they were going to stock?

Imagine ...  if they had social media and Internet in the actual summer of free love then the Beatles , Hendrix and co would have been reaching out without having to go through the Man at all ... Hair peace  more like Web peace .. peace out ... and don't forget your dose of Free Love .

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