Distribution
During the 1980s, the common medium was cassette tape, which was the default software format for systems such as the ZX Spectrum. This eventually gave way to floppy disk and then to CD-ROM.
Recently independent games have been released for big budget consoles like Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and Wii. Many games that are being released for these consoles are ports of popular flash games and/or just plainly developed independent games that have received notice. Often indie games are completely programmer driven, due to lack of publisher funding for artwork.
On November 19, 2008, Microsoft launched Xbox Community Games, later renamed as Xbox Live Indie Games, which allowed independent developers to create games for the Xbox 360 using XNA development tools and sell them on the Xbox Live Marketplace.
In May 2010, several independent developers organized the Humble Indie Bundle, which raised over $1.25 million in revenue (of which about $400,000 went to charity) and showed the value that community involvement and cross-platform development can have for independent developers.
The majority of the distribution of PC and Mac games come from various portals such as Steam and Big Fish Games. With a massive number of PC titles per year coupled with a price drop it is becoming increasingly difficult for PC developers to make a profit unless it is one of the few hit games.
With the advent of smartphones such as the iPhone and the relative ease of producing these titles many independent game developers solely develop games for various smart phone operating systems such as the iOS and the newer Android. This has also seen games being ported across to take advantage of this new revenue stream such as the successful game Minecraft.
There are also independent games distribution websites, such as IndieCity, springing up to cater exclusively for indie games, rather than including them alongside the mainstream games which are the main focus of most distribution portals (see: Steam).
Read more about this topic: Independent Video Game Development
Famous quotes containing the word distribution:
“The man who pretends that the distribution of income in this country reflects the distribution of ability or character is an ignoramus. The man who says that it could by any possible political device be made to do so is an unpractical visionary. But the man who says that it ought to do so is something worse than an ignoramous and more disastrous than a visionary: he is, in the profoundest Scriptural sense of the word, a fool.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)
“The question for the country now is how to secure a more equal distribution of property among the people. There can be no republican institutions with vast masses of property permanently in a few hands, and large masses of voters without property.... Let no man get by inheritance, or by will, more than will produce at four per cent interest an income ... of fifteen thousand dollars] per year, or an estate of five hundred thousand dollars.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)
“Classical and romantic: private language of a family quarrel, a dead dispute over the distribution of emphasis between man and nature.”
—Cyril Connolly (1903–1974)