You could say it was something Alex Dunne said that made him chairman of a new festival for independent game developers. The editorial director for Game Developer magazine and Gamasutra wrote a column that posed the question “Where’s our Sundance?” referring to the Sundance Film Festival, the showcase for independent films seeking distribution.

The positive reader response led Dunne to plan the Independent Games Festival, which opens 15 March in San Jose, California, at the Game Developers Conference.

“There’s a lot of people with day jobs out there who dream of becoming a game developer and wanted a way to showcase what they are doing,” Dunne said. He knew he’d hit on something when he received over 90 submissions, from Poland to Pakistan. Winners of the festival will be announced on 17 March.

The Gathering of Developers, a developer-driven computer and videogame publisher whose partners include 3D Realms, Epic Megagames, and Edge of Reality, became the festival’s co-producer.

“The team at Gathering [had] been talking about setting up a festival like Sundance in order to countermeasure the effects of consolidation in this industry,” said Mike Wilson, CEO of the Gathering. The games industry is becoming more and more like the motion-picture business, he explained. Developers are being represented by talent agents. Large media companies are buying up smaller outfits and are often afraid to try new ideas. As games get more sophisticated, so do production and marketing costs, which makes publishers leery of taking chances on unknown developers.

“Events such as [the Independent Games Festival] encourage these indie players and gives the guys banging out code in a garage somewhere a chance to show off their games and hopefully inject something innovative into the industry. It also gives publishers the opportunity to take a chance on something new,” Wilson said.

http://www.gdconf.com/

(c) Wired News