Good news, everyone! MSNBC.com is reporting that somehow, the beautiful, excellent labor of love World of Goo actually made a good amount of money for its innovative creators.
This is probably the most heartening story of the long list of heartening stories that have come out about indie games this year. World of Goo managed to make money with a slim marketing budget of approximately $0.00. Other things, like Braid and Castle Crashers, had a minimal marketing push—yet the most accurate predictors we have for this kind of thing (VGChartz might usually be wildly inaccurate, but their XBLA chart is based on information pulled from a massive collection of real GamerTags and is generally considered to be as close as we can get to true XBLA sales numbers) believe these games generated millions of dollars in revenue, each.
We are talking games that were made by no more than two men, games that were built on laptops in coffee shops. Could it be possible this era of HD gloss and budgets approaching nine figures could also be indie gaming’s greatest days?
It’s entirely possible. Back at the beginning of the medium most games were made by single renaissance programmers, but the money we’re looking at now is much better than what Richard Garriott and Roberta Williams made selling plastic baggies to their local software retailers.
And while it may be digital distribution that’s responsible for the most profitable parts of this trend, it’s not the sole factor. Remember that whole Limbo of the Lost plagiarism debacle? That story was so hilarious it actually got fully researched, revealing that the game’s “creator” Majestic Studios were really just three guys who concocted the whole thing in a bar. Had they not stolen every single bit of background artwork for their game, that three-man work (give or take a few, maybe fictional outsourcers) would have gotten an international release to actual, physical stores.
That a sprawling indie scene is creating its own commercial hits says that this is the healthiest the medium has ever been, with a large enough player base to support nearly any kind of well-executed crazy idea. Forget the success of the AAA titles and the Wii—if you want to see if an industry is truly mainstream, you have to look to the strength of the works at the fringes. They’re doing great, and, so long as we keep getting things like Mac Ports of Aquaria and WiiWare versions of Cave Story, we are too.