Not long ago, Square Enix launched the idea for their new system intended to help gamers get games they want called Collective.
Using Collective, you as a development team would pitch ideas. They’d then have to be voted on by the Collective (already sounds a bit creepy) community of gamers, and if the idea passes muster, you’ll have Square’s strong support in your own Indiegogo campaign, which is the only positive aspect of this.
It sounds great for gamers, but so did Greenlight before a handful of developers denounced it for surprisingly good reasons and even Gabe Newell himself said in an interview that he deeply regretted it. This looks as if it’s going to be more reality show style red tape for independent developers to go through; yet another way to make them feel like they’re sitting at the kid’s table at Thanksgiving.
Oddly, before Square commits to launching this endeavor, they seem to be asking gamers and developers to give them feedback at collective@square-enix.com, where I assume people like me can send an e-mail saying “don’t you dare do this, haven’t indies suffered enough?”
Being in contact with dozens of small developers in my personal network, I know that the one thing they’re beginning to hate is how everyone is so eager to turn indie development into a reality show where one guy “wins” and everyone else gets voted off the island. And of course non-developers, the majority, see things like Greenlight as great because they get to vote on games they like, but they lack the insight into why these things ultimately damage the industry.
Stifling creativity is the name of the game; instead of having a fine gradient of mainstream games and niche games that each have their respective audiences and turn some sort of profit, now especially on Steam we simply have “obscenely popular games that are released and make a lot of money” and “every other game which will never see the light of day and puts the developer out of business.” Indeed, it’s all just another barrier hiding behind a popularity contest, and it stinks to high hell.
If you want to see all this Collective stuff for yourself, you can go to http://collective.square-enix.com and read up.
