As follow-up to his and Warren Spector's excellent rant at GDC about the sorry state of the industry, Greg Costikyan has posted an interesting piece on his site about how to get independent and alternate games better distribution and into the hands of consumers.

He identifies and focus on the issue of distribution, touching on the (scary, in my opinion) power that the retailers have over what games are made, But I don't think the issue is distribution at all.  The Internet solves that problem very well.  Almost perfectly for a medium that is the original digital entertainment.  The real issue is marketing.  What independent and alternate games need is marketing, and unfortunately, that comes down to...wait for it...money.

We can come up with countless fun, wacky and interesting distribution systems and none of them will work without driving that desire of the consumer to get the product (if I can be so sterile).  Being on the shelf of a store is not a triumph of distribution, but simply a form of marketing.  Your game sitting on a shelf, facing outward with it's focus tested cover art, is just marketing and only a small piece of the marketing pie, and one that we could loose.  If the frenzied downloading of music should tell us anything, it's that shelf space isn't that important and distribution is like water, it will flow where it needs to be and there isn't much you can do about it barring a billion dollar public works project consisting of trillions of tons of concrete.

The reason some songs get downloaded millions of times has more to do with marketing the record labels do than anything else.  The idea that your band can cut a song, slap it up on the web and become the next Rolling Stones is naive at best.  The same can be said for independent and alternate games.  What you need is exposure, exposure, exposure and a distribution channel is not going to give that to you.  Marketing will.  (Side note:  for the sake of this rant, I will jumble marketing and PR together).

In the beginning of Humongous Entrainment, we built some of the most interesting games being made for kids (and arguably adults).  The first 3 or 4 games we released were critically acclaimed and any kid that played them became inthralled.  It was not uncommon to hear from parents that their kids played nothing else once they were exposed to our games.  It was a real testament to the power of characters, story and (dare I say it) the adventure game.   The only problem was they weren't selling and it wasn't due to the lack of distribution.  EA was our distributor (not publisher) and they got the games into every store and on every shelf in the country, but we had no money and could not afford any marketing.

We eventually raised some VC, which gave us the money we needed to do marketing and PR.  We continued to make the same innovative games we always had, but sales skyrocketed.  We suddenly found ourselves on the top of all the charts and quickly became the 3rd largest kids software company on the planet.  This sudden change wasn't the result of better distribution, it was because of better (or any) marketing.

Independent film is in much of the same boat.  Plenty of interesting and very professional independent films are made each year, how many of them do you hear about?  Unless you are a real film-nerd, probably only the ones bought at Sundance who got, not only distribution in to theaters, but more importantly: marketing, marketing, marketing.

My favorite film of last year was Napoleon Dynamite.  Made for less that $500K, it went on to make $35M in theaters and will do at least that on DVD.  It didn't do this because it was good, it did it because it found a distributor (what we would call a publisher) who then spent money and marketed it.

One problem for independent and alternate games is finding the money to fund the development, but the larger problem is finding the money, or means, to market it.  Your investors (or your mom, upset you're still living in the basement) isn't going to be satisfied that your game is fun-as-hell to play if no one is buying it because they don't know about it.

btw, I have no solution to this problem.  I leave that exercise to the reader.  Just let me know when you've figured it out.