Another game industry vet has set his eye into social networking to support indie development. Greg Chudecke, who was lead tools designer at Zipper Interactive (SOCOM) and worked on Atari's Backyard Skateboarding and Black Label Games' Fellowship of the Ring title announced he's struck out on his own, founding an indie game company and social network.
The company's called Caffeinated Games, and its goal, said Chudecke, is to create AAA-level titles that have an online community around them. Part of the challenge for both indie and commercial developers in creating concepts and marketing their games is that it's so hard to guess what the audience wants or will like - and indie devs have fewer resources for focus testing than the big guns.
Because of that, coming up with games can be very financially risky, and so lately lots of savvy industry vets have been looking at ways they can use social networks to connect with gamers, let them try out ideas and test responses in order to better gauge what people will like and whether it will sell.
You may remember just a few weeks back we spoke to Threewave's Dan Irish, who was launching a similar strategy using Facebook. Caffeinated Games' full announcement post-jump.
SOCOM and Lord of the Rings Veteran Founds Indie Game Company and Social Networking
Site Caffeinated Games.
Randle, WA
– June 11, 2008 - Announcing the founding of Caffeinated Games
(www.caffeinatedgames.com) an independent game company and social network focused on
the creation of original AAA games. It is founded by the former Lead Tools Engineer of Zipper
Interactive (SOCOM fame) Greg Chudecke who prior to Zipper worked on Backyard
Skateboarding (Atari) and Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (Black Label
Games).
Caffeinated Games Social Network allows gamers to connect directly with the creators and
create a community around the games.
"When you read postmortems about failed indie game companies you often run across a
common thread, either the publisher didn't understand the concept or didn't market the game.
We at Caffeinated Games recognize publishers have to guess what games people will buy so
it is often hard for them to sign off on new ideas. Also if your game doesn't fit into a specific
genera they may have a hard time marketing the game. Our approach to overcome this is to
make the games we want to play and then pitch those games directly to the gamers. Cut out
the middle man if you will. The gamers after all are the ones who ultimately make your game
a success."
Caffeinated Games is set to Announce their first title next week.
For more information please visit www.caffeinatedgames.com.