Chris Taylor of Gas Powered Games, the team behind Supreme Commander and Dragon Siege, believes it's become more difficult for developers to remain independent. He said with the increasingly competitive market, larger indie studios rely more on publishers for marketing and investment to survive.

“We kind of fell into a rut these past 10 to 15 years, in that even though we were independent, we were so dependent on these publishers that we were basically outsourcing studios,” Taylor told Gamasutra. “That’s not being independent."



During a trade panel, Epic Games president Mike Capps agreed. He said “It’s getting harder and harder to be independent, especially at our size. Knowing what you know well is important. It’s all about picking a battle. For us it’s about tech and making a good game, and knowing what we don’t do well...somebody’s got to put up a billboard in Hong Kong, and it’s not going to be me.”

Epic Games worked with Microsoft on its Gears of War franchise, and that extra cushion helped Gears become a huge commercial success.

“We walk a very fine line because we can’t say bad things about anyone, but our customer walks into Best Buy or Fry’s, and they don’t know we’re an independent company. They think we’re huge,” Taylor said about Gas Powered Games. “We went three years without upgrading our hardware because we couldn’t make it a priority to pay for that.”

“There are some really difficult financial situations in this industry,” Capps agreed. “You can make a game like Shadow Complex, be a 10- to 12-man team for a year, get to be a best-selling game on [XBLA], and then still have money be tight.”