On One’s Own is a column about, you guessed it, independent gaming. The wayward wanderings of DIYGamer’s James Bishop might lead to probing art, gameplay, design, reception or a number of other aspects related to independent games. But you can rest assured that all things indie will be carefully considered on a weekly basis.

As anyone who reads our illustrious website is probably already aware, the definition of the term “indie” is a bit muddled and difficult to decipher. Does it refer to the style of the game, like hip-hop or rock with music, or does it refer to the conditions of the developer? Does it matter if they have a high-profile publisher with some major bankroll that can push their product to exceed normal limitations for a small company? All of these are good questions that, arguably, require different answers from situation to situation.

Possibly the most interesting of recent ones to crop up is that of Klei Entertainment’s indie darling Shank. Or maybe that should be former indie darling Shank. No, it has not been cancelled, but the status of its indie credibility is up in the air after a number of increasingly mainstream announcements. The question is, do these things change the nature of the game or are they simply fortunate circumstances in a post-Braid gaming scene?

First off, EA Partners signed on to publish Shank. At the time, this was announced along with the decision to publish Hothead Games’ Deathspank but even with the two-part news, it’s kind of a big deal. EA Partners isn’t some small division of Electronic Arts; these are the guys who sealed the deal to publish Epic Games’ Bulletstorm from the developer People Can Fly. Not impressive enough? Add Valve, id Software, Double Fine and the most recent addition of Insomniac Games to the list of developers that have seen publishing deals go down with EA Partners.

EA Partners has taken the stance of allowing developers to keep their own intellectual property and develop further on it in the future. In many ways, they have been dabbling in the business of laissez-faire economics. They keep their hands off of the development side and just try to market the game to as wide an audience as they can as best they can.

Overall, this seems to be really working out for them as they continue to pick up bigger and bigger developers. There were even some rumors floating around that Bungie might go the EA Partners route but, as we have seen, Big Daddy Activision’s pockets are awfully deep. So how is that a developer like Klei Entertainment—no offense to them, of course, as they might eventually read this—secures such a deal?

They do a damn good job, that’s how. You connect with the right people, pitch the right kind of game and have a little star power in your pocket. Though it may have only been recently revealed, Marianne Krawczyk, the dynamo writer behind God of War, has been onboard the Shank train since near the beginning. Some have confused the recent reveal with EA bringing in more talent to pump up sales when in reality Krawczyk and Klei Entertainment’s fledgling partnership goes back to 2008.

Jamie Cheng, CEO of Klei Entertainment, and Marianne Krawczyk met at Game Developers Conference in 2008 at the Speaker Party. According to Cheng, the two began talking about how they would love to work on an independent game where they could tell whatever kind of story that they could want to tell. When Klei was ready to begin development on a new title, Krawcyzk and they were reconnected and so they began to cement down what we know today as Shank.

And let’s be honest, keeping this somewhat startling information fairly close to the chest is a sound business decision on their part. An indie developer revealing that the writer for God of War will be working on their newest intellectual property reeks of overstatement and has a touch of vaporware to it. To phrase it another way, the big boys sitting in the penthouses may have considered Klei to be putting on airs, as it were, and biting off a bit more than they could chew. There’s probably room enough for another charming colloquialism but I’ll leave it at that. With a writer like Krawcyzk, and her professional history, expectations are naturally set high.

But to once and for all settle the rumors, it has been said numerous times in a number of places that Krawcyzk has been working with the team since very near to the beginning. So we have a few strikes against Shank’s indie credibility, what with the publishing deal with EA Partners, and now we come to find out that they have a big A-list writer with them who happens to be fresh off seeing her latest brainchild, God of War III, do extremely well on the market. It seems like all signs point to ditching the indie moniker entirely and becoming a mainstream game.

And so this brings us to the real question. As stated above, does it matter if a high-profile publisher signs on with an independent developer? The answer, at least in this specific instance, is… No. Just because Klei Entertainment has sketched out a deal with EA Partners doesn’t preclude Shank from continuing to be the indie darling that everyone knows and loves. Sift through all the muck and mire and you still have yourself a wonderful little gem of a game developed by an independent company with their own unclouded vision present in all aspects.

The way I see it, Klei just got lucky. They started a game with the right people and pushed it in the right direction long enough to interest someone who could fulfill the necessary monetary obligations of their operation. This way, Klei does not really have to worry about publishing, marketing and all those things that indie developers traditionally flub up in the process of getting their games to the masses.

Instead they can focus on what they do best: make games. If the creative direction, art, writing and overall vision isn’t compromised by the addition of a publishing deal, it’s merely a win-win for everyone involved including those that will later be playing the game. Braid would still be Braid, Flower would still be Flower and so on even if they were under the same conditions. It just so happens that more people would have known about them from the beginning.

Which is part of the issue as well. There’s a sense of “getting it” in the community that is disdainful of the general public. Anything at all attached to Big Brother is bombarded with suspicion until folks conclude that it must be so because everyone else is saying it is. Even if it could and should be considered indie, we’d rather wash our hands of it altogether. Well, I say, not this time. This time we should be thankful that someone decided to pick up an rock—a nice rock but still a rock—and help polish it into a jewel.

On One’s Own is a column about, you guessed it, independent gaming. The wayward wanderings of DIYGamer’s James Bishop might lead to probing art, gameplay, design, reception or a number of other aspects related to independent games. But you can rest assured that all things indie will be carefully considered on a weekly basis.

As discussed before, a major problem with coming up with a definition for “indie game” really comes down to the single fact that larger non-independent publishers will occasionally pick up what some might have previously considered an indie game. Is Shank any less of an indie title now that EA Partners has teamed up to publish and promote it? Games like this continue to be indie titles, arguably, but have a major push in the public relations department.

But how does this relationship actually work? Is it really beneficial to both parties? It’s an excellent question that your average gamer might not even ponder about twice. In a way, it is comparable to how most goods tend to be made overseas and then packaged wherever they are going to be sold. For example, the shoes on my feet were made in Vietnam. The box, however, was made in the good ole United States of America. I have absolutely no idea how that all actually works, but I’m sure someone in Vietnam is getting the short end of the stick on that deal. (I paid forty bucks for these!)

Of course, the particulars are all different. I wouldn’t necessarily compare independent developers directly to sweatshop workers, exactly, but the situation is analogous. Your average indie developer signs a deal with the metaphorical devil in the shape of a publisher in order to fund and promote their game. This isn’t always the way that these kinds of games come to the attention of the general public but it certainly constitutes the majority.

This is not just an issue for indie games either as the entire industry battles with this sort of thing regularly. The recent hubbub at Infinity Ward stemmed partially from the fact that Activision publishes the games they develop. Per their agreement, it seems, the Call of Duty franchise essentially became an Activision franchise. All developers, mainstream or indie, need funding to either continue to work on their games, start work on a new games or promote their games in general. Which is typically how indie games become affiliated with larger publishers.

As briefly mentioned above, Shank from developer Klei Entertainment recently entered into a publishing agreement with EA Partners. And though this column is mostly about the negative aspects of the developer-publisher relationship, Jamie Cheng, Klei Entertainment founder, had nothing but good things to say about the partnership with Electronic Arts. Speaking with 1Up, he was quoted as saying, “We had a clear vision of what we wanted to do with the game, so we had an opportunity to partner up with [EA] and have their marketing muscle.” Perhaps his tune will change in the future but he certainly seems to be happy to be letting someone else do that pesky marketing.

And it is not just Klei Entertainment that holds this opinion. Other developers seem to share this same kind of hands-off approach to marketing with Jamie. If a super-giant publisher wants to promote it, that’s on them to do all the dirty work. Instead of a much smaller company funneling every last dime into a marketing budget, larger firms like Electronic Arts can step in and do that for them. That way the developers can focus on what truly matters to them: the game.

Which is partially the major disconnect between publishers and developers. The developer wants to create an interesting, fun game while the publisher wants to get as many people to buy said game as humanly, and sometimes inhumanly, possible. In a recent panel at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, a number of student and independent developers sat down with the stated goal of helping explain how to make a successful game like they had previously. It included members of the development team for Portal, The Misadventures of P. B. Winterbottom and flOw. Noticeably, it seems not one spoke of publishing agreements during their brief panel.

Picking up student games, or most indie games for that matter, and getting them out there is a no-brainer for publishers. In terms of monetary investment, would you rather spend five years or more developing a game and a total of two years promoting it… or just promote a game for two years that already has a niche audience but certainly has the potential to grow beyond being only niche? Keep in mind that the game that has been in development for five years might not pan out or meet the expectations set for it.

The choice is fairly obvious. In a world where iPhone games developed by a single person can make a profit of $250,000 in just two months with little to no promotion, cutting a deal with a student showcase winner or other game festival entrants is akin to planting a money tree or two. A small investment is likely to bring in large profits. Investing in games festival winners is about as sure a thing as it gets in game publishing.

It is not always love and sunshine in this relationship, though. There are the horror stories about publishers dictating design to developers, the obscene amounts of money that publishers make off the creative assets they manage and, of course, the ever-present worry of groupthink in the community at large. Don’t just take my word for it, though.

Timothy Ryan’s blog on Gamasutra includes an entry talking about just this sort of thing. Specifically, he looks at the way in which publishers can either be far too hands-off or become too involved in the minutiae of development. He focuses in on publishing producers and the role they play in development. Is it really so hard to imagine this happening in an indie developer situation? The answer: Not at all. In fact, it probably happens often.

As for the obscene amounts of money that publishers make, we need look no further than the president of Q-Games, Dylan Cuthbert. Speaking with Develop back in January of this year, he made a pathetic appeal (derived from pathos, people) in what may seem like an effort to demonize publishers who bankroll smaller developers. He notes that he could make the entire PixelJunk series over again just on bonuses that some executives at these publisher make on top of their salary.

The groupthink worry is best summed up, albeit unintentionally, in an article by Jim Sterling about art games and innovation. Though he criticizes indie games and innovation in general, the nugget of his argument seems to be that innovation and indie games are not innately good or bad. They can be one or the other, sometimes both, but it all comes down to the effort put in the end product. This too stems from the complicated publisher-developer relationship. Though Sterling seems to be hit-or-miss for me, this one is definitely worth a read and really speaks for itself.

Hope is not lost, however. It is not as if this problem has existed within a vacuum and gone unnoticed by those with the power to change it. A number of developers have actually gotten together to form the Indie Fund. In theory, it will function in much the same way as a larger publisher would by bankrolling initiatives but skipping the whole signing in blood part.

Nathan Vella, president of Capybara Games, spoke with Ars Technica on the subject saying, “The end goal of a publisher is to hit sales targets, make a return on investment, and generate profit for their shareholders… In literally every way possible, this can, and normally does, conflict with the end goal of developers. Especially indie developers. Sure, we all want a return on investment, but we want that ROI to come off the back of a project we are passionate about and a final product we love. Developers want to make games that, on a small scale or big scale, push the medium forward. There’s a really big conflict there.”

2D Boy’s Ron Carmel added, “Developers often don’t get publishers and vice versa. Neither is evil, but both are too caught up in their own needs to really see things from the other’s point of view.” Sure, some households might agree that Bobby Kotick is evil or EA is where developers go to die, but it is ultimately a two-way street. Maybe the Indie Fund is the first step toward building more of these streets and stimulation for more introspection on the subject within publishers and developers alike.