Last month, Brian wrote about the lack of indie labels for game developers, and the opportunities that could be afforded by those labels.
I think there’s another aspect of the music industry that could be applied to indie games, and that is a service such as Topspin or Bandcamp. These services provide one-stop-shops for artists to handle marketing, distribution and sales of their music. They also provide analytics, allowing the artists to gain some insight into where their fans are coming from, what they’re listening to, and so on. Basically, they just sit behind the band’s website and deal with all the boring but important things such as credit card processing and providing downloads. I think it would be a huge boon if such a service existed for indie games.
Now, yes, it is possible to put all the relevant components of such a service together, particularly in a games company which is full of tech people: but if you want to make games, why would you want to devote too much time to that aspect? Wouldn’t you be better off actually using the time it would take to do that and making your game even more awesome?
-David (@dwlt)