Free Game and Industry Connections

Today’s entertainment industries are some of the most lucrative in circulation and the impact and importance that the video game makes on the market is undeniably the largest portion of this.

For me however the most impressive aspect of the games industry doesn’t dwell on profit margins but in the ever growing free game and community ran games out there.

As never before we are seeing a massive increase in creative free exchange of information and ideas on such a structured level. Games such as half life with its extensive modders support are just an example that I’m sure most of us can relate to. Taking it further however is the increased rate at which games at industry standard are created entirely from scratch on a community collaborative effort are emerging. Games created via communities of enthusiasts with all manner of varying skill levels and experiences are pulling towards common artistic goals.

A fantastic example of this is the excellent “Total Annihilation: Spring” project. Based on the popular and now aging game “Total Annihilation” this project features a very clever Wiki style creation allowing any person to add material towards the game to be used openly by the developers. This project, not even nearing a level of completion, has already managed to inspire huge levels of modding and scripting to enhance the core game beyond its original intent.

However like most things there is of course an element of finance to couple great ideas, in the case of free games a lot of bulk of a game will be compiled through a few key members and projects like this do stem a lot of their success through not only the community submitted work but also from the donations. Furthermore to this there is the serious element of industry recruitment. A lot of the big name games companies now have at least one, if not many, game designers working for them that were directly recruited because of their free game and mod work. An example of this would be the Doom 3 key level designer who was recruited by the company from the maps he made for Doom 2 all those years ago. A simple boy creating simple yet interesting maps for one of his favourite computer games he now resides within the pay roll of one of the worlds leading games studios.