Watch out EA, Foundation 9 is behind you

The last paragraphs are, without a doubt, some of the stupidest I've ever read. There are hundreds of developers around hte world with hundreds of staff in them This isn't uncommon.

I would question whether or not Foundation9 is indie as it stands.

Have you seen the games these guys make? These guys are about as "indie" as Nickelback.

To lump them in with the guys that make "indie" games and distribute them on their own is an insult to real indies.

And the last paragraph is, as 1 said, one of the dumber entries in recent memory on this site.

In other news...EA buys Foundation 9 after reading post on Joystiq.

The brand may be obscure but an operation with a head count in the hundreds and over a dozen projects in progress can hardly be described as 'indie.' A brief examination of their site shows this is about as far as one can get from the mental image conjured by the use of 'indie.'

"how big can you get before you lose that indie badge?"

Well, if the 'indie badge' is just what people call them, that's impossible to quantify (that last guy who tried was crushed to death by a wrinkle in spacetime). If, instead, you mean something like 'how big can you get before you lose the indie flavor of treating employees well and producing original games?' then that question is easy. As soon as you go public and sell stock, it's over. That's true of any company. Going public exposes the company to investment bankers working for investment firms, and those guys will destroy your stock price (and therefore your company) if you don't make money at a ridiculous pace. The only way to get to that pace is by screwing your employees and scamming your customers.

I'm obviously biased since I'm the CEO of Foundation 9, but "independent" simply means not affiliated with a publisher. We get to work on all types of projects with several publishers, as opposed to being in house and working on one type of project forever.

We're relatively big compared to other independent developers, but we're still an order of magnitude smaller than major publishers, and it's simply hard to make games across all platforms and invest in your technology without more people and more resources.

In terms of taking care of people, one of the advantages of a big company is that we can attract better benefits providers and offer more career options across the company.

It's definitely hard to maintain an "independent spirit" in the sense that these postings mean as you get bigger, but we're trying to give authority and control to our studio heads and not muck with the creativity while we run the business. I'm sure we'll make mistakes along the way but I do think it's funny that many people's ideal vision of an independent developer is the small, vulnerable studio. Our side of the industry deserves to have big players too without in any way saying that it's bad to be small.

One final point: it's not our strategy to amass power in order to threaten our publishers. That would be stupid. We want to be able to invest more of our resources into our development tools and IP, which theoretically should create new business opportunitites for ourselves and our publishers. We'll see how well the experiment turns out compared to the theory!