Danish independent developer Deadline Games has focused exclusively on creating games for over a decade now having grown out of what was formerly an internationally recognized television production house. It is best known for 2005’s Total Overdose, an over-the-top action shooter inspired by Robert Rodriguez’s Desperado trilogy, as well as last year’s Chili Con Carnage, a spin-off for PSP.

Last month the studio announced it was hard at work on Faith and a .45, a third person shooter that will tell the story of two outlaw lovers against the backdrop of the Great Depression. Set to focus heavily on characters, co-operative gameplay, road movie storytelling and cinematic aesthetics, it’s bound for Xbox 360, PS3 and PC, hopefully, Mottes tells Next-Gen, as the challenges facing independent developers trying to get next-gen games to market continue to mount.

First and foremost, says Mottes, the pure cost risk factor faced by an independent developer, where one failure can break a studio, is a key hurdle to be negotiated. “[The cost] just to develop the concept to a point where publishers will take an interest is huge.” Factor in the “safety net of having your own technology”, as Deadline does, “and that increases the cost incredibly. By the time you’re presenting a project [to prospective publishers] on a next-gen platform you’re spending at least a couple of million dollars as a studio.

“An evolution needs to happen in the industry in order to support independent developers working on next-gen consoles,” Mottes argues. “I had hoped that by this point the financial pressures of next-gen development and the fact that more and more publishers are becoming publicly traded would have meant that publishers would start to see the sense, as the film industry did many years ago, in having independent developers that are actually profitable and have a good chance of surviving.”

Mottes says that applying film industry funding models to the games business would allow companies to finance more efficiently, to carry out “risk management in the sense of bonding productions or insuring productions against delays or failure in production". He believed that “the attractiveness of that to a listed company like EA or Activision would have started to influence the industry’s business models” to a greater degree by now.

"I have to worry about the fact that this industry is so immature commercially that it sticks hard and fast to a model which crushes the innovative independents forces. Looking at the consolidation that has happened and the number of innovative studios that have been bought up or have been forced to sell through the financial model that exists in the industry, I worry that the big publishers really don’t understand the value of independent development to the industry and to their own futures. I think that if they really did an analysis of the origination of the big revenue drivers in the last ten years that they would in fact find that a lot of that revenue, IP innovation or development growth has come from independents that have then been bought up. 

“The movie industry many years ago realized that you need to sustain an independent development environment in order to rejuvenate yourself and the book industry has always understood that you can’t sign up a whole lot of novelists, put them in a factory and get them to sit and write books.

“As entertainment products become more and more complex and commercially onerous you need to build models that allow for the existence of those independent forces that create the IPs, that you can then buy up and exploit and sequelize or whatever you want to do with them, but if you kill those independents you’re going to end up making yourself a slave to other industries.”