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"Do crazy shit" - What indie developers can learn from the music industry

"Do crazy shit" - What indie developers can learn from the music industry

Smaller developers should do out there projects.

That's according to Arnold Nesis from Capricia Productions who today at Devcom gave a talk comparing the games industry to the music business.

The studio CEO and co-founder said that the bands that changed the world are generally the ones who went against the grain and were initially rejected by the mainstream.

"Do crazy shit - this is what indies are supposed to do," he said.

"If we go back to the music industry and look at which artists actually made it, we see some really cool patterns. Here are some critics talking about a band: 'They are not merely awful...They are so unbelievably horrible, so appallingly unmusical, so dogmatically insensitive to the magic of the art, that they qualify as crowned heads of antimusic'. That was said about The Beatles.

"The amazing thing is that this story keeps repeating itself over and over again. It happened to every good musician ever - it's not just bands we like, it's bands that changed the course of history and did something dramatic that changed music forever. Jazz was seen as inferior to classical music. Rock was the music of the devil. And metal... well, they were eating bats and stuff. There is a reason why this keeps repeating.

He continues: "Art, at the end of the day, can only be taught backwards. You can only teach what has been done and what works - you cannot teach what works tomorrow. People try again and again and fail because no-one can predict [the future]."


PCGamesInsider Contributing Editor

Alex Calvin is a freelance journalist who writes about the business of games. He started out at UK trade paper MCV in 2013 and left as deputy editor over three years later. In June 2017, he joined Steel Media as the editor for new site PCGamesInsider.biz. In October 2019 he left this full-time position at the company but still contributes to the site on a daily basis. He has also written for GamesIndustry.biz, VGC, Games London, The Observer/Guardian and Esquire UK.