How independent video game developers won a place at the top table

Jesse Rapczak left his job helping design the HoloLens headset, one of the most ambitious Microsoft projects in decades, to fill what he thought was an obvious gap: the lack of a great dinosaur video game. A year later, his bet has clearly paid off.

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Rapczak’s team – five people working in the Seattle area, a few dozen more working as far afield as Egypt – created Ark: Survival Evolved. It has sold more than 2.4 million copies.

The crazy part? It’s not finished. “It took a lot of people by surprise,” Rapczak says. “Us included.”

Welcome to the new world of game design, where a pocket-size office full of coders, artists and a good idea can produce a hit in a few months.

During the holiday season’s surge in video-game sales, blockbuster titles produced by big studios, some at a cost of more than US$100 million, topped the charts. These games included the likes of Electronic Arts’ Fifa , Activision’s Call of Duty and Microsoft’s latest Halo sci-fi shooter.

But with the help of increasingly sophisticated game-building software and easier access to distribution tools, independent studios are playing a more prominent role in the business.

The number of publishers creating games for Sony’s PlayStation and Microsoft’s Xbox platforms last year was up 49 per cent from a year earlier, according to EEDAR, a video-game market research company in California. Steam, a computer-game distribution platform owned by Valve, saw a 62 per cent increase in its own game tally, EEDAR estimates.

The Seattle area has been a focus of the video-game industry for decades. Nintendo’s North American unit and Microsoft are neighbours, the anchor tenants of a community also home to big studios such as Valve, Big Fish and PopCap. A host of smaller studios are clustered in a few Seattle neighbourhoods, along with a small but growing network of virtual reality companies.