Sonic the Hedgehog producer Takashi Iizuka thinks big-budget game makers could learn a thing or two from indie developers in the same way that major movie studios should be taking notes from this summer’s biggest surprise success stories, Backrooms and Obsession.
The Blue Blur’s trading dizzyingly speedy platforming for co-op puzzles in Sonic Pico Park, an upcoming spin-off game revealed at Summer Game Fest made by the developers behind indie hit Pico Park, naturally.
But Sonic Pico Park is part of a growing trend as AAA publishers increasingly work with indies on some of their big franchises – Ubisoft‘s The Rogue Prince of Persia and Konami‘s Castlevania: Belmont’s Curse come to mind. So when GamesRadar+ had a chance to sit down with Sonic Team’s Iizuka, we had to ask him what makes collaborations with indie teams so attractive.
“I can’t really speak for the other companies and maybe what they’re thinking, but you know, from a Sega perspective, we do realize that making our big titles, it takes a lot of time, a lot of money,” he says via a translator. “It’s a huge investment of, you know, the staff and the resources that we have, and then once you’ve invested all that time and energy into something, you really need to sell a lot of units in order to survive in the industry.”
According to Iizuka, indie developers can instead generate an idea and then “very quickly” execute it before “moving forward and making more stuff.” He reckons that’s a huge lesson larger companies like Sega could “learn from the indie development scene.” Not to mention, it’s “really stimulating working with those indie developers, because you get to feel that that smaller team energy and that quickness of working to get an idea into an experience.”
The Sonic producer then likens the AAA game industry’s problems to what the movie business is going through right now. The summer box office’s biggest story so far is how Disney‘s Mandalorian and Grogu, an expensive Star Wars blockbuster, was pretty easily outperformed by two scrappy horror flicks made by 20-something-year-old directors.
“It’s a little bit a different type of media, but the movie industry is kind of going through similar issues that we in the game industry are going [through],” Iizuka explains, pointing to how studios like Disney are spending hundreds of millions of dollars on bets that will maybe pay off “many, many years from now.”
“But then you see movies like Backroom and [Obsession], these much smaller creative efforts that are still becoming these great successful hits, so I do see a parallel in the movie industry to what’s kind of happening in the game industry with the amount of investment and the actual entertainment that people are consuming and enjoying,” he concludes.
