Heather Chaplin learns how amateur game makers are finding their way into mainstream.

The financial world has gone to hell. Housing prices are crumbling and the credit crisis makes the word “crisis” sound like a euphemism. It‘s too bad you can‘t invest in depression or unemployment because they‘re the only areas making gains after 20 years of optimism and growth. In other words, this is no time for pipe dreams of making the indie game that will change the medium forever — if only you had the contacts to get it distributed. Wait on that for a couple of years, common wisdom says — we‘re too busy stuffing our mattresses to play your game.

Oddly, however, at just this moment in time hundreds of amateur and independent game makers are seeing their road in. And the change that‘s too big for them to ignore, tanked economy or not, comes from big-name companies Microsoft and Apple. These gatekeepers are giving away their software tools — the tools that allow developers to make games on the companies‘ proprietary systems — for free as downloads, and then they‘re offering the games (and, in Apple‘s case, other kinds of applications) for sale in their own online stores, with the makers getting the bulk of the profit. Imagine if studios started giving away film equipment and theater owners started making their screens available for anyone who made a movie.

Okay, what is going on exactly? Well, this past spring, Apple opened its iPhone Developer Program, which meant that anyone could download Apple‘s software development kits (software to help developers code, check for bugs, and take advantage of all the features of the hardware) to create applications and games for the iPhone and the iPod Touch. Make your game, pay a $99 membership fee to the iPhone Developer Program, and sell your game on Apple‘s Web site, in iTunes and on the iPhone itself. In just two months this fall, amateur Steve Demeter earned $250,000 with a puzzle game called Trism that he developed himself and Apple sold for $5 a pop.

The iPhone is one thing; however, the three major game consoles are another. Traditionally getting a game on one of the consoles — today, the PlayStation 3, the Xbox 360 and the Wii — meant spending hundreds of thousands of dollars in development and, perhaps even more of a deterrent, getting past the executives who green-lit games and who are not generally known for their love of taking risks on unusual projects. This most recent generation of consoles has been a big step forward for indie game makers because they all have downloadable services, which means the companies need lots of smaller games to fill their channels. But now Microsoft has taken it a step further. It used to be that getting a coveted spot on one of their downloadable services meant slogging through game competitions and crossing your fingers and hoping and praying that your game would be chosen. (Or you could make your game available on some obscure Web site, and simply live knowing that not many people would ever see it and that you‘d certainly never earn a dime off it.) Now, though, Microsoft is following Apple‘s act.

In November, Microsoft opened XNA Community Games on the Xbox 360. Like Apple‘s iPhone program, this lets game makers, for a $99 membership fee, use Microsoft software to create and sell games on the Xbox 360. Unlike Apple, which has the final say in what gets sold through its site, Microsoft has left it to Community Games members to decide what games get promoted to the 360. (Every game is subject to peer review for things like incompetent code, nudity, or copyright infringement.) The game maker even decides his own price — somewhere between $2.50 and $10 — and earns as much as 70 percent of each sale.

Microsoft, of course, claims their program is “revolutionizing the ways games are created and distributed.” Corporate hyperbole aside, the Xbox 360 is in 20 million homes. That‘s a lot of potential viewers for games that would otherwise never see the light of day, and there‘s even a potential paycheck in the bargain. Microsoft launched their Community Games channel with 20 games, and only three weeks later had 76 games. Not all of them are good, but many of them are wonderfully strange — strange in ways that ensure no mainstream publisher would ever pick them up. One example: In the Pit has the player controlling a blind monster hunting with only his ears. The screen is dark, and you can‘t see a thing but instead have to listen for the heavy, frightened breathing from your victims. It‘s unwieldy and confusing, but fascinating — and seeing game makers playing with outside the box ideas and getting those ideas to an audience is heartening to say the least.

Of course, you can be a cynic about the whole thing. In essence, Apple and Microsoft have found a way to offset any risk they‘d incur making experimental games onto the game makers themselves while also insuring they‘ll be there to claim the rewards should any of the games succeed, both in terms of good word-of-mouth and revenue share. In other words, the companies don‘t pay for the failures, but they do cash in on the successes. Still, I can‘t help but think that independent filmmakers would be psyched if a certain number of theaters were suddenly available for peer-reviewed independent movies to be shown — even if they‘d volunteered their time to get their movie made. And indie game makers are as eager for an audience as indie filmmakers.

The irony is that as the whole world begins to question the wisdom of unfettered global capitalism, the indie game scene is becoming a refuge for the ideas of Milton Friedman.