How TV network AMC is seeking to support overlooked indies
When thinking about AMC's involvement in the industry, you'd be forgiven for immediately picturing how it has licensed its star franchise, The Walking Dead, to several game studios over the years.
But that's not its only foray into games. The company actually also runs an indie publisher, headed by (and composed entirely of) AMC Networks director of games Simon Ferrari.
"I started at AMC seven years ago as a freelancer, working mostly on The Walking Dead mobile games," he tells GamesIndustry.biz. "But a little-known thing about AMC is that their approach to the new media landscape is to become an aggregate of boutiques instead of a big, monolithic service."
Ferrari mentions that AMC does "a lot of indie stuff" on the film and TV side, from operating American TV channel IFC (dedicated to independent films) and the IFC Film Center in New York, to co-organising the Sundance Film Festival, or running horror movie distribution service IFC Midnight.
"For basically anything smaller than Disney, Warner Brothers, and now Netflix, making games at a TV network means licensing, because most people at the company don't know how to build a games studio. When much bigger companies than AMC have tried, it's been disastrous. We were a sleepy little licensing department, just myself and one other person. But because AMC does operate all of these indie film production companies and distribution companies, I thought it would make sense if we worked on indie games.
"And so, four years ago, we did our first game, which was kind of local people I knew in the New York indie game development scene. That was called Airplane Mode, which is just a game where you sit on an airplane for six hours. And then, our first international collaboration
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