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You want suggestions for an aspiring game designer? You got me, you'd be better off asking an existing game designer. Here's what thirty seconds on Google found me:

http://www.gamecareerguide.com/features/522/entrylevel_video_game_.php?page=3

OK, let's assume I want to work for the establishment should the Ouya console not pan out. I want to make a good first impression, not an egregiously poor one that would get me on an industry blacklist. Google video game programmer portfolio led me to "How to Make a Game Programming Demo Portfolio" by Lee Winder, which recommends complete games in both 2D and 3D, even if not lengthy, with the expected menus, installers for all dependencies, source code, screenshots, videos, and full credits for any collaborative effort. The next page gives tips on how to build a CD or web site. But I seem to remember that before, you told me that some kinds of games could reflect negatively on my skill, and I wonder what else to watch out for. Where would you recommend asking next? I guess I could ask game companies' HR departments what they want to see in a junior programmer's portfolio.

Game developers don't generally try to stop crackers entirely, that would be futile; their main goal is to delay the crackers for long enough that the developer makes back most of its money early enough after the game's release (e.g. a few months). Cf. an old 'classic' Gamasutra article: Keeping the Pirates at Bay. The crackers may always eventually "win" in your terms but I'm not sure what they've "won" exactly.

This article is a bad rehash of a 2004 Gamasutra article. It doesn't improve much on that article, although it should. There are some significant issues to explore here.

A good starting issue is the relationship between graphical viewpoint and literary viewpoint. In some games, the player has exactly the viewpoint of the character they're controlling. In others, the player is a step back from the character graphically. Tomb Raider is an example. Note that in Tomb Raider, you're controlling Lara Croft, but you're not her, as her commentary makes clear.

Looking out from the character's viewpoint creates the problem that the player sometimes needs a bigger field of view than the screen provides. There have been a few attempts to fix this problem with VR-type hardware, but those are rare, and if you've ever played a game in full gloves-and-goggles VR gear, you know why. Providing view-direction controls is usually painful for gameplay. That's what drives game designers towards a remote viewpoint.

This is completely independent of the literary viewpoint. There are games where the user is the character, there are games where the user drives the character, and there are games like the Sims where the user can only influence the character. These are literary conventions, independent of the graphical viewpoint. There seems to be a convention that if your viewpoint is from the character's eye position, you are the character. Once the viewpoint takes a step back, the possibility of some disassociation from the character is opened up.

Now consider shared virtual worlds with avatars. In Second Life, your avatar is you - no question. Most MMORPGs are like that. Why? Because you're held responsible for the acts of your avatar. If you're a jerk in Second Life, it has consequences. Life in Everquest has duties; when your guild is raiding, you're expected to be there fighting with them.

All this is well known in the game design community. The article doesn't really capture the subtle issues.

1. Do your research. Your question is a good one, but is asked and answered constantly in the games industry. Check the industry sites for relevant info.
http://www.gamasutra.com/
http://www.gamecareerguide.com/
etc etc

Yeah, the games industry doesn't buy ideas. I'd recommend befriending a programmer in the industry and just making the game together, then enter it in a couple of competitions (e.g. the Indie Games Festival one), and start selling it. If it's genuinely a great game it'll rise to the top and publishers will take notice.

Easier to find a programmer who's keen to work on an indie game if you're already in the industry, but there are also "matchmaking" sites for this sort of thing, everyone needs artists too!

The market disagrees with you: http://www.gamecareerguide.com/features/266/are_yo u_in_demand_2006_game_.php

I'd tend to agree that there are a lot of hobbyist game programmer out there - probably because there are a pretty large pool of general programmers, and game programming is something that many people like to dabble in. The number of LaMothe books seems to confirm this as well, as these are typically targetted at the amateur market. But characterizing game programmers as "dime-a-dozen" is way off the mark.

One trend that's been interesting to note is that the non-programmer-to-programmer ratio has been steadily increasing over the past decade. The first game I developed required three full-time programmers and one part-time artist. My current company employs over a hundred developers, but only 25 of those are programmers. We have about 50 artists of various flavors (character, prop, world, concept, effects, cutscene, etc). We employ several full-time writers, and well as a dozen game designers and scripters, a small QA team, and a couple of audio guys. The rest are involved in other miscellany - localization, production, etc.

I'd say this is probably a pretty typical ratio for most game development companies. In general, with the increase in processing power comes expectation of filling the world with high-definition content - meaning large expenditures of resources for story, graphics, and audio. We're still coming to grips with the production challenges of this sort of content. While next-generation engines are a relatively straightforward matter to develop, the *real* challenge is creating next-generation content-building tools, allowing the art teams to do more for less. The current games are largely solving the content problem with a combination of brute force and slightly-improved tools. A considerable amount of both programming and content for games is still painstakingly hand-crafted. So, with all of this, you might expect me to claim that development cost sets the price... Partially correct, but it's not the full answer.

Other factors include: willingness of consumer to pay a specified price (Sony may have inadvertently discovered the consumer's upper limit), size of market, and general rate of consumption. There's pretty fierce competition in the industry, though, so if there was some magic bullet answer to getting costs down, I think we'd have seen it by now. My guess is that the numbers simply require this cost in order to have any reasonable chance of making a consistent profit.