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Osmos by Hemisphere Games http://www.hemispheregames.com/osmos gives players an intuitive understanding of Newton's laws of motion and orbital mechanics. It's a great, non-mathematical introduction to physics.

Many of those games were roughly equivalent to indie games these days, in terms of the amount of manpower required to produce them.

So ... what has the march of time brought us?

Firstly, inflation. The price of a loaf of bread in 1980 was £0.33, in 1990 £0.50 ; now it's more like £1, so prices have roughly doubled for the essentials of living.

An A-list title in the mid 80s would have been something like Elite ; I remember paying £15 for it (on cassette tape). The package was a robust cardboard box, with the cassette, a manual, a novella, a reference card, etc. I remember getting other games in just the standard plastic cassette box for less.

Elite was originally the product of just two programmers ; although it spawned a large number of conversions and a few unsuccessful sequels.

Right now, I can see Elder Scrolls : Skyrim listed for £29.99 . This is similarly, an A-list title of it's age. The quantity of man effort to produce it has no doubt been enormous. There is no doubt that you are getting a product that contains far, far more content than Elite, which used procedural generation for the bulk of it's content. Being silly ; you are getting around 300,000 times as much game (considering data volumes) - although it's probably more fair to rate it in terms of the hours of gameplay you get before being bored.

So, an A-list PC title seems to be priced about the same as it was in 1985, accounting for inflation, even though it probably cost several orders of magnitude more to produce.

Part of this is accountable in terms of duplication costs - it's cheaper to duplicate optical disks in a standard box than it ever was to duplicate floppy disks and cassettes. Part of it is the expansion of the market ; back then, a computer was a niche item - I had to walk to the next town to buy that copy of Elite. These things really go a long way to compensate for the fact that making games is MUCH more expensive than it used to be. You could knock out a feature-parity copy of Elite pretty quickly these days - modern programming tools would make it a cinch to achieve what you used to have to do manually in assembler or even raw 6502 machine code, and the plentiful resources a modern computer has means you wouldn't have to resort to dirty little tricks like changing screen modes in the middle of a raster frame so you could have a display that was monochrome, but high res at the top, and colour but low res at the bottom.

Even indie developers have to produce a product that is visually and aurally much more polished than anything from the 80s or 90s if they want to succeed. When you look at something beautifully simple like Osmos, you do wonder how they manage to sell that for a price that is, inflation included, around a quarter what you used to pay for a game in the 80s, given the level of artistry involved.

I agree with your observation that with the advent of CD-ROM, publishers went a little mad, and desperately sought ways to get "value for money" out of all that storage space they weren't using - they went from having perhaps 10MB to play with (if your game shipped on 15 floppies, not uncommon), to having 700MB. Hence the "Full Motion Video" crapfests of that period.

Where did the games like "Tetris" or "Lemmings", with a simple, but fascinating idea, that keeps you countless hours playing, go?

They are still there, you just won't find them at $large_retailer. Try searching the indy game sites.

For example, I wasted hours of my life playing Osmos. Simple like tetris and just as addictive. It can also be totally relaxing on the levels were you aren't racing against another organism.

Plus, the levels are totally repayable.

More like Osmos

humm... lets change some words:

A lot of people are exactly the same with anything about torture; *they* don't want anyone tortured because *they* feel it's unacceptable for for people to use it and that it will have a negative effect on innocent persons because it goes against what they believe in. It never occurs to them that *other* people might be quite happy to apply torture without any issues at all and just see it as their duty to protect everyone.

see... it also sound bad... unless you are ok with torture or if you are Jorge Bush

The problem with closed drivers and apps is that they don't affect just you, they affect everyone, just like the torture.

If fully permitted we will get a mess of closed drivers, full of bugs and incompatibilities (see windows drivers) and no incentive whatsoever for hardware builders to release open drivers, propagating bug and problems that anyone can fix. Every driver would need to be reverse engineering, taking too much resources and time... Linux would still be in 2.0 probably, not even talking about *bsd, BeOS, OpenSolaris, etc... those would be without any driver unless those reserve engineered

Your freedom stop where the other people freedom start, you CAN use whatever close source drivers you want, do whatever you like in your machines. Other choose otherwise.we lose games? its sad, but i prefer having a stable and fast platform, games will came sooner or later.

ps: there are already many native, funny linux games, you just dont have the main, blockbuster ones.
ps2: the main problem today for linux games isnt the hardware support, but the lack of standard in window managers, sound and others... check http://www.hemispheregames.com/2010/05/18/porting-osmos-to-linux-a-post-mortem-part-23/ for one example (there are others)... LSB specially need to work better and not just think in server, but also for user. Create something like directx package, where several standard tools and libs for video, network, sound, input, etc exist and check all the requirements for games to use then... it helped a lot the games in windows (before directx, windows games also had to battle each one with all the apps and libs)

Here is one page...granted, Linux is only 5%, but it's not the 0.05% that some people will claim.
Here is another. The percentages here are much more impressive, with Linux share at just about 25%.
Here is a blog post by Hemisphere games about the viability of supporting Linux.

I'd say it's worth it. I may be a little biased, of course (I don't have any windows machines)...but whenever I hear about an upcoming game with Linux support I preorder it immediately.

PC gaming is back for me... I'm thoroughly enjoying Osmos. Best ten bucks I've spent in gaming since getting World of Goo and a bunch of others and some of their code (effectively) in the Humble Indie Bundle for the same amount (hey, I paid nearly twice the average.) And several other parenthesized statements.

I don't think linux will become a more profitable platform to target than windows for major game houses in any sort of foreseeable future, but I think that graph from the article makes a pretty strong case for indie developers to target linux.

Good news for indy developers (who now have a larger potential audience), and of course good news for linux users.

And if you have a few $ left after this (ok 10 of them), have a look at Osmos also. Great game, Linux + DRM free etc. http://www.hemispheregames.com/2010/04/28/linux-osmos-release/

I'm not concerned with the difficulty involved, either from an administrative POV, or a technical POV. In effect, Amazon is doing business in my county, so it's up to them to comply with the tax laws in my county. And, they are also effectively doing business in New York City, Seattle, Miami, Anchorage, Bangor, and Los Angeles. They OWE it to each of those jurisdictions to collect, then submit, the proper sales taxes.

That's a great way to put huge numbers of small businesses out of business. You know all the home businesses selling stuff on the internet. For example, http://store.schlockmercenary.com/ , http://www.hemispheregames.com/osmos/ , etc (I have no idea if those are both US based, but just pretend).

And an incentive for big players to move overseas completely.

Both just what the US economy needs.

The images on the official website aren't loading (probably slashdotted already), but even if they were, I don't think I'd have had a very good sense of what this game looks like without a video.

Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBXpNpwDFzw
Gameplay: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EneQefAchHQ

Reminds me a little of another recent independent game, Osmos. Check it out at http://www.hemispheregames.com/osmos/

someones been playing Osmos too much.