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Indies also sell their music, and anyone who professes to hate the RIAA should be sure to buy music from indie performers.

Or better still, just listen to SongFight!s http://songfight.org/

Jack Thompson is the crazy guy who's on a personal crusade against video games. He thinks those young whipersnappers will imitate them and go around stealing cars and shooting hookers, or jumping on turtles or something. Involved in lots of high profile cases (Grand Theft Auto ring any bells?) and has tried to have legislation pushed in several states to restrict sales of certain games. Rants on national TV, interviews with the press. Was the inspiration for this song. Has been covered on Slashdot multiple times. Involved in a legal skirmish with Penny Arcade, threatening to have them arrested because they donated to a charity in his name. Much, much, more.

I'd link all that stuff to the relevant articles, but I'm feeling lazy today. I'll give you a head start, though.

comparing an orange to a Ferrari 911

A Ferrari 911? Did Ferrari buy Porsche and not tell anyone? :)

Great and lots of programmers (oh yeah sure, just 'buy the engine', don't give me that)

Why not go buy an engine? Get one or two good programmers, get a cheap engine from someone like Garage Games, and focus on your real assets. The market is going more and more towards splitting into "engine developers" and "game developers". Id rarely even builds games anymore, preferring to focus on their engine creation (they work with third parties like Grey Matter or Raven to build games like Enemy Territories and Quake IV). Epic focuses on building the Unreal technology while letting 2nd and 3rd parties like Digital Illusions and Ubisoft build games around them. There's nothing wrong with licensing technology, and you're probably better off for doing so (you can get more and better technology than what you would be able to develop while trying to make a game to make money at the same time).

Great script

Great gameplay (so difficult to pinpoint and define, isn't it?)

I would argue these are the same thing. If your gameplay is RPG-style, you need an excellent script. If your gameplay is something like Katamari, script doesn't really matter much.

Great music and sound effects

This really depends on your gameplay. One guy with a mic and the willingness to make stupid sounds with his mouth will get you all of the sound effects you need. Music is harder, and yet easier at the same time. Depending on your game, you may not even need music (I'd rather listen to the sound of the engine in a racing game) or you could allow the player to provide the music. Other games need good music, but that shouldn't be too hard to come by. There are starving musicians everywhere. You just need to find them. Put up posters around the local college campus. Troll the boards online at places like Song Fight or Overclocked Remix. For a minor outlay of cash ($500-$1000 is probably more than enough in most cases), you can get some pretty excellent music for your game.

Great voice actors

I'd really recommend indie developers stay away from voice acting. Nintendo rarely uses it, and everybody loves their games (in fact, when they do use voice acting it's usually annoying. Hey! Listen!). Skip the expense by skipping the voice actors. Of course, you could do it in a humorous way and use your developers as the actors. Don't do this if you're going for "serious"!

Great characters (Deus Ex)

Again, this goes back to script/gameplay. You may not need characters at all if you're building a puzzle game. If you can't come up with great characters while writing your script or designing your gameplay, then you failed on the script or gameplay.

Great graphics (these days... sigh)

Then why does everybody here always say they prefer gameplay to graphics? You really have to think about your target. You're probably not going to be able to compete with the big boys in terms of graphics goo-gawgery, so don't try. You'll need something better than developer art, but not by much.

Multiplayer functionality

Depends on your game. Stardock consciously decided against multiplayer for GalCiv2 and that game is doing very well.

The central theme I've noticed in my replies

We used Bittorrent to host some of the larger Songfight weeks. (Songfight is a semi-weekly music competition where artists / bands / etc compose a song based on a title chosen by the "Fightmaster". The following week, all the compositions are posted and voted-on.) Bittorrent was never used as the primary means of distribution for the songs, but in weeks that the 'fight was 100MB+ it was nice to have a torrent available.

I'm some guy from Idaho. I visited Austin for a few weeks last year to go to the Song Fight concert held there, and I went to the Drafthouse four times, and God damn if that isn't the best theater ever.

I see they've taken down all the mp3 links on the main page to boost CD sales...

Noooooooooooooooooooooo!!!

P.S. Brad Sucks^2. Brad's a nice guy, at least, if seriously outclassed by the Songfight heavyweights (Frontalot, add, JBB, Frankie).

i'm in the same boat i think. i can't recall the last CD i bought..

I can. Modest Mouse's "Good News for People Who Love Bad News." I bought it brand-new for $10 and it's worth 10 times that. I can't even begin to tell you how much I love it. Do I feel bad for supporting the RIAA (in this case, Sony)? Sure I do. But I'm also supporting a reasonable pricing structure (if everyone only bought CDs for $10, they might catch on and make all CDs $10).

When is the last time some worth buying the entire cd for was featured on TRL?

I don't know about TRL, but I saw the video for "Float On" on MTV the other day. It's SO worth buying the whole album. EVERY SINGLE SONG (except maybe Dance Hall) kicks ass.

Sure, I like to support indies too. Especially some of the quality stuff at songfight. But you can't let your principles make you shoot yourself in the foot. Not everything on MTV sucks. Just 99% of it.