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Why would high production budgets be the anthesis of gaming? By their very nature of being basically fixed development, free reproduction, hudge budgets are to be expected. Besides, a year's worth of Star Trek TNG cost in the 8 figures, why would a year's worth of game development be any different?

BTW, with very specific exceptions when you put your game out to the worldwide development community you get crap. Even Art and music resources will need to be edited the heck out to get them to fit with your game in a way that a local artist would just know. Sure, you might find a cohesive, great group in the middle of nowhere ready to create an awesome interactive experience, but then you haven't moved to the Bazaar, you're just moved the Cathedral. Aesthetic experiences are difficult to create and require high team cohesion, great forward planning, and lots of focused revisions. Generally, outsourced software does not provide a great aesthetic experience.

And freed from the shackles of megabuck production costs and the time-to-market issues that they create, I have no doubt that novelty in games will start to flourish again.

There is nothing stopping what you describe now, and in fact shareware developers have been doing just that for years. Many people do independent game development, and some of them hit it big. Some of them do it overseas. Some of them make a living from it, or facilitating others. It hasn't torn down the cathedral, because some people really just want to play a football game with super realism. Or the year's most massive RPG. And yet the little guys have been surviving for years in this market.

I don't think time-to-market is as big a deal as people make it out to be. The world, and the market, won't be that different in two years. It certainly wasn't that different two years ago.

Nice imagery in your post though.

What, with a developer's website this good?

We combine stong management ( with our Santa Monica, CA based headquarters ) with superb creative, yet non expensive development teams in Russia. This allows our clients to cut development expenses 3-5 times comparing to cost of local European or US development team or employees. At same time we provide instant feedback to our clients, thanks to our management offices in Los Angeles and London.

And, apparently, their writing is outsourced to Bangladesh. But hey, I'm not going to knock them for striving to provide best of gaming technologies to interactive entertainment industry. I will, however, point out that they don't list any of the games they have done on their "games" page, nor do they reference a single one on their website (they've only done Big Rigs), which BTW is almost straight HTML but doesn't work without I.E. And it is 6 pages long. And two of those pages are blank and one is 404.

At least this proves that my job is secure, for a little while. That is unless someone else can virtually garantee to their customers that they'll won't found term that will be more suitable for them. Or won't garantee. I'm not entirely sure which is bad for me.

You clearly have no understanding of the game development process. At all.

Hiring some "U.S. coder buddies" and some "Russian artists" is not the way to make a game that you can "sell like hotcakes." It is the way to make a game like Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing, which has the distinction of being the *only* game in the history of Gamespot to recieve a 1.0. For your reference, the developer's website is at Stellarstone.com.

There are several problems with this, but it boils down to a couple of key points:

1) Making games with today's technology is very hard in the amount of time allotted to development. Basically, you have one and a half to two years to rewrite *every component of a game.* Every time we write a new engine, we reinvent the camera. We reinvent user input, and a method of displaying that UI to the user. A new networking protocol, graphics engine, AI, physics, oh yeah, and game mechanics. Considering that there are entire companies devoted to developing each of these components, and have teams comparable or larger then we have for an entire game, one can see that it is non-trivial. Writing a typical game engine requires not one or two coders, but a team full of them (typically 10-20 for a medium to large title).

2) Making games is an iterative process. This is what *really* kills overseas development, and why I feel my job (I'm a graphics programmer) is pretty secure for at least the forseeable future. You can't plan out every aspect of your game. You can plan how you think it will work, and you can implement it. But if you don't leave time in your schedule to rework that when you are done, your game will suck. Designers and artists regularly come to my desk and ask me to help them prototype something. They need code support to try something different out in game. And they need it *now.* They can't wait 24 hours everytime they need some little piddily task completed so that they can see how something works.

You say that the common US developer is shoddy, and this I cannot disagree with. But the common US game developer is far from shoddy. We work hard, and we work smart. And we are paid well for what we can do because few others can do it (in what other IT field can you expect to make 75K with two years of experience?) Out of the 30 or so coders whom I've worked closely with on various projects, only two have been useless. And both of them have since left the game industry because it was too hard for them.

You may not believe me. After all, what do I know? But John Carmack gave a speech at GDC this year which pretty much touched on the points that I made above.

Here's an example of outsourcing being a Bad Thing (TM):

Bigs Rigs: Over the Road Racing has been hailed as the worst game ever, and that seems to have been outsourced to a company called Stellar Stone, LLC. Stellar Stone offers several services, including that "Your music theme can be performed by top Eastern European Orchestras" (which would be fine, except that In Soviet Russia, your music performs the orchestra).

Their website also says:
Unlike many development companies, we do not charge our clients on per hour basis.
Ah, I guess that would explain why it seems like they spent as little time as possible on Big Rigs.

There is an option on the main menu to view the credits, but when you click this option, the game either displays a blank screen or mysteriously crashes. I guess nobody wants to take credit for it!

This kind of thing is not a good sign for the video game industry.

Well, here's what one company that outsourced development unleashed upon the world.

A review of the "game".

The developer's "services" on their website: link

I believe This might be a good example of what outsourcing games will get you...

-B

A quote from the developer website:

The highest technical caliber of Stellar Stone developers coupled with low offshore Russia-based engineering costs gives us sustainable competitive edge to employ more and higher quality engineers than a typical US company can afford, staff up projects faster, put more developers on a project for a better gameplay value and graphics visuals. For our customers that transfers into richier product feature set at the same price point.

COMPANY

Stellar Stone Group is a full-service game development outsourcing company that manages the creative pool of designers, artists, programmers and Internet technologies specialists. Our company was founded in late 2000 to provide development services and technology licensing to interactive entertainment industry.

Since that date we not only completed number of projects for clients such as BMG Records, Sony Pictures, Heineken/Amstel, Microsoft but also developed massive game engine technology that allow us to cut expenses associated with game development up to 5 times.

MISSION

We strive is to provide our clients with best of gaming technologies and cut their development expenses, allowing them to concentrate on product rather than on technology hustles of development. We are capable of doing large scale sophisticated technological projects, utilizing the best technologies and guarantee customer satisfaction.

We combine stong management ( with our Santa Monica, CA based headquarters ) with superb creative, yet non expensive development teams in Russia. This allows our clients to cut development expenses 3-5 times comparing to cost of local European or US development team or employees. At same time we provide instant feedback to our clients, thanks to our management offices in Los Angeles and London.

Please check our Services to get more information on our offerings, standarts (sic) and procedures.

ADVANTAGE

The highest technical caliber of Stellar Stone developers coupled with low offshore Russia-based engineering costs gives us sustainable competitive edge to employ more and higher quality engineers than a typical US company can afford, staff up projects faster, put more developers on a project for a better gameplay value and graphics visuals. For our customers that transfers into richier product feature set at the same price point.

...it does make you wonder about how people actually get the funding doesn't it...