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Game Companies Prepare for Next Console War
domanova writes "The BBC has an article up about the difficulties games companies will face in the next round of the console war. I don't play games, and my programming is in a different world, but the last lines of the article struck a cord. "Mr Hasson said games developers were beginning to realise that they had to be more business-like. 'There are still some developers who were involved in games from the bedroom coding days.
Some of them are still making games for peer group approval - that has to stop.'"
Developing games is becoming harder and harder to do for small developers.
That's just not true though. Developing games that appeal to gamers who are interested into shooting their friends from the first person perspective with cutting-edge detail is harder, yes. There are plenty of small developers that continue to do just fine by appealing to those of us who are more interested in gameplay though.
If you want to make a high profile game that is going to sell millions of copies, you can go Hollywood and take your chance that your non-movie-licensed title will be the one in twenty to make it, or you can concentrate on a smaller audience and overall game quality you can respect yourself in the morning and probably put food on the table...
The reason we're seeing comments like this is not because the independant game developer has gone away, but because as the games market has grown and tons of marketing dollars have been poured into the market, the smaller developers have slipped off the radar. Remember that the journalistic machine is lubricated with cash... I'd bet more people play independant games than mainstream games (think about all those flash games, PDA games, etc...), but the trade rags only write about the ones that produce advertising dollars.