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The Future of Independent Game Development
The Guardian's Games Blog has an article discussing where indie game development will go in the next few years after its recent resurgence. The story follows the success of one small game studio, and suggests that the games industry will move to further embrace low-cost development. Quoting:
"The likes of XBLA, ... PSN and WiiWare represent a reasonable revenue stream for publishers and developers, especially with a recession looming. However, in-house staff may not have the skills required to punch out cool, hugely intuitive budget games, with little or no management. If you look at something like Geometry Wars from Bizarre Creations, the project was started in the free time of experienced coder Stephen Cakebread, and may never have happened had he been shunted on to different, larger projects. Instead, big industry players are reaching out to the indie scene to source talent."
A damp basement stagnant with a combination of undeodorized armpits, sour cream and onion chips, and cheetos where a small 15" TV is hooked up to a greasy VHS deck playing reruns of Sailor Moon and Big O. The whole area, whose size is about 110 feet squared, is dimmly lit by a single incandecent bulb but is overpowered by 6 or so glowing CRTs. The floors are littered with montain dew cans but you can find a single can of diet coke which once meant a 400 lb developer or editor was "trying to lose weight".
On one side of the tiny slashdot basement, which shares a corporate overloard of VA Linux (the ficticious business name for the lead editor's mother) are the editors which spend most of their time leeching stories from Arstechnica and Digg. The editor's work process involves taking submissions and fact checking them against wikipedia. Once a submission is fact checked an editor takes the time to deliberately misspells or entirely mangles the summary while at the same time throwing in a missleading link to a sponsor. This process is entirely time consuming usually taking 4-6 hours per submission since editors use 386DX machines with 4-8MB of ram. This can sometimes explain why articles are posted 72 hours after the rest of the world has read and commented on the subject elsewhere.
The other side of the room are the slashdot developers. There is really only about 2 or 3 developers but their obesity problem allows them to get counted twice and get 2 payroll checks. The working day of a developer involves 15 minutes of javascript and perl programming and 4 hour breaks to watch UFO hunters on Sci Fi. On the perl side of the development, most slashdot developers look at how to get every last bit of performance out of their 1 mySQL server running on a 350 mhz G4 Mac by running an SQL query through a loop for about 150000 times. This often explains why it takes 12-16 minutes to submit a comment on the story pages. Being on the forefront of Web 2.0, many (read 2) of their developers push AJAX to the next level by using xmlhttprequest() to download linux ISOs and store them secretly on the page on every page view creating the illusion that slashdot javascript is actually beneficial to their website.