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."

Comments

Re:Whats with the console obsession?

[Anonymous Coward]

You can publish to XBOX without getting microsofts approval.

http://creators.xna.com/en-US/

The XNA Creators Club allows you to develop games for PC and XBOX 360.

You can then publish the games to the 360 and charge points for them.
(they get reviewed by the community to ensure that they do not contain bad things).

XNA is a managed wrapper around direct X that provides a nice layer of abstraction.

(Also I would like to quickly say that the Farseer physics engine is very nice).

Joopsy.