I'm not sure that I'd call Basecamp a competitor for MS Project, either.
I'm doing work on one project right now that's making use of both. For my purposes, Basecamp is more useful, but I don't see project manager types replacing MS Project or other PM systems with it any time soon. It's just not the same kind of thing.
Question is, what percentage of people using Windows would ever use it? 1%? I doubt it'd even be that many users.
(Disclaimer: I'd be part of the sub-1%. I just don't think it would be used much in the general sense.)
"They should change browsers" is not an acceptable answer. "M$ needs to fix their browser" is.
It's not, though. Not to a paying client who wants the page/app to "just work right" for a majority of their users.
Cross-browser development will probably always suck. God knows, I've done it, and I feel your pain there. That being said, there will always be someone who's willing to do it for less money than it costs a company to alienate the majority of their online business, whether it's you, me, or someone else.
You probably should be happy that random business owners don't have the power to force a browser maker to make the browser work the way they want -- it's not IE they'd be demanding changes in, at least not as long as it manages to remain the mass majority browser.
But what happened after Microsoft Won, was most developers just designed their pages to work with most people and reserved the Microsoft only crap to the intranet, for for the internet pages they used more compatible technology.
Out of curiousity, what are you basing that on?
Every web project I've worked on has had "Must render correctly in IE" as, by far, the biggest priority. Some of the clients also cared that it run correctly in Netscape/FF; most didn't. (None even knew what Opera was.) Most of those were non-intranet sites aimed directly at customers.
It's possible that the clients I worked for in that period were just bizarre anomalies, but I tend to doubt it. The general opinion of said clients has been that whatever IE does is the standard, and if FF doesn't render a page "correctly" that renders in IE "correctly", FF is broken. They either didn't know what standards groups had said, or just didn't give a damn. Market forces are their standards.
I'm guessing that as FF gains market share, most new projects care about correct rendering in FF -- but no serious commercial website development project is going to say "75% of our potential customers can't buy something on our site because it renders funky in IE? Well, screw them. They should change browsers."
He's allowed to have only one e-mail address for the rest of his life, which has no spam filtering. This e-mail address is provided to everyone he spammed, who are encouraged to sign him up for whatever mailing lists they choose.
When did O'Reilly stop being about making quality books and stuff and start being about creating buzzwords and catchphrases (Web 2.0, bleh.) and trademarking them?
There was a time when I'd buy an O'Reilly book to learn a new technology; now I mostly just find resources on the web via Google. I half-seriously wonder if lots of other developers made the same transition and eroded O'Reilly's original and sane-seeming business model.
For a complex enough project (which I'd argue Firefox is), even with a clean, well documented API, there will always be plenty of questions that can be answered better and/or faster by just asking the developers of the API. You can try to anticipate all possible questions in writing API documentation, but you'll never quite get there.
What would be lost if you told everyone before the vote exactly what you were going to do? You could still switch sides and still vote off firends but you could be honest about it and tell them ahead of time. There is still always the chance that this could result in the person you were voting out backstabbing you. However, isn't that always a possibility regardless?
There've been at least a few cases over the many seasons of Survivor wherein someone basically did this, and then got voted out due to the reactive actions of someone they let know they were going to vote against. So, yes, it's always a possibility, but in these cases being honest is like buying a whole bunch more tickets for the getting-screwed raffle.
I'd argue that the optimal strategy seems to be to be honest and be seen as honest as long as possible, and then to stick the knife in someone's back only when absolutely necessary to preserve yourself, either directly or indirectly.
It's strange, I find pondering the best strategies for Survivor more interesting than actually watching the show most of the time. Maybe I finally understand art critics.
There is nothing about game that requires that you have to be dishonest or backstab.
Requires, no. However, you're kidding yourself if you think selective (and that part is crucial) dishonesty is not key to optimal play of the game.
Backstabbing at a crucial moment isn't the only tool in a Survivor player's arsenal. It isn't the only factor in whether you'd win or lose. It is possible to win Survivor without ever lying or backstabbing. But, all that said, if you are unwilling or unable to use that tool, you're choosing to handicap yourself for no good reason. It's like choosing to never run out of bounds or never to punt in (American) football.
Ultimately, I don't think the producers screen out people who won't backstab, because they don't have to. Survivor isn't the Prisoner's Dilemma; everybody can't win by cooperating. You'll get one or two people each season who are just there to hang out and have fun, but because most of the players genuinely want to win the money, they'll play the game as best they can.
This interview mostly seems to be to promote Gold Rush, not that we should be surprised by that.
The bit about Survivor was interesting, but I would have liked to see more discussion about how they tried to change the game over the years to keep up with players who understood its nature.
The most fascinating thing about the first season of Survivor, for me, was that some of the players clearly understood what it would take to win, but many didn't. Starting with the second season and players having seen the game played out once, the game had a very different feel. Reading more about the things they tried to keep it still a thinking game yet unpredictable, what worked and what didn't, would have been cool.
Not all piracy is a bad thing. I mean, software these days is seriously overpriced. You could teach yourself some very basic programming skills (Visual Basic, for instance), and create a program that'll do exactly what the $100+ equivilant does.
So of course people will pirate it. Why? Because it's rediculous to pay for something like that.
I'd be curious to hear what kinds of software you think are that trivial to create.
I can put a garden in my backyard and grow my own vegetables, but I'm still going to jail if I try to take anyone else's.
Another thing that's been happening gradually to make excitement about this possible is the replacement/upgrade of web browsers.
Like many of the other people weighing in, I'd developed web pages with features basically amounting to AJAX years ago. The problem was, especially if you were developing a commercial website, is that there'd still be a decent-sized chunk of people using old-ass browsers that didn't support JavaScript (or who had turned it off.)
Most companies aren't willing to flip even 5-10% (or whatever) of their potential online customers the bird, so what you end up doing is either not creating something AJAX style, or essentially implementing it twice and switching between the two depending on what a user's setup will support.
I haven't seen numbers, but I'd bet there percentage of people using aforementioned old-ass web browsers is a lot lower now than five years ago. Probably, you could get away with having a site that only worked the AJAX way.
At least Google didn't have such high per-user bandwidth and Flash licencing expenses.
Out of curiousity, does anyone know what those Flash licensing expenses actually are?
On one hand, I could see Adobe rubbing their hands together with glee at having a customer that has such a huge need of their proprietary technology.
On the other hand, just about giving any necessary licenses away to encourage the success of YouTube is probably the smartest possible thing Adobe could do. I know a lot of people who never bothered to install/upgrade Flash, but have to watch videos on YouTube or one of its competitors. This kind of web site seems to be the first "killer app" to drive people to Flash in a while.
The problem with this mindset is you think it's okay that the code that is increasingly responsible for running more things that make a country productive is never seen and can't be reviewed except for poking at it in a willy-nilly blackbox style. As a matter of principal I don't think it's okay. At all.
The problem with your mindset is that it's only correct if security is always the most important thing. It's not. The world doesn't work that way.
Microsoft always plays a losing game of catch-up to *nix in the security department, and *nix damn near always plays a losing game of catch-up to MS in the usability department. (There are, of course, many more considerations besides those two.) There are things the open source paradigm consistently does better, and there are things the commercial closed-source paradigm consistently does better. That's reality.
Port 25 has on occasion put out FUD such as claiming Microsoft is doing more to improve security than any other vendor
I'd be curious to hear what vendor the article author thinks is doing more to improve security than Microsoft if this statement is to be decried as FUD, and what kind of metrics/data support this. Amount of exploits patched? Amount of money spent on security?
I mean, even if you think Windows is one giant yawning security hole, that really only says that they have the most room for improvement. I'd be surprised if they're not patching the most holes, affecting the largest number of users, and spending the most money on security -- even if the results are often sad.
If I make $100 million by doing something dirty, and I'm fined or have to settle a case for $10 million as a result, did I really lose?
I could be wrong, but I get the impression that a lot of the Microsoft lawsuits go that way. They "lose", but meanwhile, they've crushed their opposition beyond repair, which overall makes them money.
At this point, I'd be ready for just about anything that let me get away from Visual Studio. I've used it since it was 16-bit, and I've even tolerated all the weird interface changes they've made to the IDE over the years. Through version 7.0, it was pretty much just a matter of re-learning where the things I needed were, which sucks, but whatever. It wasn't a big enough productivity sink to justify switching to something else. But with version 8.0 (a.k.a. Visual Studio 2005), Microsoft has officially lost their minds. They're so determined to push ".NET" and "managed" code down our throats that they've ruined what used to be a really solid development environment.
I don't know, man. It depends on what you're trying to do.
I haven't had cause to write something in C++ since the 1900s. I wouldn't be surprised if VS2005 is ass for the needs of C++ development. If someone took a survey of what people are using VS for, I'm guessing C++ would be less than 10%. There are always going to be projects that demand the speed and power only a language like C++ can provide, but as time goes on I'd bet they're less and less of the big picture.
It's safe to say VS2005 is geared towards.NET and managed code because that's where more of the demand is. For the kinds of projects I've worked on in the last year, it's been a great IDE.
I've not used Basecamp, but I have seen it - I've used Ta-da lists, and whilst functional, it/feels/ overly amateur and unpolished.
As someone currently using Basecamp, you're not far off.
Don't get me wrong -- it's good for what it is, and the price is right. That said, I'd give good odds that in two years, something similar and better will occupy Basecamp's market and mindshare. Sometimes, positive buzz is good for a product; other times, it primarily serves to draw the attention of those able to build a better mousetrap.
In a game like this, what the players say/think they want, and what they players actually will enjoy or what will keep them playing, are generally not the same thing.
Why not? If you hate your job, surely you'd try to do something to improve the situation.
Surely you would. The trick is getting a whole team of people with different priorities and visions to agree on the same something. Moving to a small town to live on savings and develop a game together isn't likely to be it.
People have different degrees of hating their job, and different ideas of what the best thing to do to change it is. Some would rather tough it out and try to get into management to make changes. Some would rather work in another industry than take the chance on the entreprenurial solution. Some people would rather work within the system in other ways. None of these choices are wrong, and none of these people are stupid. They just place value on different things than you do.
Ultimately, the idea of forming a game developers union is a something people could do to improve their situation. It's just not one you like.
Besides, there are advantages to living in a small town. The cost of living is lower, the air is cleaner, the people are friendlier, the criminals are fewer, the schools are better, etc. I wouldn't want to live in a crowded area without a good reason, and chances are there are quite a few people who feel the same way.
Your list of advantages is debatable, but I won't deny there are some. What there aren't are a majority of people currently working in the game industry who feel that way. The reality of how things are at the moment is that a majority of those people are living in or around cities, and they're not miserable doing it. No amount of wishing will change the facts of that.
As for the reasons to play consoles vs. do everything on a computer... a few reasons off the top of my head, and by no means a definitive list:
1) Price. A console costs $100-$200. A gaming PC is much more expensive. Thus, the former is accessable to people the latter isn't.
2) Non-online multiplayer. If you're going to have a handful of friends over to play games, people would generally rather do it in their living room in front of their TV than crowd them around a monitor. For some things, a bigger screen even with a lower graphics quality is better.
3) Different kinds of games. This is pretty much an inertia thing and not something set in stone, but at the moment it's reality. While there's some overlap, different kinds of games are made for computers and consoles. You won't, for example, be playing the latest fighting game on your computer. Thus, people who want to play the kinds of games only available on consoles tend to buy consoles, and because of that, those kinds of games continue to be made for consoles. It's a self-perpetuating cycle. (The converse, of course, is true -- you absolutely wouldn't want to play a game like Civilization or Alpha Centauri on your GameCube.)
4) Ease of set-up/play. If you want to play a Playstation game, you just put it in the PS2 and start playing. If you want to play a computer game, there's installation involved, and possibly drivers or other upgrades to worry about. You don't have to worry about system requirements; if you have the right console, you're good to go. This stuff is easy for people like us; it's not easy for everyone. Some people would rather just play than know how to wrangle a computer. Playing a game is interesting to them and computers in a more general sense might not be. (I can understand this -- the inner workings of my car have zero interest for me. That doesn't mean I'm not interested in driving it.)
The net effect of all of this is that someone who likes to make and play games like, say, Soul Calibur or Mario Kart can't just up and decide to go to the computer game world without making a real shift in what they do.
So move! There are many nice places to live outside of Silicon Valley. If you are self-employed, you don't have to worry about having no jobs in the area, so pretty much any place is game.
And you're going to get a team of thirty people and their families to do that with you. Right. Let's not be completely insane here.
And that's another thing: why would anyone want to play console games?
Why is that everyone is so brainwashed today that they think you need a movie-quality flashy 3D game to be sellable?
I certainly didn't say that.
There's a lot more that goes into making a professional-grade game than you seem to think. Movie-quality 3D flashiness isn't generally a huge part of why.
And that's another thing: why would anyone want to play console games? You have this great high-resolution monitor, and you would rather use a grainy old TV?!? Are you people crazy? Then there are those flimsy controllers; how can you possibly play, say Civilization, with only a joystick and a few buttons?
Why would you want to develop console games? When you do, you have to have a publisher to manufacture them. You need to get shelf placements in some store. You'd have actual manufacturing costs eating your profits. With a PC game all you need is a website from which the game could be bought and downloaded. No fuss, no bother.
I don't see much point in arguing the whys of it. It should suffice to say that this is a billions-dollar industry and, whether or not you choose to recognize it, it's not because all of the people buying or making them are dumber than you.
With all due respect, you're talking about the shift to create a one-person indy computer game, which is a world of difference from what is produced by a full game dev team making a console game (which is more the kind of thing the article is talking about, and the kind of workers it muses about unionizing.)
The start of the discussion you proposed was about talking to your fellow game dev team and convincing them to jump ship to do it independently. That's not really what you're crunching the financials of.
Putting aside that, if you're in that industry, you almost certainly don't live in a low cost area, despite there being a couple exceptions to that rule...
A game as put out by a solo effort isn't really the same kind of thing that is put out by a team of mixed team of thirty or so game designers, creative designers, programmers, and so on. Telling someone they should give up the latter in favor of the former is like telling a guy who isn't happy working as an architect building houses that he should give it up and build doghouses in his backyard. It's just a totally different scale.
The one-man effort also requires that one person be able to wear ALL hats in the game development process. They need to be able to dream up a great idea for the game. They need to be able to do all involved artwork. They need to be able to do all of the programming. If they're not great at all of these things and more, they're probably not going to put out something people will want to play. They're definitely not going to be able to put out a console game that will get past Sony/Nintendo/Microsoft's approval process.
A game of this scope isn't made in a year and it's not made by one person. It generally requires an investment of piles of money and years of time before ANY profit is seen. These things aren't practical to do without financial backing.
I don't deny one person can go off and make a game and possibly make it good, but it's not the same kind of product as a professional console game is these days. That's not to say that it couldn't possibly be more fun or draw more players, but it's not the same kind of product. It's just not. There is always going to be the demand for the polish and depth of the professional version despite some indy game successes, and while that's true, there are going to be people doing it for a living.
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I'm not sure that I'd call Basecamp a competitor for MS Project, either.
I'm doing work on one project right now that's making use of both. For my purposes, Basecamp is more useful, but I don't see project manager types replacing MS Project or other PM systems with it any time soon. It's just not the same kind of thing.
Question is, what percentage of people using Windows would ever use it? 1%? I doubt it'd even be that many users. (Disclaimer: I'd be part of the sub-1%. I just don't think it would be used much in the general sense.)
"They should change browsers" is not an acceptable answer. "M$ needs to fix their browser" is.
It's not, though. Not to a paying client who wants the page/app to "just work right" for a majority of their users.
Cross-browser development will probably always suck. God knows, I've done it, and I feel your pain there. That being said, there will always be someone who's willing to do it for less money than it costs a company to alienate the majority of their online business, whether it's you, me, or someone else.
You probably should be happy that random business owners don't have the power to force a browser maker to make the browser work the way they want -- it's not IE they'd be demanding changes in, at least not as long as it manages to remain the mass majority browser.
But what happened after Microsoft Won, was most developers just designed their pages to work with most people and reserved the Microsoft only crap to the intranet, for for the internet pages they used more compatible technology.
Out of curiousity, what are you basing that on?
Every web project I've worked on has had "Must render correctly in IE" as, by far, the biggest priority. Some of the clients also cared that it run correctly in Netscape/FF; most didn't. (None even knew what Opera was.) Most of those were non-intranet sites aimed directly at customers.
It's possible that the clients I worked for in that period were just bizarre anomalies, but I tend to doubt it. The general opinion of said clients has been that whatever IE does is the standard, and if FF doesn't render a page "correctly" that renders in IE "correctly", FF is broken. They either didn't know what standards groups had said, or just didn't give a damn. Market forces are their standards.
I'm guessing that as FF gains market share, most new projects care about correct rendering in FF -- but no serious commercial website development project is going to say "75% of our potential customers can't buy something on our site because it renders funky in IE? Well, screw them. They should change browsers."
How about:
He's allowed to have only one e-mail address for the rest of his life, which has no spam filtering. This e-mail address is provided to everyone he spammed, who are encouraged to sign him up for whatever mailing lists they choose.
When did O'Reilly stop being about making quality books and stuff and start being about creating buzzwords and catchphrases (Web 2.0, bleh.) and trademarking them?
There was a time when I'd buy an O'Reilly book to learn a new technology; now I mostly just find resources on the web via Google. I half-seriously wonder if lots of other developers made the same transition and eroded O'Reilly's original and sane-seeming business model.
For a complex enough project (which I'd argue Firefox is), even with a clean, well documented API, there will always be plenty of questions that can be answered better and/or faster by just asking the developers of the API. You can try to anticipate all possible questions in writing API documentation, but you'll never quite get there.
What would be lost if you told everyone before the vote exactly what you were going to do? You could still switch sides and still vote off firends but you could be honest about it and tell them ahead of time. There is still always the chance that this could result in the person you were voting out backstabbing you. However, isn't that always a possibility regardless?
There've been at least a few cases over the many seasons of Survivor wherein someone basically did this, and then got voted out due to the reactive actions of someone they let know they were going to vote against. So, yes, it's always a possibility, but in these cases being honest is like buying a whole bunch more tickets for the getting-screwed raffle.
I'd argue that the optimal strategy seems to be to be honest and be seen as honest as long as possible, and then to stick the knife in someone's back only when absolutely necessary to preserve yourself, either directly or indirectly.
It's strange, I find pondering the best strategies for Survivor more interesting than actually watching the show most of the time. Maybe I finally understand art critics.
There is nothing about game that requires that you have to be dishonest or backstab.
Requires, no. However, you're kidding yourself if you think selective (and that part is crucial) dishonesty is not key to optimal play of the game.
Backstabbing at a crucial moment isn't the only tool in a Survivor player's arsenal. It isn't the only factor in whether you'd win or lose. It is possible to win Survivor without ever lying or backstabbing. But, all that said, if you are unwilling or unable to use that tool, you're choosing to handicap yourself for no good reason. It's like choosing to never run out of bounds or never to punt in (American) football.
Ultimately, I don't think the producers screen out people who won't backstab, because they don't have to. Survivor isn't the Prisoner's Dilemma; everybody can't win by cooperating. You'll get one or two people each season who are just there to hang out and have fun, but because most of the players genuinely want to win the money, they'll play the game as best they can.
I'm a little surprised Jumpcut didn't rate mention. Granted, not everyone needs its editing features, but if you do it's hard to beat.
Here's a link to one of a series of interesting articles written by someone who would disagree with that.
This interview mostly seems to be to promote Gold Rush, not that we should be surprised by that.
The bit about Survivor was interesting, but I would have liked to see more discussion about how they tried to change the game over the years to keep up with players who understood its nature.
The most fascinating thing about the first season of Survivor, for me, was that some of the players clearly understood what it would take to win, but many didn't. Starting with the second season and players having seen the game played out once, the game had a very different feel. Reading more about the things they tried to keep it still a thinking game yet unpredictable, what worked and what didn't, would have been cool.
Not all piracy is a bad thing. I mean, software these days is seriously overpriced. You could teach yourself some very basic programming skills (Visual Basic, for instance), and create a program that'll do exactly what the $100+ equivilant does.
So of course people will pirate it. Why? Because it's rediculous to pay for something like that.
I'd be curious to hear what kinds of software you think are that trivial to create.
I can put a garden in my backyard and grow my own vegetables, but I'm still going to jail if I try to take anyone else's.
Another thing that's been happening gradually to make excitement about this possible is the replacement/upgrade of web browsers.
Like many of the other people weighing in, I'd developed web pages with features basically amounting to AJAX years ago. The problem was, especially if you were developing a commercial website, is that there'd still be a decent-sized chunk of people using old-ass browsers that didn't support JavaScript (or who had turned it off.)
Most companies aren't willing to flip even 5-10% (or whatever) of their potential online customers the bird, so what you end up doing is either not creating something AJAX style, or essentially implementing it twice and switching between the two depending on what a user's setup will support.
I haven't seen numbers, but I'd bet there percentage of people using aforementioned old-ass web browsers is a lot lower now than five years ago. Probably, you could get away with having a site that only worked the AJAX way.
At least Google didn't have such high per-user bandwidth and Flash licencing expenses.
Out of curiousity, does anyone know what those Flash licensing expenses actually are?
On one hand, I could see Adobe rubbing their hands together with glee at having a customer that has such a huge need of their proprietary technology.
On the other hand, just about giving any necessary licenses away to encourage the success of YouTube is probably the smartest possible thing Adobe could do. I know a lot of people who never bothered to install/upgrade Flash, but have to watch videos on YouTube or one of its competitors. This kind of web site seems to be the first "killer app" to drive people to Flash in a while.
The problem with this mindset is you think it's okay that the code that is increasingly responsible for running more things that make a country productive is never seen and can't be reviewed except for poking at it in a willy-nilly blackbox style. As a matter of principal I don't think it's okay. At all.
The problem with your mindset is that it's only correct if security is always the most important thing. It's not. The world doesn't work that way.
Microsoft always plays a losing game of catch-up to *nix in the security department, and *nix damn near always plays a losing game of catch-up to MS in the usability department. (There are, of course, many more considerations besides those two.) There are things the open source paradigm consistently does better, and there are things the commercial closed-source paradigm consistently does better. That's reality.
From the article:
Port 25 has on occasion put out FUD such as claiming Microsoft is doing more to improve security than any other vendor
I'd be curious to hear what vendor the article author thinks is doing more to improve security than Microsoft if this statement is to be decried as FUD, and what kind of metrics/data support this. Amount of exploits patched? Amount of money spent on security?
I mean, even if you think Windows is one giant yawning security hole, that really only says that they have the most room for improvement. I'd be surprised if they're not patching the most holes, affecting the largest number of users, and spending the most money on security -- even if the results are often sad.
If I make $100 million by doing something dirty, and I'm fined or have to settle a case for $10 million as a result, did I really lose?
I could be wrong, but I get the impression that a lot of the Microsoft lawsuits go that way. They "lose", but meanwhile, they've crushed their opposition beyond repair, which overall makes them money.
At this point, I'd be ready for just about anything that let me get away from Visual Studio. I've used it since it was 16-bit, and I've even tolerated all the weird interface changes they've made to the IDE over the years. Through version 7.0, it was pretty much just a matter of re-learning where the things I needed were, which sucks, but whatever. It wasn't a big enough productivity sink to justify switching to something else. But with version 8.0 (a.k.a. Visual Studio 2005), Microsoft has officially lost their minds. They're so determined to push ".NET" and "managed" code down our throats that they've ruined what used to be a really solid development environment.
.NET and managed code because that's where more of the demand is. For the kinds of projects I've worked on in the last year, it's been a great IDE.
I don't know, man. It depends on what you're trying to do.
I haven't had cause to write something in C++ since the 1900s. I wouldn't be surprised if VS2005 is ass for the needs of C++ development. If someone took a survey of what people are using VS for, I'm guessing C++ would be less than 10%. There are always going to be projects that demand the speed and power only a language like C++ can provide, but as time goes on I'd bet they're less and less of the big picture.
It's safe to say VS2005 is geared towards
I've not used Basecamp, but I have seen it - I've used Ta-da lists, and whilst functional, it /feels/ overly amateur and unpolished.
As someone currently using Basecamp, you're not far off.
Don't get me wrong -- it's good for what it is, and the price is right. That said, I'd give good odds that in two years, something similar and better will occupy Basecamp's market and mindshare. Sometimes, positive buzz is good for a product; other times, it primarily serves to draw the attention of those able to build a better mousetrap.
In a game like this, what the players say/think they want, and what they players actually will enjoy or what will keep them playing, are generally not the same thing.
Perhaps not. That's why achiever-oriented catass MMORPGs exist, to cater to your sort of player.
No judgement there, except to say, just because it isn't for you doesn't mean it isn't fun for others.
Why not? If you hate your job, surely you'd try to do something to improve the situation.
Surely you would. The trick is getting a whole team of people with different priorities and visions to agree on the same something. Moving to a small town to live on savings and develop a game together isn't likely to be it.
People have different degrees of hating their job, and different ideas of what the best thing to do to change it is. Some would rather tough it out and try to get into management to make changes. Some would rather work in another industry than take the chance on the entreprenurial solution. Some people would rather work within the system in other ways. None of these choices are wrong, and none of these people are stupid. They just place value on different things than you do.
Ultimately, the idea of forming a game developers union is a something people could do to improve their situation. It's just not one you like.
Besides, there are advantages to living in a small town. The cost of living is lower, the air is cleaner, the people are friendlier, the criminals are fewer, the schools are better, etc. I wouldn't want to live in a crowded area without a good reason, and chances are there are quite a few people who feel the same way. Your list of advantages is debatable, but I won't deny there are some. What there aren't are a majority of people currently working in the game industry who feel that way. The reality of how things are at the moment is that a majority of those people are living in or around cities, and they're not miserable doing it. No amount of wishing will change the facts of that.
As for the reasons to play consoles vs. do everything on a computer... a few reasons off the top of my head, and by no means a definitive list:
1) Price. A console costs $100-$200. A gaming PC is much more expensive. Thus, the former is accessable to people the latter isn't.
2) Non-online multiplayer. If you're going to have a handful of friends over to play games, people would generally rather do it in their living room in front of their TV than crowd them around a monitor. For some things, a bigger screen even with a lower graphics quality is better.
3) Different kinds of games. This is pretty much an inertia thing and not something set in stone, but at the moment it's reality. While there's some overlap, different kinds of games are made for computers and consoles. You won't, for example, be playing the latest fighting game on your computer. Thus, people who want to play the kinds of games only available on consoles tend to buy consoles, and because of that, those kinds of games continue to be made for consoles. It's a self-perpetuating cycle. (The converse, of course, is true -- you absolutely wouldn't want to play a game like Civilization or Alpha Centauri on your GameCube.)
4) Ease of set-up/play. If you want to play a Playstation game, you just put it in the PS2 and start playing. If you want to play a computer game, there's installation involved, and possibly drivers or other upgrades to worry about. You don't have to worry about system requirements; if you have the right console, you're good to go. This stuff is easy for people like us; it's not easy for everyone. Some people would rather just play than know how to wrangle a computer. Playing a game is interesting to them and computers in a more general sense might not be. (I can understand this -- the inner workings of my car have zero interest for me. That doesn't mean I'm not interested in driving it.)
The net effect of all of this is that someone who likes to make and play games like, say, Soul Calibur or Mario Kart can't just up and decide to go to the computer game world without making a real shift in what they do.
So move! There are many nice places to live outside of Silicon Valley. If you are self-employed, you don't have to worry about having no jobs in the area, so pretty much any place is game.
And you're going to get a team of thirty people and their families to do that with you. Right. Let's not be completely insane here.
And that's another thing: why would anyone want to play console games?
Why is that everyone is so brainwashed today that they think you need a movie-quality flashy 3D game to be sellable?
I certainly didn't say that.
There's a lot more that goes into making a professional-grade game than you seem to think. Movie-quality 3D flashiness isn't generally a huge part of why.
And that's another thing: why would anyone want to play console games? You have this great high-resolution monitor, and you would rather use a grainy old TV?!? Are you people crazy? Then there are those flimsy controllers; how can you possibly play, say Civilization, with only a joystick and a few buttons?
Why would you want to develop console games? When you do, you have to have a publisher to manufacture them. You need to get shelf placements in some store. You'd have actual manufacturing costs eating your profits. With a PC game all you need is a website from which the game could be bought and downloaded. No fuss, no bother.
I don't see much point in arguing the whys of it. It should suffice to say that this is a billions-dollar industry and, whether or not you choose to recognize it, it's not because all of the people buying or making them are dumber than you.
With all due respect, you're talking about the shift to create a one-person indy computer game, which is a world of difference from what is produced by a full game dev team making a console game (which is more the kind of thing the article is talking about, and the kind of workers it muses about unionizing.)
The start of the discussion you proposed was about talking to your fellow game dev team and convincing them to jump ship to do it independently. That's not really what you're crunching the financials of.
Putting aside that, if you're in that industry, you almost certainly don't live in a low cost area, despite there being a couple exceptions to that rule...
A game as put out by a solo effort isn't really the same kind of thing that is put out by a team of mixed team of thirty or so game designers, creative designers, programmers, and so on. Telling someone they should give up the latter in favor of the former is like telling a guy who isn't happy working as an architect building houses that he should give it up and build doghouses in his backyard. It's just a totally different scale.
The one-man effort also requires that one person be able to wear ALL hats in the game development process. They need to be able to dream up a great idea for the game. They need to be able to do all involved artwork. They need to be able to do all of the programming. If they're not great at all of these things and more, they're probably not going to put out something people will want to play. They're definitely not going to be able to put out a console game that will get past Sony/Nintendo/Microsoft's approval process.
A game of this scope isn't made in a year and it's not made by one person. It generally requires an investment of piles of money and years of time before ANY profit is seen. These things aren't practical to do without financial backing.
I don't deny one person can go off and make a game and possibly make it good, but it's not the same kind of product as a professional console game is these days. That's not to say that it couldn't possibly be more fun or draw more players, but it's not the same kind of product. It's just not. There is always going to be the demand for the polish and depth of the professional version despite some indy game successes, and while that's true, there are going to be people doing it for a living.