Patrick Dugan just made a recent post continuing the thread of the realities of indie gamedev. There’s been a recent rash of parade raining for the indie gamedev scene, starting with Jeff Vogel’s idie lament that I commented on earlier (and was recently linked to from Grand Text Auto). Patrick quickly recaps the observations made by Jeff Tunnell on what the proper expectations of success should be for indies. Jeff properly points out that average titles can only hope to break even, while only the really successful ones are profitable. The result: the market is actually not that different from nearly every other mature creative market where craftsmanship is plentiful (see movies, websites, books, music).

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As a judge for the Independent Games Festival, I’d be the first in line to agree with Jeff Vogel, who suggests in an article for RPG Vault that the truly innovative games won’t be coming from the indie gamedev scene, but rather from the big corporations:

But truly innovative games? The sort you’re only going to see a few more times in your lifetime? Those will come from Electronic Arts.

I would agree with the point Jeff’s making, and I do enjoy the dash of realism that he’s attempting to throw on the indie fanboys. After reviewing hundreds of indie titles over the years in the IGF (as well as reviewing hundreds of non-indie titles for the AIAS), I would say I’ve seen equal numbers of innovative titles in each camp.

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Some links to various discussions going on centering around the ideas in my previous post about what gamedev can learn from web2.0: Scott Hilbert has a response, mainly focused on rendering, at his newly restarted blog; and there’s also the two threads on GameDev.Net where I originally started spouting my ideas.

I have recently been trying to create a clean, simple baseline framework for game development. Not necessarily for big team commercial game development (that’s my day job @ EA), but for my one-man hobby playing with gamedev. As I experimented with several different designs for the core architecture, it struck me that there was something fundamentally missing in the world of game development that’s been popping up in other development circles.

Unfortunately, I don’t have a good name for it. Something akin to XAML, but for games not apps. Yes, I know XAML can be used to make games, but at the very least it’s .NET and it’s Vista, so it’s not quite ready for what I’m looking for. I’m actually thinking of something more along the lines of the holy trinity of web2.0, XHTML/CSS2/DOM.

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