Quote Originally Posted by User137 View Post
But the issue relates to another topic, which is "Game making in general as a hobby is dying". Nobody really makes these small games and experimentations that we use to see some years ago. The standard that modern games put on us is a little depressing. It's not possible to reach them with just some homemade game-library, against commercial engines built by hundreds of coders with huge mathematical expertise. The barrier that something like Super mario karts, or Doom 2 put, is not that big. Many can attempt to make better games than them, but already something like Unreal Tournament goes beyond the limit, and it was already released before 2004. Now the expectations are sky-high.
I don't agre with you on that. Probably I would a few years ago but not today.
Why? What has happened since then? I would say Minecraft happened. Don't get me wrong I don't say that Minecraft alone is the reason why I disagre with what you are saying. But when Notch sucseeded with Minecraft despite Minecraft having poor graphics this inspired many other indie and hobby game developers to work on their own games.
You see the gaming industry is putting a huge amount of money into advertising their own games as well as into development of advanced game engines. The gaming industry also aqured IP rights for most sucsesful titles they were in gaming world mostly buy buying small gaming studios. Why? This is the way they try to gurante themself to be earning bug bucks seling their games even when some of them are catastrophic. And when some indie game developer makes a potentionally sucsessful game they quickly check if some contents of that game might violate some IP rights from many game titles the industry aquired in the past.
I have seen several game project being closed becouse the gaming industry was saying that those games are violating IP rights from some other game(even some old ones wich are nowhere to be bought anymore). For some cases I'm convinced that the gaming industry would not sucseed to terminate theese projects if all would come into court. But the hard truth is that most indie developers don't have enough mony to afford being sued by the gaming industry. So many of them have just canceled development to avoid all that.
And that is the main reason why there aren't so many indie developers out there.

But the situation is changing. In the last mont alone I found several good and promising game projects. Last two were Towns and Gnomoria. Also you shouldn't forget about flash games. I belive that most small games are now being built in flash. Just go and visit some internet site with flash games and look at the selection it is offering. The main reason for that is probably the fact that flash games can be run on almost all platforms (and you don't even need to have any platform specific code for that). The similar goes to JAVA. And I belive HTTM 5 will folow.

So what does your game needs to sucseed in theese days? High end graphic engine with support for best graphics and visual effects? NO! Your game needs just some uniqe idea. Why? Take a look to all those big games develiped by all those big gaming studios. Dosen't most of them seems the same?
Until we indie developers would be implementing new ideas into our games we would always be able to compete with theese big gaming studios. WHy? Truthfully the players are slowly becoming tired of playing the "same" games over and over and seek some uniqe games. That's why we have several sucsessful games being developed by lone programers or small indie teams.