Greg Costikyan — the award-winning game-developer — recently brought down the house at the Game Developers' Conference in San Francisco with a speech calling for games to be created outside the burgeoning, strangling "studio system" that's cropping up in gameland. Now he's posted a request-for-proposals on this — a public discussion aimed at mining the web to see what comes up:
Virtually every independent developer sells their game from their own website, as well as through whatever other channel they can find–and everyone I've talked to says they sell only tiny numbers that way. Volumes through other channels–whether that's the portals like Yahoo Games! and such, or via Digital River, or whatever–are always larger, usually by a factor of ten or more. The fact is that you can distribute readily through the Internet, but it's awfully hard to market through the Internet. A box on a shelf serves as a billboard for a product. Conventional retail release ensures review attention. Gamers still assume that a game that doesn't have a conventional release must inherently be inferior–and gamers have yet to develop an aesthetic that says "Gameplay is what matters, and I'll accept lower production quality for superior gameplay." There are, in other words, a confluence of problems that need to be solved: a change in gamer culture, a path to market, a source of finance, and a means of marketing.
(via Wonderland)
