People say windows 7 was their idea…well it might have been but playing games through your browser was mine!!! Eat it Al Gore.

I’ve run into similar trouble in the past with web development, when a project started off being about building a rapid development framework and somewhere along the line it was turned into being a client-facing product. As you can imagine, that kind of scope creep didn’t end well.

Case in point is Hi-Rez Studios, an Indie game studio that developed Global Agenda.

They used Unreal game engine by Epic Games. The game engine wasn’t millions of dollars, but it was over $100k, and I’m sure they spent millions of dollars on Global Agenda.

I think it’s a great game, but not because of the amount of money they spent on it. It’s innovative…. not in a revolutionary way, but at least they didn’t go with the typical cliche MMO.

There are several open source / inexpensive game engines coming out… Panda3d, Lightfeather, and a few game engines made with the Zen Engine frameworks including my own Indie Game Engine.

Game developers do not need to spend millions, or even thousands of dollars for great game development middleware or engine technology.

Throwing a bunch of money at a game doesn’t make it great.

Most Indies already know this, and if the bigger companies don’t figure it out soon then I suspect they’ll go the way of the dinosaur.

What the engine makers don’t see is that they’d make more if they’d ease up on the licensing. Frankly, I’m glad to see Delta3D doing some really interesting work. For those of you that don’t know, it’s a very interesting opensource project that’s funded by the government.

Ok, short history of the game industry. Once upon a time anyone who could type could make a game. This really low bar of entry led to all sorts of interesting games, a few of which still survive. I’m sure that every gamer worth their controller pad has played nethack at least once.

Games got more sophisticated and it required more skill to create which raised the bar of entry. This shrank the pool of games because it shrank the pool of people who could make them. It’s to the point now that game companies have to invest millions into a game just to start development. They can’t afford to have a failure so they don’t take risks and games have become pretty stagnant. Why? Because if they have so much of their operating capital invested in the game that they can and do go out of business from a single failure.