So, in the previous post, I’d mentioned that I hadn’t thought that this would be how a resurgence of independent development would have played out. I’ll gladly admit that any sort of forecasting when it comes to rapidly changing technology is almost always wrong, but I was pretty far off-base.

For the better part of the last ten years, I worked in console game development, on some big-name franchises - and the big names were just getting bigger. Smaller developers would go out of business left and right because every game took more money to make - more people, more time, more hardware, more tools - because everything was trending towards higher-fidelity graphics.

As hardware power continued to increase, from the Playstation to the PS2 to the PS3 (and all its competitors), everything just cost more and more - to the point where I’d figured eventually, we’d simply make our way out of the uncanny valley eventually, and instead of pursuing more and more, re: graphics, we’d finally start to pursue cheaper and cheaper.

That is, rather than the next hardware iteration focusing on more polygons, it would focus on how to make things of a similar fidelity easier and less expensive to make. Maybe it’d be procedural generation of stuff that appears in almost every game, maybe it’d be that 3D artists would create a common “pool” of licensable material (like iStockPhoto) that could be used on any platform at any resolution - or it’d be used whatever its polycount because the hardware would have power to spare.

So, I’d thought that the way things would go would be like this:

• Each generation continues to up the ante
• Development gets more expensive
• Large companies, like EA/Activision eat up any successful smaller dev
• Smaller devs that don’t get eaten die

The idea would be that eventually, the large devs would invest in lowering the cost of development through shared technology, and eventually, when they’d finally made things affordable again, only then would people be able to start smaller, independent studios again.

I’d figured that around the time that technology got cheap enough to enable stuff like this, Live and PSN and WiiWare would finally have reached the point where they could sustain the smaller developers, even if they couldn’t get shelf space at your Wal-Marts or Best Buys.

Of course, my “vision of the future” never broke out of the basic confines of the way the game industry currently works. The “big three” still controlled the hardware, the approval process still worked the same way, and you had the same gatekeepers controlling what gets made and what doesn’t, so the relative number of “slots” available to a developer remained small, and tightly controlled.

Then Apple upended things by having what amounts to a console - a mostly “closed-box” platform where there is a single distributor - the catch is that they’ll distribute almost anything, development overhead is relatively low, because of the hardware, developing on the platform is relatively affordable, the tools are familiar, and cost you almost nothing.

It was like suddenly, someone yanked us back to the early nineties, where you could literally do garage development again. You *could* be id, if you wanted to be. You *could* work with your friends on some crazy idea that no big publisher would touch with a 10-foot pole. You *could* have a success that catches fire by word of mouth (though this is rarer and more difficult with every passing day). This huge opportunity, that I think a lot of developers “my age” had thought they’d missed out on was here again! Maybe for a brief time, but here it is. And no, not everyone’s going to be id - not everyone’s going to make a hojillion dollars overnight, based on a game that just catches fire.

But the opportunity to work with people you love, without having to do what a giant publisher tells you, to follow the ideas you’re passionate about, to take risks, to dream of something that no one’s done before, on technology that literally still feels like the *future*…

Well, hell. I couldn’t be more glad I was totally wrong.