In my humble opinion, the best part about working with game development is that it potentially involves many different skills, like programming, sound editing, composing and graphic design.
The downside of this of course being that each branch comes with an expensive license for the application involved.

Or does it?
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I was given the heads-up about an interesting article over at the indie game developer Grey Alien Games. Jake Birkett, who runs Grey Alien, had attended Casuality 2008 in Amsterdam and seen a lecture by Reflexive and Enkord on the topic of making games for passion or for profit.

During the presentation, Reflexive and Enkord explained which of their games were made for passion and which were made for financial reasons (also some were made for both reasons). They showed this on a simple diagram where passion was on the left and financial was on the right. Then, very interestingly, they revealed whether those games were a financial success or not based on if they had made a profit or loss.

Their conclusion was that games made for passion had a better result on average. That feels good, there’s hope in this world after all.

Read the whole article here.

/jeb

I was pointed to an interesting, if somewhat gloomy, interview with Russell Carroll over at IndieGames.com the other day. Russell Carroll is the founder of Game Tunnel, an indie game site, and he talks about how difficult it has been to get mainstream attention for indie games:

Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, the 2007 awards came off to the sound of crickets. Major websites, such as Slashdot, which in the past have given us front page coverage, didn’t cover us at all, not even in their games section. Watching stories about rumors and cakes in the shape of a DS showing up on all the major game blog sites while the awards were not covered was initially devastating.

I think Game Tunnel still is the link between mainstream and indie, because most indie sites simply are too indie. However, for me personally, Game Tunnel has became slightly stale over the years. They’ve made some minor updates on the layout, but the images for the game genre links still show the same games as they did two years ago (probably longer). It’s like a bulletin board where the posts never are changed… which also amplifies the disappointment that the game of the year awards didn’t get more recognition.

/ jeb