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As both a professional game developer and rabid fan, I have seen the game industry go from its humble, spare-bedroom beginnings to its current state of multi-million dollar budgets, huge teams, and massive profits.
To the casual observer, it may seem that games are getting bigger and more complicated every year. You may even hear industry veterans complaining about the death of the early days, when a single programmer could code a game all by herself and the process of bringing a game from a concept on the back of a napkin to the store shelf was measured in months instead of years. If you catch these dinosaurs waxing nostalgic about the 'good old days,' you might be able to shake them out of their misery with a simple observation.
Those days are still here!
The games of the late '70s and '80s may seem simple compared to today's skeletal animated polygonal extravaganzas, but they still can be highly entertaining. The fact is, there was a large audience for these simple and entertaining games back then. It is easy to see that the audience is still there.
What was fun then is, in many cases, still fun now. It is not as if these classic games suddenly stopped being entertaining. However, the mainstream gaming audience is no longer the primary target for these sorts of games. There is an entirely new generation of gamers that are receptive to the simple and fun concepts of yesteryear.
You can see this by walking the aisles of your favorite software store. Just check out the massive amounts of so-called 'budget' games lining the shelves. There are plenty of puzzle titles and simple arcade challenges offered at low 'impulse' prices that appeal to this crowd. It is not totally unheard of to see an occasional compilation disc of these sorts of games climb its way up the charts alongside major, so-called 'A-title,' releases.
With the rise of portable computing in the form of personal digital assistants, such as the Palm and PocketPC, a new market for low-end gaming has appeared. Because of the limited nature of the hardware, PDAs and other small devices are often only capable of running the same sorts of games that were considered state of the art ten or so years ago. This is a grand opportunity for the independent developer to create simple games with a small amount of resources. With inherently low overhead brought on by the restrictive device capabilities, these games have the potential to be profitable with a relatively small amount of sales.
The new generation of programmable mobile phones provides a brand new avenue for this kind of independent development. With capabilities often far below even the simplest PDAs available today, even fairly advanced mobile phone games require development resources attainable by the average lone-wolf developer.
Not only are the development costs associated with wireless development much less than PC, console, or PDA titles, but the distribution is cheap as well. Unlike retail games that require CDs to be duplicated, boxes to be constructed, and products to be shipped and distributed to stores, there is no physical object that changes hands on a mobile phone. It's all bits-no atoms. The product exists as a chunk of binary data on a carrier's server. The customer chooses which product she wants, and that chunk of data is sent over the air to her handset. The cost associated with producing the physical media is completely absent from the wireless gaming business model, keeping overhead low.
To most of the world, the wireless gaming market is brand new. Some major traditional game publishers have begun developing products for this arena. Yet, many of the major players in this new industry are relative unknowns and start-ups. They are getting in at the ground floor of what is poised to become a major source of revenue in the coming years.
Because of the nascent state of the market, there are a lot of questions to be answered. These largely concern the technology used and business models for creating a viable revenue stream. Once it is clear how to actually make money in this area, the major publishers are sure to show more interest. Right now, the market is wide open for small and independent developers to make their mark.
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