Good post and good read.
The funny thing is that it's mostly a matter of indie developer attitude thinking they can (or must) compete with the big boys... There are so many people trying to make games that are only really possible with a huge budget, big team and probably a 'better-than-3dgs' engine.
I think a lot of time gets wasted by indie developers all over the place. Casual games, small games and innovative games is where it's at for the indie developer. Really interesting and uncommon / different ideas rarely will get a green light at the big AAA companies. Think about The Sims that had a lot of trouble convincing the people that backed the project with money.
Indie developers, unless they have great talent at making their own tools and engines (Project Offset for example, but they will grow into a AAA company soon, just mark my words.
), shouldn't even try to really compete with the AAA games in my opinion.
There's a ton of things indie developers should and can do, but directly competing with the AAA games isn't usually one of them.
I guess if you think that you have just made a professional market analysis then you should be proud of yourself, but there are much smarter statistical mathmaticians and economists looking at game trends and game sales than you. And believe me, those guys are pretty confused over the game industry right now.
I agree with both points here by the way. As an example I think it's crazy that those guys think gamers will have no issues with 'shorter' games, as they claim bigger and longer games are becoming too expensive to make.
Also, in general it's no wonder that they are thinking about the casual game market now as profits per project are much higher and it just took a long time for them to realize this.
I do think that in the near future indie developers will get more real competition from the AAA companies when their trend of changing their main focus to the casual game market continues.
You cannot easily compete as a one-man-army against them. Yes, you can sell an over-night project or A7titude, but it is still another league than the games offered at Steam.
We can take Ichiro as an example. He worked very long and very hard to come to this point. And he did not do everything alone. I consider him very professional. But yes, he is still indie.
Doesn't that contradict the point you tried to make as Ichiro as far as I know actually used a game studio project to get on steam?
Perhaps I am reading to much into what you've just said, but do you think we should not stick to smaller projects as indies? The over-night projects actually are what people here should make far more often, small accessible games that are fun to play (and fun to make)... It doesn't even have to be real 'casual' games either, there's a lot of abuse of that term going on in my opinion,
Cheers
