It used to be that you could develop on the main gaming platform with little or no investment cost in a team of as little as one person doing it only as a hobby (as mentioned previously).

Now, you can’t even develop for the main platform(s) without spending tens of thousands of dollars for their development kits. That’s assuming you just happen to know how to use their tools.

You can’t even be a Carmack or Cliffy B anymore. You don’t just strike out, make something cool, found your own company along the way and become successful development/design gods. Those paths have already been taken. It’s like a lot of other aspects of the tech industry. Two decades ago, you could get to the top with some ambition and self-education. Now, most people have to go to college for a degree specifically aimed at the career that didn’t even exist a couple decades ago. Then — and this goes both for game development and most of the tech industry in total — you step into a bottom-end job and work your way up in a big fat corporation where everything is structured and every move has to impact the corporate bottom line and some day you might have a break through and get noticed and get your own project. It strike me as becoming a more traditional work path and less an art. Like being a public accountant and joining a company that needs an accountant. Nothing more.

There are some indies and some under-dogs, but as I mentioned, it seems like even those guys — aside from knowledge — need massive investments of cash to do their thing. Didn’t Braid cost Blow well over six figures? And that was a one man operation that took several years.

I would be interested to know what the smallest game production company is that ever got a game published on the 360 or PS3 as a retail full item (or for that matter, even on the playstation network store or xbox live arcade). I bet it would still be a multi-million dollar company — other than Blow’s Braid who I guess just lucked out and had the right connections or something.

I understand a lot of this is because we, as gamers, demand a lot out of our games now. Even though they’re ridiculously short for the most part, we demand great music and sound tracks and voice acting and graphics… but still… why does a game like Grand Theft Auto IV *have* to cost $60,000,000?! What exactly about it necessitates that much money?

Good comment. I agree, the high development costs sometimes get away with innovation in games.

Not only are fewer risks taken, but there’s less variety and less advancement even with each iteration (see the Call of Duty series, for example). Every game ends up playing like a movie and the ultimate goal seems to simply make games interactive movies.

There are indie developers out there, but even that is not cheap. You might be one guy making Braid, but you’re still going to have to put your house up to raise capitol to make the game.

Videogames aren’t the only arena where this has been seen, though. A lot of technologies that once catered to the enthusiast with an idea and a passion are quickly becoming out of reach. For example, it is less rare for a single guy today to just pop out an idea on the internet and have a new sensation. A decade ago, a couple guys in a dorm room could manually add some websites to an index and call it a search engine and a decade later they’re billionaire search engine moguls. Today, you have to either know every aspect of the backend technologies and develop them yourself as well as all the front-end presentation and interface technologies or you have to pay through the nose for a team to help implement your idea at a couple hundred bucks per hour.

It’s myopic to say “everything has already been done”.

It’s realistic to say “pretty much all of the easy, cheap, low-entry stuff has been done”.