I recently watched Rev Anthony's Rant about indy game developers not receiving due payment when high quality games are created and released to the public. Is there a way smaller developers could be paid for hard work? I think the answer is maybe. As Anthony mentioned the issue is really pay per performance. If a game is good then it deserves payment. There will always be the potential for buyer's remorse but if you're an indy game developer giving away your wares for free or near free then there's a good chance of seller's remorse as well.

After some rumination I think I may have come up with a possible solution to this problem and as Rev mentioned it involves a paradigm shift. The real issue here is distribution and advertising. Larger game developers have more money to spend on advertising thus increasing the public's awareness of the next new, supposedly hot game being released. So simply by increasing awareness they've increased the chance that at least someone will purchase the finished game. Smaller game developers on the other hand don't have as much money to spend on advertising so they're forced to lower the price of their game in hopes of increasing the chance that someone will pick it up. This is where things need to change.

What I think needs to happen is the creation of a indy game collective. This would be a group of indy developers selling their games together. Thrifty Gamers would likely be more willing to pay a bit of cash for multiple games instead only one game at a time. The consumer would pay a base price for all the games that would be distributed and then after they finished playing the games they could decide what percentage of the initial price paid would go to each developer. The entire cost paid up front would have to be distributed as the gamer sees fit. If they wanted to play all the games and then only pay for one of them, they could. Alternately they could decide to divide the upfront cost evenly between all the developers. In this way the games seen as being of the highest quality would in theory get the money they deserved and the smaller indy developers would have the chance to get their games distributed to an increased audience. Depending on the number of games included in the purchase price there might even be enough money for a little advertising getting the word out even further.

What are your thoughts Destructoid?

Video Games

Believed to have been invented in...

1972, the year Pong and the Magnavox Odyssey came out.

Actually Invented in...

1948, when Thomas Goldsmith Jr., a professor of physics at Furman University, patented his horrendously badly named idea, the Cathode Ray Tube Amusement Device.


The Amusement Device was based off old military radar displays, which were just dots on a screen. They figured you could put some kind of overlay on the screen with pictures of aliens on it or whatever, and you'd have a rudimentary game where you could shoot projectiles at the bad guys. Despite being only kinda crappy, it was still too expensive to be marketable and only a few prototypes were ever built.

The second video game came out three years later. British electronics company Ferranti built the NIMROD, a computer designed to play one game and one game only, the classic game of NIM.


Go on, play NIM online so you can relive the forgotten golden age of video games: I'll wait.

Back? Yeah, that sucked; especially because the bastard computer keeps winning (obviously, it cheats!). Like all computers from those days, it was the size of Adam West's Bat-computer, and simulated a game that's played with 16 match sticks. So the first computer game was only useful if you were the world's greatest NIM player, or just extremely short on matchsticks.

Thanks to Cracked.com

Just finished a fun game of Peggle Party with fellow Dtoiders KyleGamgee, Mxyzptlk and Naia-The-Gamer and boy howdy was it ever a RIOT!

I hit some pegs, scored some points and had a barrel of laughs, and that was only the first game!


Anyone else playing peggle party? I'm sure you are. Whats your favorite character/ level to play. I haven't ever gotten more than about 500k points so I need all the ProTips I can get.

Dunno if everyone has seen this new trailer by now (link) but let me tell you that I'm not that excited about it.

When did all the good ideas evaporate? It seems like the disturbing trend of remakes and bastardizations is in full swing when one of my personal favorite childhood books "Where The Wild Things Are" gets its very own Big Screen debut. Why do we allow this happen when more often than not the resulting film isn't anywhere as good as the original and often only serves to tarnish that cherished memory?

I'll tell you why, because we are all lazy as shit! If more people took it upon themselves to come up with interesting stories to tell and then actually follow through and TELL THEM, we'd all be better off for it.

Just wait until hollywood decides enough time has past that other classics can be bastardized and remade, Gone With The Wind the remake anybody? I'll tell you what I really don't want to see is Dr. Seuss's books in their own 3D CGI amalgamation of imagination.

Can we just come up with some new ideas please and leave the past where it belongs....in the history books.

I would like your advice on something, if I had to choose one over the other, which game should I get: Left 4 Dead -or- SKATE II -or- StreetFight IV

Just so you know I'm a big FPS fan and am loving Fallout3 (120hrs so far), Played the crap out of the first 3 Tony Hawks, and was always a big fan of the Mortal Kombat games. So in my eyes these three all hold the potential to be great games, I just wonder which one will hold my interest the longest.


my worries


L4D: as fun as killing endless zombies is, this can only be fun for so long right?



SKATE II: once you get all the tricks down and skate all the parks what more is there to do right?


SFIV: This is really just a rehash of the originals right?

This is really a metaphor for life....

Sometimes you might feel like a pixelated square jumping from log to log.....

Fish under the water might temp you, distract you, causing you to fall off that log of life.

But you've got three lives damnit! and remember that every once in a while a larger blocky thing comes your way...

you need to prepare yourself to jump over that shit too.