While I may not have explicitly mentioned it above, I agree with a lot of what you wrote, especially where it concerns the working environment and overall developer quality of life. Most casual game developers I know get to actually live their lives, and aren’t constantly facing multi-month (or even multi-week!) crunch times.

As for the shareware universe vs. the casual game/portal players, it’s something I’ve been meaning to write about for a while now. Check out the next blog post for that discussion

There are still plenty of small-team casual games — maybe they’re not the ones getting the big numbers on the major portals, but there’s a large shareware universe beyond the portals. Check the Indie Game Developer forums for a view into the community.

My article does mention the importance of marketing. But it more strongly emphasizes the superior working environment of indie games, quite apart from the money to be made. It’s a healthier, more sensible way to approach game design. And if you “only” pull down $100K a year — well, I hope there are designers stuck in some sweatshop studio who might be willing to make that tradeoff!

Unfortunately a lot of the less successful developers don’t realize this and focus purely on making the best game they can. That’s a great goal, but in order to be truly succesful you need to have a strong distribution network and marketing to help support the title.

I guess I’m coming from the bedroom coder side of things. The places that I frequent (mainly indiegamer forum) have larger developers like Reflexive but also have many, many smaller developers.

I think a lot of it comes down to how you define success actually. A small team like Raptisoft don’t need to sell as much as a company like Reflexive so can be ’successful’ with lower sales.

If you look at the top downloadable games at Zone, Shockwave, AOL, etc. You’ll see that the majority of those games are of exceptionally high quality and high production value. I don’t look at Diner Dash as the exception, I look at it as the norm for top-tier successful games.

I’m certainly not trying to knock small 2-3 person teams. I’m actually a big fan of Raptisoft and think they’ve made some great titles, but I think that size of team is becoming less and less typical, especially for very successful games.

Now I think about it there is Diner Dash but that’s an exception (there’s always one) - I’m sure there are others but in general the ’shoestring’ game developement is very much alive and kicking.