12 March, 2005 Can people be intelligent and moronic at the same time? I submit that the evidence of such is overwhelming. I am basing this assertion on http://crystaltips.typepad.com/wonderland/2005/03/burn_the_house_.html which is a summary of game developer (for the most part) rants at GDC. I got the link from Ryan's .plan. Let me do a brief summary of a few of the rants. Warren Spector: Wal-mart drives business decisions, and this stifles the industry. We need to divorce funding and distribution, and find alternative forms of distribution. Greg Costikyan (who?): Bigger budgets and bigger spectacle stifle innovation and promise larger profits in return... to game developers who want to make games rather than make money. Chris Hecker: Hardware developments on next-gen consoles will make innovative games harder to implement. It's worth asking: If you're an artiste, and you don't care about the size of your paycheck, and you don't like the current distribution model, and you want to innovate rather than be controlled by your investors (the publisher), then... why aren't you going indie? Why stay in a system you hate? You just said that bigger budgets are a problem and stifle innovation. You just said that next-gen consoles will have hardware tweaks that stifle innovation. You just said that the current distribution and funding models stifle innovation. If you're still working in the portion of the industry that has these problems, when a different portion of the industry does not... aren't you the foolish one? Or were you just being disingenuous in the first place? Now I hadn't heard of all these people, so it's possible that some of them are already involved in the indie market. If this is the case, then I would ask what you're complaining about? Are you trying to be vicariously bitter for all those who work on large-scale console games and don't mind? Either way, none of these people come out smelling like roses. Then they had the audacity to belittle a man who asked a legitimate question about piracy. Oh, that's right... I forgot. It's not the people who steal your game that are to blame, it's the people that gave you the money with which to make it in the first place. I'm sure these are smart people... but it's hard not to label them morons.