I Hate Missing Gold Rushes

I wrote a few months ago in some detail why I was running scared from iPhone development. Recently, there have been more indications that the handful of people who made bajillions of dollars developing little apps for the platform got lucky. Now everyone and their housepets are making apps, flooding and overwhelming the store, getting the apps lost in an arcane approval process, not making money when they come out, and being sad.

It was a classic gold rush. I can't take much satisfaction in the inevitable crash, because it never makes me happy when indie developers get stiffed. I'm happy that some people made a lot of money. But for anyone else to feel bad that they missed out is like walking past a roulette wheel, see that a '17' came up, and being angry at yourself for not having just bet seventeen.

But all of this does confirm one rule about indie game development that I've felt for a long time:

In the long run, the only way to make money is to make non-trivial games. If your products don't take a done of work and care to make, you will fail, because someone will copy you and do it faster and cheaper.

There is no way that quickie 99 cent apps were a surefire route to a profitable life for anyone. The inevitable result is 20 different Sudoku apps cannibalizing the market. I hate spending a year at a time on the fiddly work of making a full-length RPG, but it is the fact that other people can't do this that makes it valuable.