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Comment by Kurtz79 | Hacker News Reader

Gamedev is simpler today than it was by then, but games (we are talking about AAA titles, as Metroid was at the time) have escalated in complexity by several orders of magnitudes.

Today is simply impossible for a single person/small team to create a rival to Call of Duty 4 or Fallout 3, while back then it was relatively simple for someone with the skills and talent to emerge.

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Not as rivals to those games, perhaps. But Minecraft and Angry Birds show that it's easier than ever for a single person/small team to create and sell an extremely successful game.

> But Minecraft and Angry Birds show that it's easier than ever for a single person/small team to create and sell an extremely successful game.

More so, they prove (again) that the technology arms race in today's video games is utterly retarded. It's also the reason many indie games tend to be so good and refreshing - they can't make a hitech ultra-HD game, so they focus on what really matters: gameplay and design.

"Utterly retarded" is far too strong a statement. The indie games of tomorrow may be built on "hitech ultra-HD" engines. The exploration of the space of games is advancing along many dimensions (including technology) and I think technology improvements will be needed for many of the great games to come.

The technology race in video games is as utterly retarded as it is in the movie industry. There's as much room for Clerks and the Blair Witch Project as there is for Toy Story and Avatar.

I'd just like to point out that Minecraft's code is absolutely horrible from an algorithmic standpoint. On performance/speed and code quality metrics, Minecraft is a statistical fluke.

Isn't there a lot of awful video game code around? Optimization is usually delayed until the end of a project, and crunch time is a norm at most AAA game developers.

Yet by any other conceivable metric it is a huge success.

I love good code & elegant design, but it doesen't beat having a successful product out there.

Remember, shipping is a feature ;)

60FPS is also a feature. Not crashing when sent invalid input on the wire is a feature. Being able to support more than 100 concurrent connections without requiring a monstrous top-of-the-line server is a feature. These are all missing from Minecraft.

Remember, usability is a feature. >:3

Easier than ever, when you stand on the shoulders of giants:

http://m.techcrunch.com/2011/02/28/creator-of-angry-birds-ph...

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