The majority of games are created by large teams of highly talented and well paid individuals. There are certain types of games that could be created by a single college sophomore or a teeny tiny team. Most games can not. A team size of 20 is considered quite small.
Both your statement and the link's author's is incredibly wrong and incredibly insulting.
M2 research says it's $10m to do a AAA title on a single platform, whereas it's 5k-20k to do a mobile title[1].
TUAW's figures show that there are approximately 42,000 iOS titles produced, which dwarfs the 18,000 console titles that have been produced in all of history [2]. So as for backing up the claim "the majority of games are created by large teams of highly talented and well-paid individuals" it's simply wrong--very wrong.
Now if we're normalizing per dollar (that is, considering how much industry $ are going to triple-AAA vs appstore crap, instead of number of titles), the argument is overwhelmingly in favor of the AAA titles, even when considering only the latest generation of console titles--about $60b to $40m, by my back-of-the-napkin arbitrary-cutoff estimate.
But that's exactly what jbri said [3] and an argument you rejected [4].
In general, the etiquette here is that if you're having an argument about facts, you bring facts to the table, and you don't respond by calling the other person "insulting" or "incredibly wrong", especially when you quote no sources and the available evidence contradicts your position. These types of replies add nothing to the discussion.
[1] http://www.m2research.com/the-brief-2009-ups-and-downs.htm [2] http://www.tuaw.com/2010/11/17/the-staggering-size-of-ioss-g... [3] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3937135 [4] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3937200
Let's take the $5K cost and break it down.
A competent young programmer, making $80K/year, would be paid $5K in 3.3 weeks.
However, games don't just need programmers, they also require art, so let's take $1K to pay for the artist's time. That leaves us with only 2.6 weeks of the programmer's time. Let's also say that we have a game designer who we pay $1K. That leaves us with only 2 weeks of the programmer's time.
Having been a professional mobile game developer for 7 years, I've never seen a game take only 3 people and only 2 weeks. The minimum, in my experience, is about 2 months and around 5 people, or roughly $60K, for a very simplistic game. I'd even venture to say that it is impossible to create a quality finished product in 2 weeks.
Pointing out that AAA-games are expensive to develop in a discussion about social games is missing the point a little, I think.
Sure it's possible for one person to develop a successful social game. But how many of those people can develop two successful social games? 5? 10+? The only name that comes to my mind is Zynga.
Zynga can make it work either by continuing to develop successful games on their own, or by backing down from Instagram silly money on their buyout offers. But they can't make it work by pretending to be the gateway middleman for a distribution network they simply don't own.
In my defense, i'd like to point you here. http://www.inc.com/magazine/20101001/how-i-did-it-john-veche...
Also, i meant 2 dozen programmers each making their own roguelike, like Toady One. Not dozens working on a single game. you should get graphics for a 3 million/year burn rate.
These may (or may not) be the quality that you would expect, but to say that people don't like to build games for fun, and that some would be fun and possibly take off, couldn't be more wrong.