Posted March 03, 2010
Gundato: At which point they are competing in the browser-game market, and we agree. Indie devs just can't compete for certain categories. You are never going to see an indie dev competing for atmospheric set-pieces or battles that blow your mind as particle beams flash across your cockpit.
At least not yet. There really isn't much left to do with graphics (in terms of 2D techs, anyway) and as the technology gets more refined, it's going to be cheaper to acquire and use.
Also, the opposite is true. There are some things that large companies are always going to be behind indies on. Since they have larger budgets, they need a wider base to recover their budgets. And when the base is wider, you don't have much room for experimentation.
And to be fair, there isn't much competition for particle beams across the cockpit lately. That genre seems to be pretty dead now. :pSo they're going to react to their loss in the limelight by giving themselves bad PR? That sounds stupid, even for Activision. Then again, with Kotick in charge...