The Struggling Game Developer

I have been developing online games for very ten years and until recently it's been an amazing job. Where else are you able to make use of your imagination to build surroundings that is your own and have plenty of people participate and enjoy themselves within it? It is truly amazing!

Why I say "until recently" is because the market is becoming over saturated and therefore there is less and less money in it. Now what appears to be the fun among game developers are in-game ads. What does this mean? Well it seems that online games are no longer the product. The product is advertisements; the game is the delivery medium.

Developers can no longer make any money off their games unless they stick ads throughout their games and then give them away to the commercial providers. So, only when their game serves thousands of ads do they get $1. Was a game developer could sell the source code for their game for a couple of thousand dollars for an average (lovely) online game. Now, their game will must serve over 5,000,000 ads to receive a quarter of that. Most developers are becoming content with this solution because they have "held out" for some time and things have not gotten any better. They can spend a month or more developing a game and since nobody is purchasing, licensing, or sponsoring the game sits and collects dust. Meanwhile, some developer that is technically savvy, but has no imagination, comes across their game and either de-compiles it or creates their own version of it and mass distributes the game through of these marketing portals. So, by the time the original gets noticed people think the original is the copy because "everyone knows that game".

So now it is a compounding issue. As increasingly developers enter the whole commercial campaign world, in exchange for the game development industry, the tighter the door is closed for any of those that require staying generating games in lieu of generating marketing vehicles.

How did it come to this in the first place you might wonder? I think plenty of things played a role in this development. A bad economy, realization that there is first rate money in marketing, and simple to learn program for generating games, and de-compilers. Is this a preview of things to come for other industries? Could the whole of the net finally be reduced to immense marketing platform? Basically a place that helps induce seizures due to the flashing chaotic ads covering otherwise mundane and uninteresting sites?