I had a lot less sympathy for nimblebits when I read the part about how Zynga tried to buy them first.

Marsh also said on Twitter that Zynga "did try to go the honest route and try to acquire us first."

I'm an indie game developer, and if a giant like Zynga approached me wanting to buy my company or the rights to the game, I could either:

1) Take the pile of cash, then go start another company.

2) Refuse. After all, the game is my baby, right?

If I took route #2, I should not at all be surprised if the megacorp then decided to clone my game. In fact, I'd be surprised if they didn't. Zynga certainly seems like a seedy company, but in this case it looks like they deserve some kudos for actually approaching the devs before cloning the game.

Game Maker is a pretty nice tool that let's you get into making games without heavy programming: http://www.yoyogames.com/make Also, you might consider mobile game development. I'm a professional Android developer, but I haven't looked at App Inventor yet. I'm not sure how amenable it is for building games, though I'd guess it would work pretty well for simple ones: http://appinventor.googlelabs.com/about/

I've been developing on Android for well over a year now. At Google I/O the Android team dismissed the idea of fragmentation, saying they prefer the term "progress". Is fragmentation a problem? Yes. Is it such a big problem that it should prevent someone interested in the platform from developing on it? No.

The Android engineers are only considering fragmentation in the context of having a range of older and newer firmware versions. There is the horizontal fragmentation of hardware (i.e., a number of different devices running the same OS version), but there is also the overlooked horizontal fragmentation of the firmware. Just about every manufacturer has modified Android in some way, usually by creating their own custom UI to "sit on top" of Android. But sometimes this ends up affecting deeper functionality than just the top layer of interaction. E.g., HTC has the Sense UI, Motorola has Motoblur, and Samsung has TouchWiz, which are all their own custom modifications of Android. So in reality there might not just be one version of 2.1. In addition to stock, there might also be Sense 2.1, Motoblur 2.1, and TouchWiz 2.1. And this isn't even considering custom ROMS. I've run into (albeit rare) cases of exceptions occurring on 2.1 Sense that don't occur on 2.1 stock.

I have 6 phones for testing: G1, Eris, Tattoo, Droid, Nexus, and now the Evo (thanks to Google I/O). Four of those were gifted either from Google or the manufacturer, so if you put in the hard work to make reasonably successful apps, you will get support as an indie dev.

Do you need that many phones? Probably not, the simpler your apps are (which should be the case if you're new to the platform). If you're developing games, especially ones using input other than the touchscreen (e.g. accelerometer), you will probably want to invest in at least 3 devices.

So fragmentation is a very real problem, but it's not a very big one, and honestly I'd take the freedom and ease of development and deployment on Android over the iPhone any day. And FYI, as an indie I'm currently generating a good salary from Android development alone.

I think your bubble is the one that needs a little bursting. What needs to be distinguished is the detail involved in the "idea" or "concept" in question. If by idea, you mean making a match-3 game with cars instead of fruit, or some vague, unrealistic concept for a sprawling MMO by a teen who has never implemented any aspect of a real game before...then yeah, those are a dime a dozen. If you're talking about well-developed designs for solid, fun, playable, marketable games, then those have a great deal of value. Just because an idea hasn't been implemented doesn't mean it doesn't have value. There's definitely a continuum from very bad to very good ideas. Of course, ideas from people experienced in generating previously successful ideas that have been turned into successful implementations are likely to be more valuable. As far as the OP, your chances of breaking into the game industry with an idea are incredibly small to nonexistent. Start with a small, simple game project and do what it takes to get it completed. If you have the skills to design a huge, sprawling epic you are should know the core basics of fundamental game design enough to allow you do develop a solid, playable small-scale game. If you can't do that, you're probably not going to go very far in the industry anyway.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/03/11/microsoft_bing_on_android_in_china/ Sorry to burst your anti-anti-Microsoft bubble, but you guys are only thinking about desktop search. Mobile is a huge part of the future, and Microsoft apparently has no ethical qualms with filling the void left by Google in the mobile space.

This guy is a moron. Most of his "gripes" aren't even real gripes (e.g. the tools are too helpful!). The others aren't legitimate, except perhaps fragmentation, but that's inherent in the whole point of Android and the SDK has done a pretty good job so far of either letting you design for compatibility mode (in which Android tries to figure out the best way to render your UI) or design for 3 broad categories (basically small, medium, and large screens). The guy really tips his hand when he talks about how Android hardware sucks. Check out this chart: http://mashable.com/2010/01/05/nexus-one-vs-droid-vs-iphone/ In terms of specs like screen and camera resolution, battery life, chipset, etc., the newest generation of Android devices are either comparable or surpass the iPhone. The really stupid aspect of this article is that there are legitimate gripes about the platform that the author completely ignores. Huge on the list should be the inability of Android to run apps from the SD card, and thus the constraints on available space for apps on a device. The market still has all kinds of problems, the most dire a need for a decent desktop portal, something somewhere near comparable to iTunes. As far as the actual SDK, particular APIs are a chore to use (Google Maps, for example), and though Google rolls out new features with every SDK, they are often poorly documented (e.g., the new Account Manager API). All in all, Android is great to develop for. But like every platform it's got its problems, and if you're going to gripe about it, do it right.

Does anyone actually follow the links to referenced stories? The Reuters story that is said to report a "muted" reaction is entitled "Motorola shares jump on hopes for Google phone" and says:

The market's initial response to the announcement was modest and the shares closed up just 1.5 percent on Thursday, but many analysts took a closer look at the phone --called Cliq in the United States-- later in the afternoon and issued upbeat reports.

The story says shares rose 6.5% on Friday. So the initial response (i.e. for a day) was muted, but overall the response was very positive. No matter what your opinion on Android and Motorola, at least get your shit straight, at least for the people here who obviously don't read past your blurb.

If all ideas are essentially worthless, then there should be no difference between great ideas and horrible ones. In fact, there should be no such thing as a great idea. So I'd disagree with what a lot of people here are saying. Of course ideas have inherent value. That value cannot become realized until the idea is instantiated, but that doesn't mean the original idea doesn't have value. How about the wheel? The idea that we shouldn't pee in our drinking water? Salting meat? How about any innovation?