[Richard]

Possibly but I have seen very little cooperation between development teams in the past like this. We tried launching an Academy of Strategy and Wargame sciences to pool together money for such a venture but no one was seriously interested.

I have actually talked to developers and shown them the hard facts about retail and still told "well that's nice". I think the main reason for that is there is still this rock star persona to retail. To be honest we had planned on getting into retail shortly after we opened shop but after rejecting 15 seperate offers because they would have screwed our developers over we seriously don't try anymore, except maybe foreign retail.

The large companies, like I said, can take the hit over the long haul and can fund games to the 2 to 3 years it typically takes to gain profitability. And if a developer gets lucky (like say the guys who did Kohan) enough to get funding that way they are set for awhile, but their are still at the win of a publisher deciding that it no longer wants to do their specific genre because it isn't profitable enough.

There may be another alternative besides Online sales to the small and mid guys but right now I don't see it. I think it will take some real disaster stories (ie some well known but small company going under due to retail pressures) to get these guys to relize that the time to act is now in getting a viable alternative to retail going. For niche titles to survive this needs to happen, they just can no longer compete at retail (at least not in the US).

Luckily I think we have proven (and some other indie companies) that if you keep your costs down and deliver a good quality game a year that you can easily guarantee your existance in the long term.