[Richard]

Some developers get funding from a publisher, which sounds nice. When Tim did 101 Empire funded the actual development and then promised royalties afterwords. The problem is that unless your game is a huge seller you will never see royalties. So now you are are begging for the publisher or another publisher to fund you, the problem is in most cases the original publisher owns your game rights. So in many cases if you want to continue to make money the publisher gets to dictate your game to you, in which case they are looking to make money so they dumb down your game to make it more appealing to the mass market. Thus you start making games you don't like to make or you are out of business.

Don't get me wrong there are success stories, but for everyone that is a success I can show you many others where companies just don't exist anymore. This is very true in the hardcore gaming areas. Wargames and sims suffered first. How many hardcore wargames or sims do you see coming out of major publishing houses today? Not many. Remember SSI, Microprose, Interactive Magic, Janes, Origin, etc. All of these are gone or are now a joke Version of themselves.

Eventually it is going to hit other areas, in fact it has started to hit the rpg market with a few notable exceptions. I also fear that MOOIII is not going to make the money it needs to impress the publisher and thus we won't see new 4X games coming out of publishers for awhile. Now maybe Quicksilver has kept costs low, if so that might save them.

But my basic point is that without having to sell your soul to a publisher who can then dictate when your game comes out no matter how buggy it is, and will probably want to dumb it down to appeal to a lot of folks, there are very few options for the niche markets anymore. And let's face it Space based 4X games are a niche today. When a game could sell 100,000 copies and be a big success that might have not been true, but today it is the sad truth.