While ago I thought about outsourcing some part of my work to external people. My experience was terrible. Not really because they were bad, but because of communication problems. You may be speaking english well but for certain situation/terms is very hard to find the correct word or to explain yourself well enough without wasting several minutes each time.

I envy the developers living in poor countries for this (of course there are also other aspect about living in poor countries which I don’t like!). They can find many people working for few $ (compared to european people salaries) and have no problems with communication.

I think the online market will be flooded in next years with games made by development teams from 3rd world countries where they can afford to live even with small figures of income.

In his blog, Phil Steinmeyer’s talks about the fact that portals are good. Those discussion are fun to read as always, but I want to talk more to another aspect of the “problem”. How can you define yourself indie when you’re using a portal? Everyone who worked with them, knows that they often require changes to your product (not all portals do that, but many yes). Isn’t this falling back to the old “boss that tells you what to do” idea?

You can tell me “yes I just change some minor things and earn 50k euros for that” – well is fine, I don’t talk about the money, but about the principle and the fact that you shouldn’t define yourself anymore “indie”. You’re just another small development team, skilled as you want, but that have to take orders from someone… 😉

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I’ve removed my old, unused forums, but now will blog much more often about my WIP games with new links to exclusive alpha/beta version to download, and will listen and reply to all people feedback.

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was too fun reading a post in indiegamer forums made by the friends at Sakura Games they announced a sort of casual game name generator online! you can check it here if you want to have some fun:
http://www.sakuragames.com/casualgamenamegenerator.php

that one is better than the Kasual Kit joke…! 🙂

Was fun reading on indiegamer forums the usual newbie talking about the game made with RPG Maker XP, Aveyond, defining it as “easy money”.
I think that is one of the biggest offenses you can do to a developer. I know, before I was like him when first I saw the various casual games “bah crap games” I thought.
“I can make one in 1 month” and so on. I know because I was thinking that myself too.
THEN when I started trying seriously to make them… oh well! even if you use a middleware solution, is still quite HARD to come up with an interesting story, and bugs can be present even using a script system (like plot holes or worse blocks so you are stuck and can’t go on anymore).
So only because someone used a toolkit or a gamemaker tool, don’t think is “EASY”. Nothing is easy as it seems 🙂