There is only one way to do bootstrapping. It's called research-and-development. The game industry has to start doing it. It has to fund one-, two- or three-member teams of designers to do nothing but bang out new game design documents and core early early early prototypes.

The problem with going Flash is that is a technology/execution approach. You have to get away from that if you want to reinvent.

I also forgot to mention that the whole emphasis on building game companies has to be dropped. You are a designer, you design an original game (draft a design doc), you then sell it or licence it. No rigmarole around making a company. It's not your job - you aren't an administrator, you're a creator.

Interesting read. I would argue that the web-based model is not unproven. There have been plenty of success stories which started out as web games..

But it definitely is very risky. The games industry in general is a very hit-driven industry, but web games multiply that by several orders of magnitude. For every 'Flow' or 'Diner Dash' there are thousands of games you have never and will never hear of.

Also, I hope that Kongregate considers opening the door for Silverlight based games. As much as I love to hate flash, Silverlight has some real advantages over it.

Wow, thanks for posting about us, Simon. These are great comments.

In our opinion, if you want to take a technology-based approach, Flash games would be one of the last ways to go. Our approach can best be described as an "opportunity-based approach." We tried to find the path of least resistance to getting our company to a point where we can make our own games. We simply see Flash as a tool that allows us to do that as quickly and cheaply as possible.

If you want to make games completely by yourself, then you can certainly do that. But for us, it's simply more fun to make games with other people, and more importantly, we can make games of a larger scope then we could otherwise. Not only that, some of us are artists (as opposed to programmers) and can't really make games by ourselves easily anyway.

In my own opinion, it's pretty rare that you can, as a single artist, design a game on paper and pitch it around, expecting it to be picked up without too much development on the game. This is true especially if you don't have finished games in your company portfolio, which I was happy to see Simon pick up on in my post. Those days are pretty much over on the retail side from what everyone else in the industry says. My guess is that they're running out for XBLA, too (it's one of the reasons why XNA is out there). Interestingly, it seems to us that two of the few places you have a chance of doing that are Adult Swim and Kongregate.

Why are you invested in cutting down the idea that lone designers could pitch a design doc? Does it somehow take away from your business? Is there some limited space in the innovation market?

The original posting was asking how new games in general could be innovated, and they pointed out Kongregate. You're business is doing well enough, but I was pointing out that it is sad that if you want to innovate, say, an entirely new kind of triple-A game in line with a shooter, you have to turn to designing a flash game on a web portal. Certainly if lone designers could be allowed to pitch design documents that wouldn't hurt Kongregate.

I'm in no way invested in cutting down the idea. You can see I feel that way because I stated, "If you want to make games completely by yourself, then you can certainly do that." My point was that it's not very realistic. That's why I state that it's "pretty rare" that the game would get picked up. Who says? Many people in the game industry - all with more experience than I have - have said that publishers get loads of design documents all the time. There's no easy way for them to tell if an idea will actually end up selling very well if the idea is just on paper. Instead, what they want to see is a playable game that proves what's on paper actually works.

No one is saying that someone can't try to innovate by pitching design documents. In fact, that's exactly what we did. The point is that it's likely no one besides the two companies listed will listen. And it's certainly not "sad" to design a Flash game on a web portal. Thinking it's "sad" would be taking a technology/execution approach, which you yourself say "You have to get away from that if you want to reinvent."

The whole point of the blog post was to analyze where the greatest opportunity is for a company with no games in its portfolio who wants to work on games all day long, i.e. as a full-time job. We have our innovative AAA game ideas, too. But we're relying on the wisdom of everyone else in the industry who says that you should get some shipped titles made before you try to tackle pitching big game ideas to publishers. I myself have first-hand experience pitching big game ideas to publishers, and from what little experience I have, I'd say those people have been right so far.