My response to this sentiment is: STFU, then, and make one of these crappy games. Then you'll have millions of dollars to make whatever kind of other awesome games you'll want forever and ever.
Because I hate crappy viral games that make tones of money, I should shut up and make a crappy viral game in hopes of making tones of money?
No thanks.
If you had just said "Shut up and make your own game" I could respect that sentiment even though it is quite rude and basically shuts me down from having an opinion which (strangely) I thought was one of my rights.
But suggesting that I start making viral games for Facebook after I go through the trouble of writing an article explaining that I hate those types of games is just stupid.
It's not stupid. It's rational. You're lamenting the fact that the market is demanding games that you, as a craftsman, think are crap. Crappity crap crap.
On the other hand, if you make one of these simple, crappy games and it is successful, you will have millions of dollars that you can use to fund any type of game development you want.
I suppose you see that as compromising your principles or something. In any case, the fact that you "hate it" is an artificial barrier to your own success. If you really believe it's easy for you to make one of these games (and therefore easy to make millions of dollars), why wouldn't you?
I'm sure you'll rationalize it by saying "I don't want that kind of success" or "If I have to compromise my beliefs about game design even once to be successful, I don't want it."
Well, alright, that's fine, but you should see how you're limiting yourself strategically. The market is screaming right now, "HEY! MAKE THESE GAMES!" You're free to ignore it.
As for being rude, well, your article insulted a lot of quality game designers I know whose work, I'd wager, has touched more lives than yours ever has or will. So I'm not too worried about being rude, especially since I think your attitude is what's crappy, not these games.
The author appears to have either a few false assumptions or simply wanted to rant against FarmVille and thought mentioning Indie games was required.
Indie games come from a few places. There are non-games industry and games industry creators. Those from the games industry obviously needed to work on some game before going Indie. They get experience, connections, and money from working on games just like farmville - without that industry start, who can say if we would have ever received World of Goo or others.
Likewise, those not from the games industry needed to know videogames exist. Maybe farmville will start a teen on the path to becoming someone on the caliber of Cactus.
What goes on in pop culture influences Indies, but it definitely doesn't control nor destroy them. Does it get more people exposed to videogames? Then I can't see it hurting the Indie scene. Note: it may "damage" mainstream games to some, but that is what you should complain about.
Zygna (of FarmVille fame) has one of the most sophisticated testing and metrics operations on the Internet today. From externally observable evidence they're probably better at it than WoW and WoW is large enough to be its own national economy. (Zynga is a lot like IMVU or for that matter Toyota: I don't care if you have no interest in their product, their processes are worthy of study.)
They aren't just throwing dung at the wall and seeing what sticks: they're very, very good at what they do. For every FarmVille there are tens of thousands of games which you have never heard of: their viral growth coefficient was .95 instead of 1.05, kaboom, that is all you need to fail. The platform is getting harder to develop for, as early entrants used techniques which were what SEOs might call "a wee bit grey" to gain traction, and these are either impossible now or will result in a new entrant getting hit with the banhammer. (For example, early social games maximized their viral coefficient by adopting a spam-early spam-often policy to user notifications, which ticked off a lot of Facebook users, causing Facebook to take a number of countermeasures. Ask somebody who builds for it to describe the specifics, but there are now throttles and some sort of system where you earn the right to use the viral channels.)
"Ask somebody who builds for it to describe the specifics, but there are now throttles and some sort of system where you earn the right to use the viral channels."
All of that is going away in five days. No more requests, no more notifications, etc.
Memo to self: add "Do not build for platforms which could pull the rug from under you" to list of tips for founders with day jobs. That sort of thing would crunch my business like a tin can if it happened to me in the wrong week. (Actually, I think all weeks are the wrong week for something that big.)
Facebook has done this at least three times previously. This time was better than previous because they actually laid out a roadmap with specific dates.
This is why the game I'm currently working on is built using facebook iframe/connect, and not fbml; the thinking being that this product should be able to stand on it's own merit regardless of which API i mash into it.
I don't have a good one-stop "Here's everything people outside the company know about Zynga" resource in mind, but my two secrets for keeping a finger on the pulse of social gaming are a) andrewchenblog.com (though he doesn't blog much anymore, which saddens me because it frustrates my hunger for testing/metrics inspiration) and b) Slideshare (It is amazing what goodies people give away at conference presentations and a huge portion of them eventually migrate to Slideshare.)
I can't really speak for social games but I can elaborate on the casual side of gaming .... when we upload to sites like Kongregate and Newgrounds we submit ourselves to the mercy of a very vast, very diverse, very easily unsatisfied and very unappreciative audience ... and we need about 8 out of 10 people to like our game, and there's no second chance.
Sometimes only a handful of games satisfy these requirements a month, out of 100+ a day.
Social games I imagine are much the same .... you have to get a lot of things right first time, and your list of things that were right yesterday aren't necessarily so right today.
Really a lot of things are the same ... the difference between making a product your friends like vs. your town vs. your city vs. your state vs. your country vs. the whole world .... probably far below 1% of 1% of 'stuff' makes it to the top.
That's an interesting difference ... with casual games we have a really short window of opportunity to execute significant change.
On ratings-focused sites like Kongregate and Newgrounds we might literally only have hours to measure, judge and react to feedback and bugs before our game slips off the new games page or the ratings-damage is too great to recover from. And that's if we're lucky enough to be given a reason why "this game sucks 1/5" heh.
On the rest of the internet we have the issue of games being distributed beyond our control, once a game goes 'wild' it gets to 100s of sites and there's really only a couple of options for pushing out updates - hot load an x megabyte swf to millions, or Mochi's LiveUpdate system which requires their ads (sometimes we're not allowed to use ads).
He seems to discount the difficulty in harnessing the virality of Facebook, especially now with the locked down channels. I think virality is far harder to get right than good art, or a good story, or good game mechanics.
I want games with substance and style, richly textured and thickly layered, with real character development and breathtaking artwork. I want games which remind me of good books.
I paid $70 for this game when it was called Final Fantasy 13 and had a development budget in the upper eight figures (in dollars, not yen). If you want this from a game with a development budget in the five or lower six figures which is only paid for by 1% of all players and does not have a viral loop baked into its DNA, you apparently want to be disappointed.
Although this guy is correct in saying that FarmVille, Mafia Wars, etc are really crappy, game-play wise (but excellent slot machines), I think Facebook games hold massive promise for indie developers; they're bringing casual games to a massive new audience, and I think there's a lot of money in games that provide engaging gameplay and leverage the social aspect.
"Facebook is going to set indie gaming back 5 years, developers must follow the money, and nobody can deny that there is sick cash to be had playing the viral lottery on Facebook"
I can cite many examples of people who have abandoned PC gaming for XBLA, PSN, Wiiware, Flash gaming, Unity web gaming, or the iPhone, I don't know of a single guy who has jumped onto Facebook. So the fundamental thesis of hardcore indie developers being tempted by the lucrative cash piles to be had in Facebook apps seems pretty dubious.
The other contrarian point I'd like to make is that Facebook has actually been really kind to indie developers. Facebook Pages are huge for self promotion: Facebook is consistently a top referrer for our game, even though it is a traditional, PC/Mac/Linux downloadable game (that's not even released yet).
Slightly off-topic: your upcoming game seems pretty cool; especially the setting. I've had the comic in my RSS feed since months and I was really thrilled to see it come alive the past few weeks.
I think the author is upset because developers are slowly learning there is this giant demographic of people who like playing games, who aren't 16-30 year old males, and these people have no problem paying for games.
I think he's upset because games used to be made with only his demographic in mind, and now his group is being shifted back in how many games are developed for them.
