Interesting discussion...
There's obviously a niche market out there, even if it's one which doesn't appeal to all of us.
The point is that right now, you probably have dreams of writing a kick-ass RPG or FPS and if it's good enough, sell it to make a bit of pocket or if you are old enough, beer money.
But, what are you up against? Dozens of well financed companies like Valve with huge teams of programmers, artists, musicians and modellers... the list goes on.
None of them produce mainstream computer games which would be classed as suitable for kids to play in most religious communities due to the sex, violence, bad language and questionable morality of the content.
Personally, I have no problem with mainstream games myself - this is what the majority of the punters want and the companies have to cater for the mass market.
But this means that there's a customer base to cater for who are crying out for someone to make something they can buy. So far, they have been buying crap software because that's all that's been available.
OK, the market is a minority one admittedly, but I'd even go as far as to say that you could be looking at tens of thousands of potential customers. Just compare that with the numbers of possible sales when you are competing with the mainstream guys...
You've also got the fact that you are not going to have anywhere near as much problem with pirating. With the subject matter most of them aren't going to even bother touching it.
Also, you don't have to be in any way religious to write such software. I doubt that any of the production teams from any of the current top ten blood 'n guts games have ever murdered anyone!
A bit of research on the internet would see you through and no-one would be any the wiser.
So, there's no doubt that many DB users here are more than capable of writing something of a much better quality than that which is currently available - even as a lone indie bedroom coder. The question is, how many of you could abandon the idea of writing a typical shoot 'em up for something a lot tamer?
TDK_Man
