I believe the age of an indie making a computer game and making "millions" is almost gone. You'd have to make the game so cheap people would prefer just to buy it than download it with a free virus attached (double the value!). $5 or so. But then you'd have to sell 200,000 copies to make $1 million gross. Most commercial games don't sell close to that amount.
In my opinion indie developers should focus on making console games either on Wiiware, XBLA, or PSN. At least it's a hell of a lot harder to crack.
Or you could make some business applications, as I have found that the business sector is less likely to pirate a piece of software, and you can charge a lot more for it. Look at where I work--- we have over 2,000 employees just at this one location. All of us have WinRAR registered (I hear they bought a 15,000 user license!). Business and middleware developers can make buckets of money by charging more and targeting a higher "class" of people.
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Quote: "but anyone hoping to make millions is, in my opinion, coding for the wrong reason."
And what is the
right reason? Not all of us have the benefit of working 60+ hours a week programming for fun.
Quote: "make it impossible to play my games without connecting to the internet to check and make sure my copy is legal"
I hear ya--- I mean, *who* has an Internet connection nowadays? Blimey!
I say they should bring back that copy protection software that installs a trojan on your computer and blocks your machine from making copies of any discs. Much better than connecting to the Internet and sending a few kilobytes of data over. I mean, I just love plopping my disc in the drive everytime I want to play a game. Mass Effect doesn't do that and neither does, come to think of it, *any* software application you can imagine (PhotoShop, MS Office, Windows).
Quote: "People pirate as much now as they always have."
Are you serious? When I was a kid you had to dial up a BBS with your 2400 baud modem and download 1MB an hour. It would have taken me a month to download Photoshop. Nowadays any Joe can go to Pirate Bay or Newsgroups and download a copy in 30 minutes or less.
Piracy has exploded exponentially since the Internet has been around. That's just economics.
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