Hi Michael and all, Ah, I do understand probably better than many developers what frustrations you must feel. I myself was sighted up until a few years ago, and believe it or not I rushed off to college wanting to learn to program and in particular write games. In my unexperienced mind I thought I could write the next Jedi Knight, Quake, Doom, or another popular game of that time. Little did I understand then what I do now. What experience has taught me is this. Writing games is a complex and time consuming venture. It is not as easy as it sounds, and it takes hours of dedication. It also takes money to higher the actors to play the parts for some games, it takes money to purchase high quality sound effects, it takes money to license, market, and design the games. For example, one sighted game I have on my computer, Voyager Elite Force, probably cost Raven Software and Activision a huge amount of money to produce. After all most of the actors from the tv shows were hired to act in the games cut scenes. Not only that the game has lots of dialog between Ensign Munro and the crew and hazard team. Then, there are several sound effects for the ships, aliens, weapons, and so on. All of that adds to up to allot of money just spent on dialog and sound effects. Nothing to say of the programming and graphics design involved. If I were to take on Voyager Elite Force it would take me two or three years to construct a prototype of a game like that. If it takes me around a year to do one simple side-scroller just imagine how much work goes in to a FPS game that is equal to that the sighted players have. I fully understand the desire for bigger and better games. Unfortunately, that will not happen in our smaller market unless we can get teams of developers and more money to produce them. If I did a game equal to the sighted games one or another i would have to try and get money back spent on effects, labor costs, etc and that could end up in some very expensive games. Could you imagine the general reaction to a game selling for $60? Most would say that is to expensive. The sad truth of our community is all too many are willing to ask for something, but it comes to reaching for there purses to pay for the additional costs they won't do it. It can't be 5, or 10, or 20 people it needs to be a couple of hundred before I would have a reason to look at doing something so complex, time consuming, and some preorders to upfront some of the early costs of getting the project started. I'm certain I have the programming skill to pull off some good likenesses of Star Wars Obi-Wan, Resident Evil, WWE SmackDown, or some other PS2 games, but I don't have the money to invest in the sound effects, royalties, and the personal time it takes to invest in such a large project. They have teams of programmers working to a common goal, and I am but one leave blowing in the wind. The fact is that most small time developers wishing to make a few extra bucks find it better to write three or four small projects be the be simple FPS shooters, arcade games, board games, than spending all of that time on one large and costly project that may or may not have a good return. The one and only way I can see this working is some sort of open license like GPL. You would create games based on sighted games, keep the source and game free, and tell users to supply the effects from the original disk or rom which are licensed and commercially protected property of the company. Either that or have a download of the sounds, but distribute them under a different license which states where they came from and that by downloading them they can not use them for commercial projects, etc. However, if using GPL or some open license there is no money for the project and it becomes volunteer work. Which may or may not fit in to many developers' desire to do with his or time considering the size of the project.
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