How can we reinvent games?

Greg Costikyan -- the award-winning game-developer -- recently brought down the house at the Game Developers' Conference in San Francisco with a speech calling for games to be created outside the burgeoning, strangling "studio system" that's cropping up in gameland. Now he's posted a request-for-proposals on this -- a public discussion aimed at mining the web to see what comes up:

Virtually every independent developer sells their game from their own website, as well as through whatever other channel they can find--and everyone I've talked to says they sell only tiny numbers that way. Volumes through other channels--whether that's the portals like Yahoo Games! and such, or via Digital River, or whatever--are always larger, usually by a factor of ten or more. The fact is that you can distribute readily through the Internet, but it's awfully hard to market through the Internet. A box on a shelf serves as a billboard for a product. Conventional retail release ensures review attention. Gamers still assume that a game that doesn't have a conventional release must inherently be inferior--and gamers have yet to develop an aesthetic that says "Gameplay is what matters, and I'll accept lower production quality for superior gameplay." There are, in other words, a confluence of problems that need to be solved: a change in gamer culture, a path to market, a source of finance, and a means of marketing.

Link (via Wonderland)