During the last two decades it was becoming more and more obvious that creating a game that has a chance to achieve a massive success requires to invest as much money as possible. While the cost of production of games was not that high 20 years ago, nowadays many games have a multi-million dollar budget. While this results in high quality graphics and cinematics for the consumer, independent game developers were feeling more and more endangered. Currently, there is just a handful of big players, but there still is a chance for indie game developers. Major consoles such as Xbox and Wii are allowing independent developers to create and distribute games through their marketplace. This may be a great opportunity for those who have great ideas for games, but lack a distributor and money.
It is hard to compete for independent developers with a company like Electronic Arts, which is a top video game publisher. The recent strategy of EA was to focus on quality of games rather than minimizing the cost of developing games. While generally that was considered to be a good strategy, some say that the drop in stock prices suggests otherwise. The shares recently fell a few percent and analysts suggest that this is due to their emphasis on quality. Unfortunately, developing a very high quality product requires a lot of money and time as we can see, for example, in the case with Warhammer Online, which was delayed a few times. More and more money is required for producing games, and that is a reality that we have to accept.