We're going on two years of providing outsourced design services here at Skyward* Corp., and we've been fairly successful.

We believe that development teams in general have become bloated and overly costly and that has created a burden on the industry as well as the players themselves. Games these days cost too much to make and to buy, our diversity (except in the indie space) is fading and we're becoming more and more Hollywood in finance and product. I don't see that as positive.

The first of this month represented Skyward*'s 1 year anniversary, and at the time I focused on how absurd the odds were that we'd make it that long. It's something we're very proud of, but also something we understand could only happen because of our clients who have had enough trust and faith in us to put their games in our hands.

So, I wanted to take a moment to call out our clients and their own incredible accomplishments over that time:

The game industry is changing; that's undeniable. Smaller
teams and smaller games regularly break into the awareness of players while
larger games manned by hundreds of people often struggle just to break even.
AAA games are locked into an arms race, where more and more money is being
spent to outdo what was done last year and often failing to recapture the sort
of money those teams had set their sights on.

At the same time, games have never been more mainstream and
integral to our culture than they are today. Ask someone if they've played a Facebook
game. Even when the answer is no, they know what you're asking about, don't
they? We regularly hear stories about how companies like Zynga or Blizzard are
raking in the millions, but at the same time we're still hearing the same old
refrain from developers (me included!) about how we don't ever see that money,
or really reap that success.

Some have suggested that that's a crock, that story of the
poor developer. They're probably right. Over the last 15+ years of my career,
I've done pretty well for myself. Sure, I don't have Zynga money, but no one
developer does. The thing is, when you hear the lament of the poor developer
lashing out at the big publisher, you might hear the word money thrown around a
lot, but that's not at all what it's about, not really.

I actually wrote the following letter to a friend recently when he asked me to explain my new endeavor, but I thought it was worth sharing:

My partner and I form the core of Skyward. We’ve spent our careers as game designers, working on projects on various consoles, handhelds, PC and most recently the web, with Fortune Online. It’s been an interesting ride, to say the least, but something has stood out over the last few years.