Quantity! Great advice for indie game developers getting started

I love the Experimental Game Dev Podcast Show because of all the great information in the form of interviews.  I have been spending all of my spare time listening to these interviews going back to 2006.  Today I was listening to the interview with Tom Scott from December 2008 and this is what he had to say--its long, but worth the read:

It’s not particularly positive advice when you first hear it, but it’s the kind that’s helped me through. If you spend 10 pounds on your game – sorry – if you spend ten bucks on your game, whatever, it’s likely to fail. I’m just saying there are so many people chucking so many ideas out onto the Internet that you’re likely to get lost or somebody else would have gotten there beforehand or the public just won’t be interested. 

There are a million people chucking a million ideas a day at the Internet and for most of them just by the laws of probability are doomed to fail. If you spend a million pounds on a game, it’s still likely to fail. And this is what big companies don’t get about the web. It’s that the odds of a million pound project succeeding aren’t much greater than the odds of a 10 pound, $10, project succeeding simply because of that same weight of numbers. 

You don’t know what’s going to capture the public’s imagination. I used to think that people had a magical corporate influence detector, and that anything that big companies put out on the web was going to fail simply because people could detect that it was corporate. It’s not the case. It’s just the fact that corporate games are outnumbered so so greatly by the millions of people putting ideas out there. The odds are that the million pound games are going to fail just as much as the 10 pound ones.

My advice is don’t worry about it. Chuck out as many ideas as you can. The only way to improve your odds is not to spend a year of your time working on that one perfect project. Put out a quick version of it. If it’s successful, spend the time and the budget on that. If it isn’t successful, chuck out the next idea instead.

The big bit of advice I always have is put as many ideas out as fast as possible. Be in as many places and as many times as you can, and then, maybe, one of them will be in the right place at the right time

Someday I will have the resources to really do a great, in-depth game, but for now I am shooting for quantity so that I can learn as much as possible and get my skills up.