(Future of Game Development - 3)
If a person has been spending the past 10 years as an indie developer and been wearing various hats at once (i.e. not really staying as a dedicated expert in any of the sub-fields of game development), however, just quitting game development altogether may not be a desirable option.
For such a polymath, the best alternative career choice would still have to be rooted in the domain of game development because it is one of the rare industries that could be described as truly interdisciplinary. And I am saying the word "rare" here because most other industries are highly specialized and compartmentalized, as opposed to the videogame industry which has so many intellectual dimensions overlapping with one another, such as fine arts, music, literature, engineering, psychology, and so on.
What's the solution, then, if leaving the game industry is not an option? From my perspective, the answer is quite simple.
Since a videogame is a complex piece of software which encompasses many areas of knowledge, it is often the case that drawing a distinct boundary between things that could be classified as "games" and things that could be classified as "non-games" is quite difficult. Is Microsoft's Flight Simulator a game? Well, it rather depends on how you play it (If you play it for training or experiments, it would be more of a simulation than a game. If you play it for fun, it would be more of a game than a simulation). Is SimCity a game? Probably yes in an official sense, yet it is also educational and is systematic enough to be able to be used as a research tool.
This is where an indie developer can start discovering secret "bridges" which lead to hidden niche markets. If selling a game purely for entertainment's sake is not a feasible option, one can still take a different approach by reinventing the purpose of gameplay. While it won't appeal to the broadest spectrum of audiences, it may still be able to attract a certain group of people who may have been fed up with games that are constantly trying to exploit the gamer's psychological loopholes.