It seems to me that we have been seeing a new trend in PC gaming recently. One one side, we have the old established juggernauts of old, companies like Epic, id and Blizzard, who churn out massive new games every 2-4 years. One the other, we have casual games so simple and innocent as to border dangerously on the vapid, often delivered in the form of a Flash application somewhere. But, in between the two, we are seeing an entirely different class of game, rapidly gaining ground at a surprising pace.

Most commercial games today are created the traditional way. A bunch of developers get together, pitch an idea to a publisher, get some funding, maybe license an engine or movie, and get to work. Several years later, a complete product has been wrought from the collective talent and determination of the development team, and is ready to go on sale. Eventually, it makes it to your friendly local game store, on sale for some ridiculous price—in these parts of the world rapidly approaching $100 for a single console game.

In these modern times, this type of game is often at the forefront of technology. The people at id, CryTek, and others are amazingly talented and clever. Unfortunately, this kind of research is also expensive. Very expensive. Ironically, the fact that new engines can do so much more than old ones could means you also need to shell out a great deal more for artists capable of making the most out of the engine; what good is having access to 2048x2048 textures on a regular basis if your artists can't make them look good?

As a result, recent heavyweights have often been apparently faced with an unpleasant choice: Either spend a lot of money and time to produce something truly worthy, or cut corners and content and release something half-baked but still technically and technologically impressive. The latter has manifested itself more recently in the form of disappointingly short games, a problem especially bad on consoles. Devil May Cry 4 and Mass Effect, two recent major releases, have both been criticized for not offering enough gameplay. Heavenly Sword is possibly the worst of the bunch, offering only about 10 hours of gameplay for a competent player.

Underneath these giants, however, something is slipping past, and it's growing in popularity. Not quite casual games, and not lumbering mainstream hulks, these games sit squarely in the Goldilocks zone of "not too simple, not too expensive to make". I'm talking about games that offer a decent amount of gameplay without being expensive—neither for the developer nor the customer—and without taking years to produce. Games like Portal, the new episodic Sam & Max games, Sins of a Solar Empire, and others. These are decidedly not indie games; they are full-scale commercial games developed by large game houses. Yet, they are qualitatively different in that they are shorter and cheaper, yet satisfying.

Maybe it's a sign of the times. For a long time, the smart money has been on the game development industry being divided into engine-makers and game-makers, and maybe this is just the next step: when the major actors move ever upwards, making larger and longer games with insanely huge budgets, a gap has opened up for more modest games that don't aspire to be technologically revolutionary; just good games at a decent price and with a more realistic schedule.

As an interesting aside, it seems these Goldilocks developers have a much more admirable stance towards copyright infringement. Stardock, the publisher behind Sins of a Solar Empire, have shown a great deal of insight into the problems surrounding these things today by saying the following:

So here is the deal: When you develop for a market, you don't go by the user base. You go by the potential customer base. That's what most software companies do. They base what they want to create on the size of the market they're developing for. But not PC game developers.

PC game developers seem to focus more on the "cool" factor. What game can they make that will get them glory with the game magazines and gaming websites and hard core gamers? These days, it seems like game developers want to be like rock stars more than businessmen.

Blaming piracy is easy. But it hides other underlying causes. When Sins popped up as the #1 best selling game at retail a couple weeks ago, a game that has no copy protect whatsoever, that should tell you that piracy is not the primary issue. [...] In the meantime, if you want to make profitable PC games, I'd recommend focusing more effort on satisfying the people willing to spend money on your product and less effort on making what others perceive as hot.

This is the key to why these games are successful. When the big guys are off trying to be rock stars, some developers are waking up to the fact that you don't need to have the hottest engine in town to make a great game that is both popular and profitable. There is a vast market out there that likes games but is not interested in paying $80 for a game, especially if it's going to turn out to only last for 10-20 hours. While there are those who to pirating these games rather than shell out the exorbitant amounts being asked for, it leaves a massive body of people who are willing to pay a more reasonable sum for a game that provides a decent amount of fun gameplay, despite the lack of next-gen features. Games like Sins prove that it can work, because it's already working.

If you're only going to take one thing away from all this, it should be this: Games don't have to be cutting edge or take five years to develop to be successful. In fact, for most developers, you're probably going to be better off if you don't try doing that at all, but settle for decent and fun.