The Door of 2008

What actually changed in 2008 wasn't the games, it was the shelf. Xbox Live Arcade, Steam, WiiWare — routes opened up for small developers to reach large audiences. Jonathan Blow spent three years and roughly $180,000 of his own money on Braid, and was about $40,000 in debt right before launch. It came out on XBLA in August, and his life changed. Another one, World of Goo, was even more extreme. Two developers who'd left EA made it on a development budget of just $10,000, and it briefly hit number one in Amazon's PC game sales. Sitting right next to it at the time were World of Warcraft, Spore, Left 4 Dead, and Fallout 3, titles built on tens of millions of dollars. And it shipped with no copy protection at all. Around the same time, the financial crisis and rising development costs had put a lot of people out of work, and this became a landing place for many of them. Change the shelf, and you change who gets to be on it.