While “getting into the mass market “ is by no means the pledge of every game developer, it is the mass-media markets that govern the shape of monopolisations within publishing, production and distribution channels, extinguishing possibility for the emergence or sustainability of mini-markets and smaller teams that choose not to side with a publisher. Game-development as a practice is fast becoming a game whose rules are made by the 'major players'.

Artists and researchers are, however, finding other outlets for presentation of their work. Electronic arts festivals, symposiums and conferences now welcome the medium of the game as a valid, even important field of enquiry and expression, but it is here that we find a glass-ceiling for the truly independent developer. Simultaneous with the continued absorbtion of game content into the Entertainment Industry comes a market for the tools of production themselves, which are often comparable to that of a feature film budget. These include game-engine (the complex software that supports the game) source-code and related licences.

For the artist, issues of cost and licensing greatly hinder open experimentation within the medium, in many cases rendering it totally inaccessible. This is understood best within the context of arts funding. The huge amount of interest in divergent explorations of game technology within the arts is frustrated by either the cost of production or legalities of development and distribution rights.

Here would be game-artists typically find themselves making some serious [and risky] decisions.

To have control of the project (both in the sense of development and distribution) one can either license an existing engine and codebase or author an entirely new one, both of which are are options far too expensive to be realistic within an arts budget. For instance if I wished to develop, distribute and even collect profit from a game based on, or using the 2 year old Quake III Engine, I would need to buy the license for $US250,000 with a 5% royalty paid of the wholesale price for the title paid to id Software. This pricing schedule is indicative of the expense of other quality engines like Unreal Tournament, Serious Sam and Half-life and is secondary to typical budgets for the production labour itself.

Costly proprietory game-engine code and development tools are also often specific to particular computer platforms 3, further restricting the medium's field of distribution and flexibility within the development environment. This again is due to monopolisations by companies disinterested in supporting platforms that do not offer worthwhile revenue returns.

Aside from game companies themselves, multinationals like Microsoft, recently a highly aggressive competitor in the marketplace of computer gaming, produce code 'libraries' and 'Application Programming Interfaces' that greatly influence the hardware design of graphic and sound cards, ensuring that certain game-engine features may only be available on their operating system.

Microsoft's closed-source 'Direct3D and 'DirectSound' are examples of this, both of which compete with the excellent opensource and cross platform alternatives, Open Graphics and Open Audio Libraries (OpenGL, OpenAL).