We're hoping that GalCiv's success will be able to attract attention to Drengin.net. Only time will tell.

There are several new types of ships we want to add into the game including a commerce raider that can prey on trade routes. Another feature that will go into the 1.x series is the ability to harvest resources from uncolonized planets in a given star system. The list goes on and on.

That's the real barrier to independent developers in the game industry. Better known games have an immense, almost insurmountable amount of inertia in the way of getting coverage. And that inertia doesn't exist to nearly the same level in the commercial (non game) software market. The merit of the product or service tends to be the determinant more so than marketing inertia in the general software market.

Retail has gotten much better over the past couple of years. The Internet is the great equalizer. I remember a couple of years ago WindowBlinds being rejected by a distributor to be at a store. The distributor told us no one would be interested in a program like that. WindowBlinds has an estimated 7 million users today. But isn't available at retail still. The Internet helps make sure that products get a fair shot. Or at least a more fair shot at success than what was previously possible.

I don't think there's much that can be done other than let time take its course. Over time, the Internet will provide more channels and more opportunities. Retailers will be able to more easily work directly with publishers and not have to wonder whether some killer game got filtered out by some distributor rep down the chain. But I think it'll take a long while.

For now, the best thing developers can do is budget their resources so that they don't have to sell nearly as many units to succeed. Don't budget things so that you have to sell 200,000 units to break even.