We know the games industry is very cut throat, with many smaller developers living project by project and hoping their latest games will sell well to pay for their development and fund the next. However the danger for years has been the buying out of smaller developers that show innovation by the big corporations.

Popcap, the company behind Plants vs Zombies and many others, have announced their are cutting 50 posts at their Seattle headquarters, and rumours that their Dublin studio might close completely, following its takeover by Electronic Arts.

Funcom, based in Norway, has also announced it is to lay off staff after average reviews for its latest title.

Any other developers in trouble you know about?

And what do you think about the current state of games developers? We have the issue with large corporation games publishers buying up smaller developers and then closing them down... just to obtain their IP and other assets. But equally some larger players in the industry can buy up developers to offer them a lifeline to continue, if not forever.

Independent developers really started to disappear after the 16-bit era IMO, and with the rise of consoles from larger companies than we had really seen before (Sony and M$) who had huge amounts of money to throw at their products.

But with the advent of smartphones and tablets it has resurrected backroom coders and small development teams. We also have much easier publishing channels than ever before. For smartphone and tablet developers we have their app stores, for consoles we have their respective online stores (xbox live, PSN) and for PC we have SSo it looks like the industry has gone full circle in some regards... but has equally matured far beyond the dark days when computing as a whole was still developing and the technology was very new. As an industry it is still growing and in certain cases overtaken the film industry.

How do you view the industry today?
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