From Ryan at Untold Entertainment:
“At the end of his talk, Dan painted a very bleak picture of the Flash games industry, one where ongoing consolidation leads to big, unstoppable companies, and Flash developers serve at the behest of their new overlords. He’s totally right – that’s already happening. But then he started channeling Karl Marx and Sun Tzu, preaching that workers (Flash devs) must own the mode of production, or build their castles on less crowded hills. His advice: be platform-agnostic. Don’t be a Flash developer or an iPhone developer or an Android developer. Be an octopus. Constantly dip your tentacles into many different buckets, pulling out new players and audience members on a variety of platforms, so that you don’t become beholden to the powers that will eventually control any particular platform, given enough time.”
It’s funny, I’ve for the longest time identified myself as a Flash Developer – even now as I primarily do C# development. It seems like the advice is conflicting though – some say to specialize and be the best at what you do and some say to “Be an octopus.” I’m starting to lean toward the octopus camp in a Robert Rodriguez “People are scared when you can do everything yourself” kind of way…