I think this article's headline is a little misplaced. The massive backing given to Ouya on Kickstarter in such a short time period is testament to the sheer volume of people who want indie gaming hardware. Gamers aren't going to throw around terms like 'saturated market' and 'product differentiation' when a $99 game console comes out.
Don't forget RethinkDB, Mixpanel and Cloudera - those guys are solving some difficult, real world problems. Personally, I wouldn't classify massively distributed computation as a service boring. If anything, the scale (in numbers of users, amount of data) makes B2B of this kind even sexier than share-my-cat-at-my-location-agram.
Kudos to this guy for giving a head start to plenty of indie and starting game devs. I can attest to this as I used Cocos2D to produce my iOS game (since pulled because I have been too occupied this year to hack on iOS: last year of high school = major pressure to do well; very competitive environment). But this is beside the point: Wenderlich's tutorials are awesome, well-written and comprehensive. They won't get you production ready games in a flash, but they sure do help.
From an Indie point of view, iOS game development is considerably more accessible than Android game development by virtue of the following facts:
* Cocos2D is a robust, free and easy-to-use environment; a fully-functional, stable, Android analogue does not exist.
* iOS code is 99% universal (just works on all devices) whereas Android code really isn't. For instance: OpenGL sample code from the Android development guides (http://developer.android.com/training/graphics/opengl/index....) does not work on 2 of 4 android devices I've tried it on because it targets deprecated API's and methods which are unusable using the newest SDK versions (it was version 14 or 15 at the time; largely unimportant). Imagine how disheartening, demotivating and demoralising it is to see that "official Google endorsed code" just doesn't work.
* I have personally tried AndEngine and Cocos2D for Android. Neither is up to scratch with iOS Cocos2D.
tl;dr Ray Wenderlich is indirectly responsible for a ton of Indie games on the App Store, should be thanked, and no, an equal (easy-to-use portable, robust, _decent_ framework) doesn't exist for android (though there may be analogues).
> Cocos2D is a robust, free and easy-to-use environment; a fully-functional, stable, Android analogue does not exist
Cocos2d-x is a very functional and robust C++ port / analogue of cocos2d, and it works on iOS, Android and Win32 (not sure about OSX and Linux?). Is that what you call "Cocos2D for Android"? What do you mean exactly by "up to scratch"? Android's fragmentation is a well known problem that can't be abstracted away, but that's no reason to underestimate the value of such frameworks (it sure is a reason to avoid developing for Android though). I for one love being able to develop abd debug in MSVC on Windows, and only touch Xcode / Eclipse for platform-specific stuff.
As an aside, the HTML5 version of Cocos2d-x is also functional but I can't vouch for its robustness
The $99 is not so much the limiting reagent... South Africa doesn't mean poor BTW :) its just the barrier to entry that is a tad high for an income-less High School student.
I know it's not technically mathematical, but someone in this community should point to Godel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter. It is a fascinating book that partially explores the complexities within Escher's work.
I don't want to sound like a live-free-or-die-hard FOSS fanboy (even though I am), but, you could always use an open toolkit like Qt or GTK. They're ubiquitous, and especially in Qt's case, totally customisable in terms of look & feel. Microsoft can't perform any cathedral-style deprecation (cannibalization) to these toolkits.
