Semi Secret's Adam Saltsman

I really like the iPad as a gaming device because it has a longer battery life. There's some big budget, what I could call 'real' games coming to iPad over the next year - it'll be really interesting to see if they can stick. Because the hardware can support it, it really can put out something that looks great and you can sit down and play it for an hour, and it doesn't turn off. There's definitely some things headed that way, that are structured to be played under those circumstances. But just because the hardware supports it doesn't mean the audience will.

I prefer the small games, because I feel like they're less risky. We could charge more if we went all-in on one game and it would be a much bigger deal when it came out, so maybe it would balance out, but I'm not entirely sure that either of us have the patience to work on something for a couple of years...

Yeah, just in a year... When we launched our first iPhone game, which was before the iPhone 3G even came out, we released it for $2, and that was considered like really aggressively low-priced. But within a year, releasing our next game for $3 was considered essentially an act of mutiny - not by the general public but by the hardcore gaming scene. They were just appalled by our hubris. It was a real funny thing. And then in less than a year after that the iPad came out and things are pretty different again. It's a fast moving thing, and I think everyone feels it rewards shorter development cycles for now. The big games that are coming for the iPad are, I think, things that were built for something else and their controls are really amenable to a touch screen: so it's "oh crap, here's an opportunity to port one of our games," and the results are going to be super-interesting, if nothing else.

Yeah and I think it may not be a $1 game, it could be something that has like 20 hours of linear-content based gameplay in the same way that we would expect that from a downloadable console game.

Oh, he's alright. The hardware can support it; it's just a question of whether the audience will. And I think they will – there's a very clear historical process of casual games being a gateway drug to all this other stuff that everybody else likes so much.

It's a funny ecosystem. A lot of us just first met online and then eventually, months or years later, met in person and like any group of fairly like-minded people there were instant drinking and Street Fighter-based friendships. There was just no question: everybody there was like an obsessive, semi-anti-social creative person who obsessively consumes other media and tries to make the best thing they can. They're all marvellous people, and like everything else if you get a group of people who are outcasts in one way or another, if they're by themselves they don't really engage socially in general. But if you get all the outcasts together, it's like Breakfast Club all the time.

None of that is surprising, but there is a perception from some people that there are 'real' indies and there are successful indies. In my somewhat limited experience, the difference seems to be that there are indies who work 16 hours a day and finish projects, and then there's everybody else. It sounds like a really crappy, harsh thing to say, but I don't think it's a weird coincidence that some people will ruin their life for a year or two and end up with something really amazing that nobody else could have done at the end of that process, and they share it with the world, and the world's pretty supportive. I think it's really hard to say "they're like a different person now", because they saw this opportunity, and they killed themselves to take advantage of it and made this really interesting thing. I haven't seen any of these guys just roll over and get super-weird.

But I have a fairly lax definition of indie – I think Valve totally qualifies, even though they have an amazing amount of resources at hand. I don't think it's a coincidence that the guys who made Steam are also the guys who actively maintain their own games for years. They're still releasing updates for Team Fortress 2, and that game costs like $6 now: they're essentially offering free DLC for a nearly free game, and I have to think that they do it because they love it.

For me, if you start trying to define an indie hierarchy that's based on anything but making the thing that you have to make and not doing it only for the money, but doing it because it's the thing that you have to make... If you can buy food while you make it that's great. The number one thing is never going 'Okay, okay, I wanna get that extra 10 grand at the end of the project, so let's make sure that we cut out this stuff that we really love.' If you don't have to make that call, then in my book you're creatively independent. And that's my definition for the games I want to play – if it wasn't made in that relatively creatively independent atmosphere, I probably won't be able to get a lot out of it.