So, my private business, ThoughPut Inc is winding down. The cell phone market has almost completely consolidated at this point. The big carriers have learned that if they carry more than about 100 games, it begins to hurt their overall sales. Because there are so many game developer wannabe’s (including me, up until recently), the carriers have more than enough to choose from, and the mobile gaming arena has become *extremely* competitive. Even with the average “small” cell phone game costing around $300,000 to produce, carriers are finding that they can deal with only a handful of game publishers, and have more than enough games to fill their decks.

Where does this leave the small game developer? As one carrier exec said, “You do the math. If we’re going to carry 100 games, would want to deal with 100 different developers, or only a handful?” (or words to that extent). Of course, I’m not complaining — I managed to get in at the right time, make a decent profit, and then pull out before I spent all my profits trying to keep up with the industry giants — not a practical proposition. So what does this have to do with my blog, and why do I mention it now? Well, since ThroughPut no longer needs the dedicated web server it has (which 2robots.com is piggybacking off of), I no longer need to pay $109/month for it.

Don’t worry, this site isn’t going anywhere. I am just going to move it back to my old coworker’s data center, where it was before I started ThroughPut Inc. Unfortunately, I botched the job of remote-upgrading my server there from Red Hat 7.2 to CentOS 4.2, and managed to completely hose the machine. So, the conversion will have to wait until I can take a trip out to the middle-of-nowhere, Long Island, and re-install the thing in person.

Maybe this weekend.

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