Let me just be clear about one thing here: 360IDev was the best conference I've been too in a very, very long time.  There was no single thing that made it so outstanding, but rather a gestalt. Oh sure... it had great sessions, great talks, some amazing information and all that.  Even the served food was quite good!

But that wasn't it.

What made 360IDev so great was the people.  And I'm not just talking about the friends I made there... though that was especially precious.  But I'm talking about everyone as a whole.  Because what I saw at 360IDev is something I haven't seen in about 15 or 20 years.  It's a bit hard to describe... but what I liken it too is the early days of the Game Developers Conference.  Back when it was small, eand the people were all there with a singleness of purpose and the people who put it on were as gracious and helpful as they could be.

To be blunt, the conference was not dominated by stuffed suits, not dominated by nonsense, not dominated by people hawking stuff... there wasn't even a single prima donna in sight!  People were there to learn from each other, help each other, and band together to achieve their ambitions.  The sense of community, which I feel the whole game industry lost so long ago, was a constant at this conference.  It was, I realized by the second day, home.

This industry will evolved too, and much nonsense will invade over time.  But for the moment, my special thanks to Tom and John for putting on one hell of a conference.  Every iPhone dev needs to be at the next one, without question.

I gave a well-received talk.  Blew a few minds, changed some attitudes and showed a few receptive minds the light and the way.  At least I was told I did.  Okay, I'll be a tad immodest: I'm pretty good at the whole speaking thing.  And this was far from my A-effort (because I had little time to prepare) but I think I got the job done.  And, in some way, I hope I showed a lot of people not only what it was they really needed to be focusing on but also tried to reset the stage a bit.

The enthusiasm one felt from this crowd was fantastic.  The people who had done well with the App Store were giving of their time and advice.  And everyone was there to have a great time and just be spontaneously creative and productive.  I saw genius just for genius sake.

But I saw one other thing too, a dark thing that needed to have some light cast upon it.  It was the usual grousing.  All of it, of course, focused on Apple. More specifically the App Store, the approval process, and so forth.

Well you know what?  I think, I hope... I gave people some perspective at the show.  I know I got through to a few at least.

Because what Apple has done here is nothing less than amazing: They have ignited a new Golden Age of indie game development.

While there I had the opportunity to tell the story of my close friend and brilliant programmer John Ratcliff who, when I first met him, was doing hit games for EA from his basement.  This was 20 years ago, back when EA was not the megacorp it is today.  They relied on small indie developers like him to build games and grow their business.  He created such hits as 688 Attack Sub and Seawolf for them.  Essentially alone.  In his basement.

And he made great royalty money too... buying exotic cars, building a big house so so forth.  He was (and still is) famous in the game development world.

Alas, times change.  EA game projects today have credit lists a hundred names long it seems!  Big gambles, big risks, big payoffs, big disasters.  It's a whole different industry but one thing is for sure: the age of the lone-wolf developer had ended.

And, 20 years later, Apple....  Steve Jobs....  and his team....  Brought. It. Back.

While so many focus on the small things, like the whole Google Voice rejection mishigoss, it seems everyone has lost sight of the most amazing transformation of the gaming industry in my lifetime.  Not just amazing by what it has achieved, or what it will achieve going forward, but the pace at which this has occurred!  The old vets of the App Store game have about 1 year of experience!

Take a moment and think about what this means.  About the magnitude of this accomplishment.

Sure, it's awkward that Apple owns the distribution channel, and that your fate often rests in their decision to bless you with promotion or not.  But that was also true when AOL was the primary online aggregator and you were doing online games (pre-internet ya'all!).  This is not entirely unprecedented.  It's a trade off.  And as was pointed out at one of my panels, it's like the bargain share croppers take on... you get to farm on fertile land.  Apple makes it fertile to the tune of 50 million users and a one-touch solution for buying your apps and sending you money!

As Apple sells more and more iPhones and iPod Touches, at ever lower prices the market just expands.

I was confronted by the fact that many devs feel a tad helpless in the face of the blizzard of apps appearing on the store each day.  They feel their app is just lost in the wind, and there isn't much they can do about it.   Fortunately many of the talks at 360IDev focused on this very subject, including mine.  But even still, there seemed to be an undercurrent of "this isn't fair!"

They are right: it isn't fair.  But more to the point, it isn't supposed to be fair!

I will repeat the point I tried to drive home at the conference:

What Apple has done here, what Steve Jobs has done here, is he has stepped up to each and everyone of us and handed us a bat. Stepping aside, he says to us "Swing away!"

For Americans anyway, we should all recognize this because it's part of our culture as a country; our prime founding principal: Opportunity.  There are no guarantees of a hit app but rather we have been given the opportunity to have one.  Apple has made it possible for a lone wolf developer to compete in the same channel as EA, and win!

If you have the talent, the know-how, the drive, the ambition, then you should be swinging for the fences.  It's not a Lottory; it's not luck.  It's about focus, determination and skill.

So, for all of the budding iPhone developers out there, I say this:

Steve has handed you the bat.

Now... what are you going to do?