Gaming Startups
DarkShikari: If you want to look at an interesting example of a successful independent game designer, look at ZUN, the developer of the wildly popular Touhou Project shmup series.  You'll notice a few things:1.  He's stuck to a genre that, while still quite popular, does not require an enormous development team.  The place for gaming startups is not in the business of the "big players", but working on games whose main attraction is creative content and enjoyable gameplay, not high-end graphics and enormous amounts of hand-crafted content.  Because of this, ZUN can develop roughly one game a year for the most popular amateur (doujin) game series in Japan in his spare time... and still have time to work full-time at Taito corporation!  See Braid for another example of a relatively low-budget game that made it big.2.  The primary attraction of his games is probably the incredibly well-made musical scores: each game has a full soundtrack, with tracks for every level and boss fight.  This serves as a "grab": the easiest way to get someone's attention is a case of "that looks cool" or "that sounds cool."  His games certainly do the latter.  If you can get a talented artist, music is not something that inherently takes a great deal of time to produce, unlike enormous amounts of 3D modeling or other forms of content.  Most importantly, people simply like listening to good music while playing a game: if you find people are turning off the music to play their own during a game, you have done it wrong.3.  In the end, remember that enormous resources and marketing are not necessary to create a game.  ZUN has certainly proven this true: he has gone from making hobby games in college to being the sole developer of a game series so popular that the fanbase has its own concert, its own convention so large it rents out the Tokyo Big Sight convention center, and makes up almost 5% of Comiket.  Yet he never did any significant marketing--his fans marketed the game for him.  And he still outright refuses to sign any rights over to a major corporation for any sort of higher-budget game or non-game adaptation.Now, perhaps ZUN was lucky.  Or perhaps in one of his drunken moments (he's notorious for his love of beer), he struck a goldmine of brilliance that allowed him to become so successful.  But he's certainly not unique: the way to success for a small games developer is to make niche games and acquire a dedicated fanbase, not to aim at the Halo market.