IMHO bedroom coders have come up with more original ideas than any number of pro designers have - so I don't think articles like this one really offer anything new or helpful in our cases. For instance, he says:
Quote: "Would you rather people played five hours of your twenty-hour game before getting frustrated and gave up on it or completed your game in ten hours? Replayability is no longer an issue. Nowadays when people have finished with a game they trade it in towards the price of another one. Also renting is becoming more popular. Trying to increase to length of your game by making it too hard is bad practise."
That's really the damning point of the whole article, I don't want to spend months making a game that people complete in one night - and using people selling the games again as an excuse for not bothering making it too long is exactly why the PC games market will keep it's decline.
Van-B
The nature of Monkey was irrepressible!.