While it’s somewhat ‘above’ the scope for an indie dev like most of us here, I think it was tremendously valuable.
Dallas Dickinson is not the first person I’ve heard say, “make your game follow your genre so your players can form reasonable expectations, but emphasize the innovative feature, and make that innovative feature fit your game’s theme.” With SWTOR, it’s certainly story. With other games, who knows? I know with Thora it’s certainly gameplay [/shameless-plug] In all seriousness, though, I wish I’d had that advice a year and a half ago.
Another bit I liked was the management of outsourced services. Everyone has to outsource something some time, and their perspective on rating and communicating with their contractors was interesting. I agree that it’s a good idea to meet face-to-face with people; problem is, being indie, we typically have more limited resources which may preclude that.
I could go on a while, so I’ll just say - great find, man!
While applying this thinking directly to an indie dev is definitely above our scope, I think that having articles like this in the back of our minds just enables us to design better products down the road even if we aren’t away of it’s effect on us