I wrote one of the largest mods for Team Fortress back in the Quake 1 days. One man, working nonstop by himself for three days, developed the original CustomTF. Of course, I spent hundreds of hours later adding stuff, but that was all it took originally.
I am a hobbyist game programmer: that is, programming games is my hobby. Most of them are fairly trivial (such as ports of old C64 games) but they show that it is still fairly easy for any programmer to tinker with new genres of games, if he is willing to invest enough time and effort. And there exist Flash/Java game programmers that create “different” games regularly, as shown in the multitude of quirky little Flash game sites scattered around the Web.
I’m what I suppose you’d call a semi-pro game programmer. I have one commercial release (WordWars) that has earned me a modicrum of money, and I’m working on a browser-based RPG right now. It’s hard work to make even a simple game, but harder still to get noticed for doing it. Heck of a lot of fun though. The trick is to make a game you want to play, not one you think will sell.
Have you heard of PyWeek? It’s a continuous competition whose participants whip up quick, creative games in Python.
many friends get me strange looks when I state that the main reason for me to jump on the mobile bandwagon was the lack of “ready” components. I had to write everything myself: my game engine, my 3D software renderer, my XML “toy” parsers. Without all that, where’s the fun?
Or you became a detail maniac and start writing photo-realistic games or you’re condemned to repeat yourself and others.
Going mobile you not only have the chance to try new control-styles (mostly motivated by devices form factors and limited input-devices) but also hack everything “the old way” to get speed.
There’s also one last appealing factor: when dealing with mobile you have more chances to know what your game is going to be running on. Take my case: Im doing open source games for the Nokia 770. Other from the 770, only the Nokia N800 currently runs my games. Is like dealing with a Video Game console 
If it weren’t for computer games growing up, I never would have been introduced into the programming world either, but now I’m here and I’m enjoying myself. Thanks, Atari/Nintendo/Sega/Sony/Microsoft!
Ok lads rant time im 42 have played games from my first days of (pong)all the way thro to today there are many games worthy of note (lucas arts/halflife/quake early days and many many more/ but lately the games are really pissing me off.the last two weeks ive spent the best part of €250 on the likes of farcry2 fall out 3 cod5 (cod seires was a personal fave)turok the new 1/and a couple of others i cant even be arsed to remember.To be honest they are all shit i havent even finished 1 of them all the way through.My point being i have spent hours on certain older games trying to get past a tricky point because i wanted to see what was next but now all you get is eyecandy ie a wavey bush a sunset/shiny water ect ect.games have lost there fizz they are no longer an adventure they are just pretty i really think this is down to big companys wanting something shiney they can put on the tv to con young and old gamers into thinking ooooooow that looks good sadly it works.
Experimental Gameplay - http://www.experimentalgameplay.com - is shaping up to be something like the independant game development farmground you’re talking about. These games are way too simplistic, but I could see either this or something similar that allowed people to post a demo, grow a fanbase, and get funded to build out the full game.
In the meantime, though, my 5 year old sure likes these games, and the 2 year old loves to watch…
I always wanted to make games but (much like music) the more I’ve learned about the industry the less I have wanted to make a career of it. Also, the indie-gaming community (or the parts of it I’ve had dealings with) is strong and full of helpful, interesting and very competent people.
Of course, the higher availability of the tools will make for more posts on all the games writing boards along the lines of “I got C# Xpress, how I make MMPORPG??? kthx.”