Thinking about creating small desktop games, who is this market?

It's a tough, tough market to make PC games, but it also has a vibrant indie game community.

In contrast to the other answers here, I'd argue that desktop-based games can be easier to start with than with mobile devices, because the barriers to entry are lower.

If you develop for a mobile platform, the makers of the device act as gatekeepers. You'll often need to purchase their developer tools and framework. You'll need to submit your product for their content and quality review.

Developing a flash-based game might be a good compromise, but it presents challenges of its own. I highly recommend reading Lost Garden, a great blog about indie gaming with a focus on Flash.

If you're not plugged in to the indie PC community, I recommend going to GameTunnel and checking out some of the games and developers featured there. Many indie developers have blogs or articles that highlight aspects of developing games and the business of gaming.

I would say desktop is a bad market for this, unless you are doing flash games. I would encourage you to look at doing this for mobile audiences and on hand held platforms like the PSP and DS.

To expand on this, there are really a number of reasons I suggest this.

1. Most mobile/hand held gaming systems have a distribution channel that all of their customers are funneled into. This means potentially large amounts of customers having a chance to see, and purchase your game. While you still need to do marketing in most cases, often these channels also feature rankings that if your able to climb will usually result in high sell volumes and being picked up by outside press and review sites easily. This can lead to your product becoming self sustaining simply from holding a high rank, and no other marketing campaign happening.

2. Developing for a fixed platform such as a game console or Iphone is much easier to do than developing for the PC sea in some ways. There maybe more technical debt that needs to be payed in order to be able to successfully develop for them, but the strength is that you have a single hardware configuration.

With PC you have thousands of different hardware configurations, graphic cards, etc. This can becomes a huge compatibility and support nightmare quickly. This is why there are hardware compatibility labs and testing services that run successful businesses around this service, as you really need to test on a huge range of hardware. You also need to worry about frame rates and system requirements. With a console you don't have any of this, you code it to work on a given console and it works the same way across all of them.

Note that this is also true for the at large mobile cell phone market, and some others like Android, you end up needing in this case to test on tons of different devices that also have different hardware configurations and limits. This is why I really recommend Iphone/Flash/Hand held game consoles (PSP/DS/GBA)

Desktop sounds so 90s. Just kidding but desktop is hard. There is too much friction for the average user - find online, download, install, etc. It's, like 93%, easier to open a flash game in the browser and 85% of users can do it. (totally made up numbers)

Then there is the piracy - finally a user installs your game, but you don't get any money off it. 2D Boy, the makers of the superb World of Goo, reported 90% privacy for the pc version of the game. This article on their blog discusses that. There wasn't any DRM, but still 90% is too much.

I'd advice you go for mobile, social or consoles:

• The iPhone is big, but kind of hard to get noticed (like any market).

• There is good opportunity in flash especially in the social networks. Facebook is huge (see Zynga, Playdom, Playfish) and Twitter based games might be just taking off (I don't really think there is much value in twitter games myself). Plus you don't really need that fancy graphics (you still need good looking graphics though).

• I'm not really sure how consoles are doing, but the Wii Ware and Xbox Arcade look fine.

Oh, and a great graphics designer is a must.

I'd say just focus on making one game, and keep improving it over the time and simultaneously launch it over as many platforms as possible. Multi-player games and especially building a community around it works out quite well.

Anyway I suggest that you should first pick up a game development book and learn more about the art and science of game development.

Take a look at the YoYoGames.com game maker. Creating a game is super easy, then you can create desktop executables AND web versions of your game. Plus, a $25 license for the full version of the game maker - can't beat that. Just try to play a few of the games their users have made - very impressive stuff.

Personally I'd try iPhone as starter.

• It's easier to develop (artist wise and coding wise, people understand the limitations and won't expect a Halo 3).
• Selling is easier, payment etc. all will be taken care for you easily
• No piracy
• People don't want to spend $5 over the web, but most of the iPhone users are used spend money on iTunes

Also XBox Live and PSN got similar feature but they expect a very high quality and polished games. Since this will be your first game development experience you might not get there right away.

Not to totally disagree with fm, while the Iphone is a great development platform and I completely recommend it, there is piracy. Actually most iphone games/apps have a 50-90% piracy rate and are usually pirated within a hour of being released. (There are automatic tools that break the DRM, strip a few things, and upload them to torrents.)

Sorry about the additional, answer, but I currently lack the reputation to comment.

I have been a Palm game developer and had success selling casual games. Here is the outline if I were to start again.

Build a browser based HTML5 game using javascript and the canvas tag. Don't go for fancy games, just basic puzzles to begin with. The benefit of this approach is that now you can use phonegap like tools to package it for Android and iphone. It also works on desktop and you can host a free version on your site.