I was surprised yesterday to see 148Apps run a post on the Atari Pong Developer Challenge. I’ve written about this before on Revert to Saved, and the Atari competition is essentially spec work. Presumably gullible and desperate (or perhaps just naïvely optimistic) indies get to submit their ideas, which become the property of Atari, and one lucky winner ends up with a huge wodge of cash, although as Brian Robbins pointed out in February, said huge wodge might not be quite as huge as the dev was expecting. In his words:

If this were a typical publishing contract, there’s no way I would recommend any developer to sign these terms, no matter how desperate or cash strapped they are.

This is something of a far cry from 148Apps’s take:

Now is the chance to cash in that indie cred for a beefy paycheck.

More like cashing in your soul for a chance to win the King of the Spec World crown.

Like others who have run this story, 148Apps claims Atari is somehow extending an olive branch to the indie dev community, but there are other ways to do this. Atari could so easily have created its own shortlist of indie devs that create great games—perhaps great retro games, in some cases—and chucked a dev fee at them, thereby commissioning exciting and innovative indie games based around the Pong theme. This could then have been released as a series on the App Store, and if Atari was really wanting to doff its We Love Indies hat, it could have revenue-shared. But the Pong Indie Developer Challenge? That still, like a synonym of the original game’s name, stinks.