i honestly fear for the entire medium at this point. there were 9,000 layoffs in the game industry last year, and there have now been 3000 just this month. it doesn't seem like it's going to stop. and that's just layoffs that were announced as layoffs, not any of the other ways that companies force employees to quit without having to fire them (return-to-office policies, moving people's jobs to faraway cities, etc)
and outside AAA, nobody is funding indie games anymore. publishers are either not taking pitches at all, or won't take pitches for games that cost less than a million dollars. everyone i know, from new indies looking to pitch their first commercial project, to established developers with several hits under their belt is struggling to get anyone to even listen to them. everyone, from AAA down, is putting all their eggs into the biggest possible baskets to guarantee hits.
and this has an effect on smaller games that are made without publisher funding. for one, it's harder than ever to do that: if you have the skills to make a video game and aren't a professional developer there's a good chance you just got laid off from your job in tech too, because that whole industry is collapsing. everything is more expensive than it used to be. and the big companies spending more and more on their "indie" projects just makes anything that's not that level of quality look like a cash grab.
i keep thinking about dave the diver, a game developed and published by nexon, a billion dollar company, a giant in the korean gaming market, getting called an indie game by morons too stupid to realize that a game isn't indie just because it has pixel art graphics!1
that's what we're up against. massive companies spending millions of dollars on huge projects and disguising them as indie games. i know it's cliche to hate it, but i'm so sick of the whole "shorter games worse graphics etc etc" bullshit because it's not true. you don't want that. you're lying to me, and i hate being lied to.
i feel like i've wasted my life. i spent all this time nodding and cheering when people said that video games could be more, do more, that there was room in the industry for all kinds of freaks and weirdos. i devoted my life to proving them right, i spent years honing my craft and then those people turn around and say "fortnite's actually really good, they got goku in there now." dave the diver nominated for best independent game. "you should really take genshin impact seriously, a lot of people like it." fuck off. i am so sick of wasting my time trying to impress these losers. i want so badly to make the video games that i think would really matter to people, and it's just a total waste of time. they don't care. you don't care. nobody cares.
1: (and, let's be honest: they don't know or care what nexon is or how big of a deal they are because they're racist and nexon is korean)
