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)
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
this has been my experience the past few years too. and for the uninitiated, what taking a million in venture capital funding does (because lets face it, most indie-funding publishers that can toss out millions of dollars have some shadowy VC behind their friendly outward facing owners) is they fucking own your ass. bet on that million dollars being the only money you ever see out of that deal, even if the game becomes a hit, because the people who gave you funding can and will cut themselves a blank check for "expenses" just so they'll never have to pay you the % they promised since they magically never recoup their losses
not only that, you can't make a sequel with better terms either. they'll want "right of first refusal" which basically says you have to give them the opportunity to work with you first on sequals or spinoffs or whatever, and if you can't come to an agreement (i.e. you don't consent to whatever shitty deal they give you) they can sue your ass. and hey, remember how they have a shadowy VC funding them and you got nothing out of your hit game?
plus, like. a lot of indie games don't need a million fucking dollars in funding. they need 250k, or 100k, or even 50k or less to finish. but they're not interested in that at all. that's not in their "throw big money at lots of things and some will become a smash hit and pay back orders of magnitude more" playbook
and this then creates a culture of haves and have-nots. we're making kitsune tails on a shoe string budget (mostly me and my partner slowly whittling away all our assets until we've got basically nothing left) and we're competing with "indies" that have development budget in the multiple millions. of course we can't make a game of the same size, scope, and polish level with 0.01% of the budget. and that's not even going into the BS that is multi billion dollar multinationals trying to get in on it by being like "oh hey look at this cute indie game we made"
things are fucked
