Mike_Rotch retweeted
Most games fail. I made ~$2 million in my solo indie gave dev career which puts me in the top 0.1% of solo indie game devs. You know how many of my games I consider a financial success?
One. 80% of that revenue was one game. Paid for the rest. If you're in software for the money, game dev is not the way to go. Divide my revenue up over the hours I worked, subtract expenses, and I made about what the average junior software engineer makes working for a big company. A third of what I make now.
Make games because you love to make games. Make them with a.i. if you love a.i. Make them without a.i. if you enjoy that. But know that you've picked a market where your odds of financial success are about as low as they possibly can be for a software engineer whether you use a.i. or not.
So many anti-ai haters are throwing stones in a glass house. The amount of "indie game dev" labels I see on people's profiles who have never shipped a game in their life is absurd. Ship a game first, then talk shit. But know that you're talking shit, not speaking the truth. I don't know what motivates people who have never shipped a game in their life to tell other people that their game will fail, but if you're on the other end of this, just know that they have no idea what they are talking about. Nobody does.
Gamedev is even less understood than filmmaking and 80% of the 600 films that hit theatres every year are financial flops. 99% of advice in gamedev is complete bullshit. Millions of games get made, some of them succeed, then the successful devs give talks at GDC like they knew what they were doing. Then a bunch of people copy that formula and fail. There is no formula. Do your own thing. Explore. Discover something nobody else has discovered. Create a new mechanic. Go crazy. And enjoy the process.
