There’s only so many times you can get fucked over before you just call it quits. And if you wanna work at a big studio you’d probably just lose your job within a year again anyway. They could go solo but that’s not a guaranteed success, especially if you’re not financially stable. I don’t blame these people for going with something else. Plus with years of this bullshit I’m sure a bunch have had the life sucked out of the work they used to love.
Yeah, solo dev or indie is basically a gamble, either you make a game that people want to play 4 years down the line, or you make a game no one want to play and 4 years will go down the drain.
Yup, the way I see it, you have a few options:
- work in game dev, have crazy deadlines, mediocre pay, and likely lose your job in a year or two; you’ll grow to hate game dev due to all the stress
- work in another industry and do game dev on your own time; if the side hustle is successful, go do that full-time and set your own pace; you’ll get paid more, have more time off, and you can work on whatever game project you want
- try to make solo game dev work (it probably won’t), and then go back to 1 or 2
So on this list, 1 and 3 really don’t look that appealing, so why do them? Just do 2 until something takes off, in which case the risk of 3 is already largely solved.
have been forced out of their jobs and are now trying something new
I mean that is all there is to say, really.
Cool. Then, during the next boom they’ll hire just anybody which leads to shittier games, which leads to another bust, and so on.
shittier games lead to harder times -> harder times create strong developers -> etc
trust the process
Then there’s me, in my 30s, some professional dev experience like 10 years ago that ruined me for years, looking to get back into the industry because everything else I’ve tried makes me feel hollow
Good for them. Staying shows abusers what they can get away with.
Not really… This isn’t people being empowered, this is people being chewed up and spit out