They're clearly right about their point. You can make a shitty game in one sitting using today's tools; I've done so a bunch of times. My games all suck but they are games with art, music, sound, and gameplay that people can play and enjoy briefly. You are also clearly right that making good games is hard, and indeed getting harder. The quality bar for a AAA game is insanely high in 2023. I don't see these as being incompatible points, and I'm not sure the anger I sense in your post is warranted--was it necessary to suggest that anyone who disagrees with you is a dilletante and that their posts are noise?

* Those who miss my own self-mocking should feel free to consult "Catullus 16" in lieu of submitting their critical commentary on my comment

Perhaps you're interpreting a general statement that means different things to different people through your own context and missing a bit of what they mean. It's easy to do something as a career and discount the non-career people doing it, but everyone has their own reasons do to things, and sometimes it's not external.

If we replace "games" with "art", then we get people saying "easy to make art". I'm sure professional artists trying to support themselves think similarly to you, that it's hard, and I'm sure it is. But they may not be talking about art the same way you are talking about art.

Making art for yourself can be fun, and relaxing, and even liberating. Making games for yourself can be too. In this context it can be very "easy", because you're only looking to please yourself. It's no less "real", it's just for a different purpose in some cases. They aren't adding noise, they're talking about a slightly different thing, but it's also an important thing, and also important for the other, professional context as well.

Do you really think professional game makers and art makers are making their profession better by telling laypeople that no, what they're doing is not the same at all and what you do is hard so they shouldn't relate their own experiences? Won't your profession be better served by instead of discounting their views discussing the differences of when it's done personally or as a hobby and when done for general consumption? Aren't many of these people the professionals of tomorrow, or maybe not, and you're helping some people realize they'd rather keep it personal and a hobby?

It’s difficult to make good games. It’s difficult to make fun games. It’s difficult to make complex games.

But it’s easy to simply make games.

People make games in 48 hours. People make games with pencil and paper. People make games probably no one ever plays.

If a game is difficult to make, it’s because you have made it difficult: You’ve given in to scope creep. You’ve chosen an ambitious idea well beyond your abilities. You have complicated multiplayer network code where it’s hard to keep clients in sync. You’re writing everything from scratch…

But overall, if you can stick to something simple, manageable, and well within your ability to execute, you will realize it’s easy to make games.

>If you feel what I feel you don't make excuses about "luck."

one of my favorite quotes:

“Luck Is What Happens When Preparation Meets Opportunity" - Roman philosopher Seneca

And I think it bridges both people's feelings on the term. Yes, to some extent you do need to just be in the right place at the right time. Or create that right place/time yourself (which I argue is harder than even making a game). But your own quality of work and talent will be a factor in if you are "lucky". A genius who never leaves their home or never communicates will never get lucky, but someone hard working with a plan to get themselves out there will create multiple portions of luck. Which of course contrasts to the rich but lazy heir who will have opporttunities out the nose but almost no genuine interest in them.

>You can choose to make something beautiful, to hone your craft, to stir a feeling. What could be better than that?!

based on this website, making 300k at Apple or something.

I don’t think anyone would claim the actual game design is much easier (and the marketing is probably more difficult now).

No business feature in my 15 year career has ever come close to the complexity of shaders, trig, and physics!

In the end whether I ship it to market or not I will always have the satisfaction that I literally achieved my childhood dream and, if I recall correctly, fame or riches was never part of that equation.

Too bad that the toolsets and skills available for games aren't pushed further into the computer ecosystem.

I think a linux desktop with UI elements from even a moderately basic game could be a better integration between humans and their work.

For example, most games have settings with options and keybindings right at the very start of your interaction with the system. At any point, you can get in and tweak them if they aren't efficient enough for you.

You can also adjust sound and display settings.

Additionally, most games have a sort of "soft start" to help you learn the user interface, and navigate through the game world. Games have to attract the player and get them up to speed.

It would be very cool to promote these sorts of things up in a desktop UI.

When I was a kid, my older brother could reproduce any game he saw. He saw Tetris and he built it. I described a Mario game (well before Super Mario) and he built it. He wrote a text adventure. Later he learned proper programming and stopped making games. I don't think he can do it any more, but at that time, it seemed to be easy for him.

Of course games changed a lot since the early 1980s. But on the other hand, to make a game without all these modern frameworks and game engines, also adds an additional barrier that he easily overcame.

The worst part about that phenomenon in online fora is the scores of equally oblivious people itching to click that reply link and confidently back up the first ignorant comment with their equally uninformed suppositions presented as fact. I wonder how they'd react if Joe from sales interrupted them at every meeting confidently declaring that they were doing their jobs wrong, "backing it up" with assumptions and misgivings that any developer could instantly identify? I wonder how they'd react if after calling him out, he justified it by saying he should know because he's worked with developers for years?

That is why designers don't contribute to open source projects.

This isn't specific to games. I doubt many dot-com millionaires would have the same success with the web if they were born today.

What to make of the absence of A-lister game development personalities? There are maybe exactly zero. Notch disgraced himself, and he may be the single only person to have ever gotten into the regular person popular consciousness enough. In the near past, Sid Meier and Will Wright had their names on games, but I guess not in a memorable enough way. I'm not sure anyone watched the three or so TV series about John Carmack and John Romero. Gabe Newell, Shigeru Miyamoto, Sam Houser, Tim Schafer, Hideo Kojima... A baby boomer is not going to recognize any of these names. None of these names pass the "Mom, have you heard of..." test.

So there will be lots of noise.

There are benefits to this - the absence of a system - though.

- no institutional power: As you may have experienced, there's no one taste maker. When you are trying to market for $0, it's literally all serendipity.

- the heritage: There's no such thing as a nepo baby in game development. All those ex-Blizzard people have just as little chance of making something anyone plays as you do, even as they finance 8 digit budgets to your 0.

- the data: Valve, benevolently, shares the data that movie, TV, music and book financiers hoard, allowing any 1 smart person to correctly play the role of the 10,000 studio executives at Disney.

- there's even some up front money, for nothing: Facebook, also benevolently, gave out lots of development checks for games, expecting basically nothing in return; Epic Mega Grants similarly.

What did I miss? You did it because it was fun. And… it was fun? Then just because you release it and share it with others, now only external validation counts?

I think this is a trap I fall in all the time as well. I make something, and as long as I keep it to myself, only my own experience with it determines if it was a success or not. As soon as others get to see it… what I think of it doesn’t matter anymore. Only their reaction.

It seems like most of the industry is pushing bits around or trying to make specific shareholders rich at the cost of everyone else.

Rambling, but it you get any good insights I'm definitely interested in hearing them

Heads up that a majority of these are “fake”, and/or stretch the truth considerably. There was one where in one video they had made a fully realized open world in Unity and in the second they implemented flying.

It’s all smoke and mirrors. These creators have spent weeks getting these games to the point at which they’re at. Whether it’s in training, or in previous failed games, or in creating templates to make future games, it’s never that easy. There are so many nuances to these engines that you can easily lose an entire day just fiddling with one feature or fixing a bug.

So take it with a grain of salt.

All of these things led me down rabbit holes that gave a wealth of knowledge and experience, many of which I apply to my day job (or let me be in a position to move up). In 20+ years, I've made hundreds of prototypes, engines, and demos. I've only fully released a handful of games, and for the most part they were a slog to complete.

For the longest time I thought it was something wrong with me, just "too lazy" to complete something or I needed to "try harder." I've since come to learn more about ADHD and see it's an expected result as dopamine levels change throughout the project. So I've changed my expectations from "I'm going to run my own indie studio someday" to "I'm going to work on whatever moves me right now and use it as a fun learning experience."

Why do you feel you need to be skilled in either to express oneself? The expression is the goal, not the perfection.

I also don't believe that you have to let go of the expectation of compensation. You can have both compensation and expression, just maybe use a little more time/money towards marketing.

If your goal is to release as fast as possible or create as many games (for some definition of game) in your lifetime, then I guess there's a case against building your own engine or - as I would call it - using libraries.

But big engines definitely have distinct "feels" and can't quite hit certain gamefeels.

There's also the long view: What if I spend 5 years making an engine, learning gamedev and computer graphics, and come out highly expert with an engine built to my tastes? At that 5 year mark, suddenly my engine is better for me than the generic ones.

You may say - there's no guarantee! True. But what if I know I'm technically excellent and that I'd be wasted that advantage of mine by _not_ going that route?

What if I really only want to make a handful of games in my lifetime. Maybe I'll release smaller ones along the way as learning exercises, but I'm fine with spending 5-20 years in the dirt growing and come out the other side with something truly special?

Tools affect your art. Especially programming & gamedev which is so psychic. I may not want my mind tainted by engines with product-mindset values I don't agree with.

The reasons go on.

You'll learn a lot from writing things from scratch, and likely come out of that a much better programmer. This experience can lead you to making a more interesting game.

The difficulty of writing a custom engine is also overblown, you don't need to (or should) implement a general purpose engine. Just implement exactly what you need for your game.

Anyways there are plenty of recent examples of very successful indie games using custom engines, often from a single dev or small team. Sure you may be able to get your game finished faster with Unity, but there are thousands of garbage Unity games on Steam, you can always add one more to the pile.

As a guy who started 14 games (most with a custom engine, some not) and released none of them, I think both approaches can keep you from shipping in their own unique ways if you're not focused enough on _what_ you're building :)

Teardown [1] was developed by one guy, custom engine, and sold over a million copies. The technology is so unique that it wouldn't be possible to implement in an existing engine, at least not without significant rewrites.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teardown_(video_game)

You can see a ton of polished, fun games that weren't successful by just skimming over lists of games on phones, Steam, or Nintendo Switch. I'm not going to bother linking any of them, since you're just going to nitpick and insult the work of random people you don't know, and it won't be a productive path of conversation.

That said, you can redefine your idea of "success" a little and make a comfortable living: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JmwbYl6f11c

It also really depends how you define "successful". I've put out 3 mobile games in the last few years as a solo or mostly-solo game dev[1]. Each one has been game of the day on iOS and received other prominent featuring. From a critical and editorial standpoint my games were successful. From a "is this a sustainable career that supports me financially" standpoint, not so much.

[1] You can find my games at https://birdcartel.com Let me know if you think they fall into the unfun/janky bucket.

I broadly agree but I think you're being too pessimistic about not having players. If your game is not novel (or maybe even if it is), I'm sure you can find a community that would enjoy it. Maybe participating in that community counts as marketing to you but I feel like sharing what you have created and marketing what you have created are separate.

Reddit is a good place for this type of discovery. Discords of other niche games in similar/adjacent genres would be another one. I feel like it's not as hopeless as you make it seem!

But there is still plenty of room for ambitious, beautiful, complicated or thought provoking games. That's what's hard now. It used to be hard to make good pathing AI or a performant 3D renderer or real time physics. Now the challenges are different but still very hard.

I'm currently doing exactly this. There's some games I never finished and released back in the 2009-2011 period when I tried self employment, so I'm using ChatGPT to build me a javascript game engine and Stable Diffusion to make some art.

The world doesn't need another vertical scrolling shooter, but I'd like games that don't waste time on loading screens and have nothing to do with the evil that is 'analytics'.

I too had the unfulfilled need to be "known" when I was a child, which was impossible because my traumas were so far from any normal child's experience, realizing the futility of ever being "fully" known or "fully knowing" someone coincided with the concept of Sonder fully sinking in, that's also when I realized empathy was a red herring and thoughtful sympathy was the strongest possible outcome outside of perhaps a twins experience (which I can't even begin to speak to).

Nothing as infinitely complex as an individual can ever be fully known for any non-arbitrary definition of fully, most -- if not all -- people won't ever even fully know themselves. Appreciating life and the mystery of individuals is something to bring awe. People who think an individual can be "fully" known have a very low view of the complexity of individuals.

Meanwhile California has been working on its interstate railway for... 25 years now? Still a long ways to go too. And that's a single state housing ~16% of a single country, a country some 25x larger in land.

I made a multiplayer game for a game jam and I had to setup alerts on my phone for when people joined just to ensure they had someone to play against (although I didn't get it setup properly until after the voting period ended). Even that didn't work because many of the players were in a timezone opposite mine, so I was asleep when they connected.

So, Farmhand just exists as a free open source game that I love making and handful of people enjoy playing. And I hope it continues on like that for the rest of my life. I think I'll reflect positively on that choice on my deathbed.

- [0]: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2080880/Farmhand_Go/

And I think that era is completely dead, if it ever really existed at all. What I mean is somebody might see a game like the Binding of Isaac sell a zillion copies and think to themselves, 'Wow - I could make that game. I could even make it better!' And they're probably right, but with that game already released to massive popularity, creating a clone just isn't going to resonate with anybody unless it takes it to a whole new level, which clones essentially by definition don't do. You can see this exact attitude in this author with his 3d renderer. He expected people to appreciate it because he spent thousands of hours on it. But people don't care about stuff like that, they care about what's in front of their eyes - and what was probably a few poorly lit textured polygons moving around is not going to inspire fanfare.

Ironically low-effort clones also work as an example on this front. Vampire Survivor is another game, technically trivial, which has sold about a zillion copies. And it's little more than a reskin of 'Magic Survival' [1]. But the author clearly saw the potential in that game that nobody else did (including its own author), so he deserves all the credit and reward he's received. It just feels like if we viewed game development as a market, it's full of people buying high, selling low, and then becoming all philosophical when looking for why things didn't turn out as they planned, as if there was some deeper meaning or lesson to be learned.

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cnM9CIqv8Iw

- Convincing a publisher to sign your game takes a lot of marketing skill that an engineer like myself isn't used to, it can be harder than finding an audience of players, since you have to set up a meeting for each one person you're trying to convince to give your game a chance

- Or your can go Kickstarter, but then you're committing to basically being a publisher yourself, and not designing/developing games

- Board game publishers are also having a rough time since there's been so many issues and sudden surprises with shipping because of the pandemic. That's calmed down a bit but it's still putting publishers in a precarious state, and they tend to have fairly thin margins to begin with.

- Board game designers also tend not to get paid very well unless they land on an evergreen title, like Dominion, Ticket to Ride, etc, and/or have a constant pipeline of games (which takes making great relationships with publishers and convincing them to sign a bunch of games you churn out) and people in the industry in general tend to get paid less (can be 50% less) than the already underpaid people in the video game industry. I keep looking at salaries in job postings and going "No way I could take that much of a pay cut, as much as I'd probably enjoy the work more"

I know one guy that worked on a game for two years, made a game that was successful by the publisher's standards (it was in Barnes and Noble) and only received $9,000 in royalties ($18k split in half with a designer). He quit and started a marketing company and is a lot happier now. A few others I know are taking long breaks because they're just burnt out from the constant grind.

That being said I did have a burst of motivation a few months ago and designed a few small games and tried pitching them at a board game convention this past weekend. One meeting (with the largest publisher, even) went pretty well, the others didn't.

If nothing else, I can always code a web version of the games and release them without needing a publisher, eventually, or at least make Tabletop Simulator versions of the games.

I ask this as someone who doesn't play video games (never played any of these so called "Art Games").