[littletinman]

This has been my strategy for the last few years. I've been making games on my own dime for just a few years but I now have two self published games on Steam, and a few Micro-Consoles, and a Job in entirely different industry with great benefits and hard stop 40 hour weeks.

I absolutely love programming games! It's the most fun programming I've ever had in the 10+ years of writing code. Nothing beats showing off your creations with family and friends and them "getting it."

I've gone back and forth of whether I should join the industry but with a kid and high priority of family time, I just can't do away with what's actually important to me. I've never regretted working a solid job to support an awesome hobby.

[cableshaft]

Yeah, definitely. I have become a little disillusioned with the video game industry on the consumer side as well, though. There seems to be a lot of "download the newest game, play it for 30 minutes (for an app, 2-3 hours for a big game), then delete it and on to the next game" going on, and it seems very difficult to make a name for yourself unless you're working on large, artsy indie games that take many years to make.

I've started getting into the board game hobby recently and it seems like, while you're never going to get rich off of it, there's much greater opportunities to gain a reputation and while there's a lot of "play the game a few times and move on to the next" in the hobby as well, because games are physical they tend to stay out there and get reprinted for decades, instead of stay out there for a few months, on average.

I tended to design board-game-friendly designs in the first place, so I decided to pretty much switch to board games. As a bonus, there's a healthy demand for mobile app versions of board games anyway, so you can get a physical AND a digital version for the same game design.

Plus it's a hell of a lot faster to prototype new mechanics and build prototypes with physical board games.

But that's me. Programming games is still a lot of fun, just sucks when gamers spend so little time on your game before moving on to the next shiny thing.

[littletinman]

For me it's more about what I put in to it than what I get out of it. I realized really quickly I wouldn't make much more than beer money out of this hobby.

I think the most difficult thing about the video game industry is the amount of drama in the hobbyest scene. Still trying to find a "group" that isn't jumping on the latest "cause" rather than feeding in depth discussions of randomly generated worlds.