[syntheweave]

I also spent time in the industry, and would agree. There are much better industries to work in to make a paycheck, and games can be sustainable if you approach them with an eye towards hobby-scale production. But 20-year-old me would probably still disagree because he lacked for ideas of how to approach a career. It is hard to see your options properly when you're starting out and most "helpful advice" from elders amounts to "I did this and it worked for me(in a completely different economy 30 years ago)" or "the good jobs are in X".

Really, though. The people who do best in games tend to come in with a specific specialty skill that they enjoy and is transferrable, deploy it for a brief tour, then exit. Everyone tasked with arbitrary production-as-a-whole functions gets wrecked at some point. And it doesn't get better at indie scale, because accountability is even lower in a tiny studio, and the producers will tend to achieve results by repeatedly finding new people to do free work, gaslighting them and then tossing them aside when they stop delivering. And if it's a true go-it-alone, then you can end up self-imposing crunch when you sense the game isn't shaping up like it should, and it's easy to stay there indefinitely until you break because game scoping can get out of control so easily.

Like, you can make indie stuff work. I know folks who have. But they have a very tight grasp on the kind of thing they are aiming to achieve, and categorically aren't doing "game productions" in the sense of spending most of the cycle fumbling around figuring out how to make the game and worrying about how to make characters successfully interact with doors. It's basically always a narrow genre entry like "Sokoban puzzle", and the dev specialized into doing only that genre so that more of their work and skillset transfers between projects. And you can do great work this way and truly achieve mastery over the subject matter because with such a narrow scope, the code and assets can be iterated over a ton, without much deadline stress. But "the industry" as a whole is blatantly against respecting that process since it's normalized stealing as much as possible from last year's trends and then pushing all remaining effort into a wider marketing funnel, and in doing so, creating a raft of challenging technical problems. So for as much sheer effort the industry puts in, most of it is wasted.