[georgeecollins]

It is true that Unity and Unreal lowered the technical difficulty to make games. And the market is saturated with acceptably good games. You get posts by people who say, my game is as good as game X or game Y and had new features. Why isn't mine popular as well? It's usually a complicated question that people who enjoy making games don't like to think about: what makes people spend money on games.

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.

[dimgl]

> You get posts by people who say, my game is as good as game X or game Y and had new features.

A majority of the time, this just isn't true. I'd like to see a single example of a game that wasn't successful but was legitimately a good game.

And yes, I think making a completely derivative and uninspired game that works well is not the mark of making a good game, even if it technically works.

[georgeecollins]

Being in the industry, I think I could give you a hundred examples of games I consider very good but not successful. Typically the reason why people think that is because the good games that are unpopular are obscure. I used to think the exact same thing before I did it for a living. You would counter that they aren't "good". (What does that even mean?) It becomes a circular argument. Good = successful, unpopular = not good.