[tiniuclx]

Times have changed a lot since Garry broke through with the infamous Garry's Mod. That's where I got my first taste of programming - writing a PID controller for a tank turret so I could point the tank's gun using my mouse.

Today, it's easier than ever to get started making games (even I can do it! [0]) but standing out in a crowded marketplace is very difficult. The music industry saw a very similar trend about 10-15 years ago, with the release of consumer recording equipment. In both cases it lead to a 'de-professionalization' of the industry, where most participants are amateurs but most of the success still goes to established studios - barring one-in-a-million outliers such as Garry's Mod, or other indie darlings like Hollow Knight, Balatro, Stardew Valley.

[0] https://store.steampowered.com/app/3627290/Botnet_of_Ares/

[x0x0]

You may find this channel interesting: https://www.youtube.com/@thomasbrush/videos

Thomas interviews lots of successful indies about how to make games that provide a living. My takeaway is that while the AA/AAA environment may have never been more challenging, if you can ship small focused games, you the evolution of devtools (eg free and/or functionally free engines for teams earning under $1m) means that making a living shipping small games is doable. You just have to ship small games, not try to compete with studios spending $150m on the low end.

[ToucanLoucan]

And I'd reinforce that to say that you can do the same thing with software, and small IT build-outs.

Monolith platforms right now are more unpopular than perhaps they've ever been. Businesses in your area would LOVE to not be saddled to the monstrous site-builders and corporate-focused clouds that don't fit their businesses. If you want to make a good living, get out there and network with folks who run businesses in your community. I make a solid side-income doing IT for businesses in my area, just easy stuff like setting up WiFi services that they can rely on, managing on-site POS systems, printer ink, that sort of shit. I did the same thing at a previous job and now I do it for a handful of businesses near me. I don't make a ton of money but I think I could scale this up if I really wanted to, I'm just happy with it where it is and want the reliable salary of my WFH programming job too, and a lot of this stuff I also manage with automation.

There's a lot of money to be made in small IT/Software/Games. It takes more legwork but it's far more rewarding IMHO.

[tiniuclx]

Thanks, that seems very interesting!

[skeeter2020]

>> 'de-professionalization'

I'm a dinosaur who's supposed to hate the music kids listen to these days, but the quality seems as good or better, and the quanity magnitudes higher, so maybe it was a professionalization of amateurs?

[tiniuclx]

Well, the quality of the games that reach some level of commercial success has indeed gone up. On the other hand, ~50 brand new games release on Steam every day and a lot of them are gonna be first-time releases from amateurs for whom the level of quality & polish achievable with a small team & publisher support is just out of reach.

The best indie games are amazing these days, but they hide a long tail of disappointed developers.

[Buttons840]

I'm always on the lookout for the highest quality game that was a failure. I'm open to hearing some here.

To potential game developers: Do not despair based on reports of a difficult market, despair based upon games you have personally looked at that failed.

Personally, for almost every failed game I can see a good reason why it failed. Sometimes games succeed and I don't understand why, but so far I haven't seen a game that failed and I don't understand why.

If what I'm saying is true, then to succeed you simply need to build a game that does none of the things that lead to failure.

[meheleventyone]

> If what I'm saying is true, then to succeed you simply need to build a game that does none of the things that lead to failure.

This is true but it’s also equally true that no plan survives contact with the enemy. No one can perfectly predict the future.

The market isn’t static and everyone else is also trying to avoid doing things that will lead to failure. In some senses trying too hard is also a cause of failure because it leads to homogenization and you enter the market at the same time as everyone else with the same ideas. Games is a place where innovation can be key to success but that is also where the risk lies because it’s not clearly understandable until after the fact. This in part is why AAA seems pretty stagnant.

[npinsker]

You have the right idea — it’s MUCH more complicated than it seems. There are more games than ever, but the market is growing (Steam in particular is exploding outside of the US), indie devs can do more with less and don’t need to use as many middlemen, and influencers regularly give games millions — or more — in free advertising. Whether the business is easier or harder is a very difficult question to answer.

This indie dev (who has made millions themselves) agrees with you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCzhyUsDHPE

[meheleventyone]

This video is great but ironically it is largely about marketing which includes all the positioning, market analysis and case for the game as well as PR and advertising.

[ByThyGrace]

If the market is spread so thin that, say, fairly original games released today would have been sure hits 15 years ago, where is the failure? Lack of six figure investment in marketing campaigns? Is creating success simply already having the capital to make a successful game? Is it being in the influencer "meta" (see right now e.g. PEAK)?

I don't think success/failure should be framed in any other way than "did the game break even for the dev/publisher" and that's beyond what any player perceives. Because crossing that line will send devs into despair, as you mentioned, it's just not sane.

[gwd]

I took "I can see a good reason why it failed" to mean, "There was an obvious flaw in the craftsmanship of the game": The story wasn't good (if it relied on story), the mechanics weren't good, the graphics were sloppy or ugly, it was buggy or incomplete or something else.

The claim is: Make a solid game - a solid story, solid mechanics, solid graphics, no bugs, etc., and the game will succeed.

And that's an easy claim to refute -- point out just one game that was at least "solid" on all those fronts which nonetheless failed. He's asking you to show him one, so that he can update his beliefs.

"They didn't spend $500k promoting it" doesn't seem like a "good reason why it failed".

[meheleventyone]

What I’d suggest is taking a look through the games published by a company like Raw Fury that has a stellar reputation. There are plenty of good games by that definition that didn’t do well commercially on their books.

https://rawfury.com/

For one other example I know of because friends made it is Phantom Spark: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1924180/Phantom_Spark/

Making a good game is table stakes for success not a guarantee.

[chongli]

Success is not 100% in control of the developer. There are plenty of outside factors that influence a game’s ability to take off and gain a lot of attention.

"It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not a weakness, that is life."

- Jean-Luc Picard

[raincole]

Define failure. If you mean financial failure, there are hundreds of examples. Perhaps thousands. A game that sells well can be a financial disaster. Bioshock Infinite sold millions of copies and it was the final nail in the coffin of the its developer.

[Sohcahtoa82]

> On the other hand, ~50 brand new games release on Steam every day and a lot of them are gonna be first-time releases from amateurs for whom the level of quality & polish achievable with a small team & publisher support is just out of reach.

I'd wager a lot of them are money grabs from someone who followed a tutorial on how to make a certain type of game in Unity, swapped a few assets, and put it out there hoping to make a few dollars?

[shortrounddev2]

Yes but it's difficult to distinguish your game from theirs in the search results. It's not like people play a demo of every game and then buy the best one

[GoofGarage]

Someone on YouTube recently looked at exactly what those 50 games are. She tried to give all the ones she bought (she looked at most of the 50 in the store) a fair shake, tried to "find the fun" and give it an honest assessment while trying to at least get a laugh out of it.

Video here (fun watch!): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6_qbe26m9E

-- -----

Though I'll summarize what she played that was released on August 4th, 2025, of what she chose to buy:

* "The Last Mage" was a game produced very cheaply by apparently a lone gal (the videographer found the dev diary) that was a fan of K-pop, levered heavily on existing assets, to produce a campy idea as best she could.

* "You Suck at Football" levered existing "viral game" ideas like "Only Up". Very much someone's early attempts.

* "Velocity Racing 1000" was a racing game that appeared like someone's early attempts. Very wonky controls and physics.

* "Potato Cop" is a simple action game in an deliberately "amateur style", likely produced very quickly and cheaply. She had fun with it though.

* "Escape from Amazonia" is an horror game with a quirky plot premise that did elicit some actual screams. Again, produced very quickly and cheaply, but she had some fun with it.

* "Descent" was a horror game with some genuine attempts on the presentation side, and again elicited some screams. Some clear effort there. Someone was on to something with this one, and it's a shame they didn't refine it further.

* "Agu" is a crude, early access, challenging platformer. This won't go anywhere, but the videographer made the best of it and had some fun with the sheer difficulty of overcoming the physics.

* "Bee Simulator: The Hive" had some FANTASTIC presentation and assets. Localized for 14 languages. Great voiceover. Somewhat educational. It's apparently a re-release of a previous game which is why it has poor reviews. Some quirks and bugs, but some might really enjoy it.

-- -----

So are you really "competing" with 50 other games if you put out something extremely high quality and polished? No. You might be competing with 5... at most. If you put out a genuine banger and took the time to market it in advance, you should get noticed.

Steam's algorithms clearly are doing a good job and ensuring most of this stuff isn't getting much visibility outside of release. Though it's there to find if you deliberately look to unearth all of it.

[Sohcahtoa82]

> If you put out a genuine banger and took the time to market it in advance, you should get noticed.

The emphasized part of this quote is probably far more important than you give credit for.

I imagine a lot of solo game devs simply don't have the money to pay for marketing, and with many communities having rules against self-promotion, combined with the latest Discord phishing scam being "Hey can you try my game?" and delivering a trojan, it can be hard to get your game in front of people. Even if you're in a community for game devs, most of members are there to get people to play their game, not someone looking for a game to try.

I bet there are some real diamonds out there, hidden in obscurity, lost in the landfill of early attempts at making a game.

[ThrowawayR2]

Even if a prospective developer were competing with only a single quality indie game release per day, that's 365 games per year, every year and people generally don't finish any given game in a day. The odds are still stacked quite heavily against them.

[deadbabe]

Only if it’s in the same genre.

[reactordev]

Quality is subjective, quantity definitely is more abundant however, there was a certain aspect to analog that can’t be reproduced digitally in one’s bedroom. The studio sound, while recorded digitally, is still very much an analog thing. That recording quality comes through. I can tell when something has been quantized and syncopated vs someone really good at the drums.

It will be game on when a bedroom artist can make their own master vinyl and print their own records without a $45k upfront cost.

[delis-thumbs-7e]

I think Bernard Purdie was (and still is) pretty damn good at drums, so syncopation certainly did not hurt. I’m not sure how you play funk without it.

https://youtu.be/HO7u2n5owu8

[reactordev]

Machine-assisted syncopation is what I’m saying. Human syncopation is skills.

[miohtama]

Tools are much better compared to old school cassettes and such

[zzbzq]

the quality is definitely not better, not since the early 2000s when everything was fully digital and everything is single tracked, rhythm shifted to metronome grid, autotuned--the really big budget producers like max martin will put a little effort into the mixdown but by and large they're not even trying to make thing sound good, they're just pumping out minimal effort productions with default settings.

[matheusmoreira]

> the quality seems as good or better, and the quanity magnitudes higher

Doubt. To me it seems like 99% of everything is crud and I have to wade through a lot of crud before I find something that's actually good.

[globnomulous]

> professionalization of amateurs?

If this were the case, they'd be paid better.

[bluedino]

Rick Beato would disagree.

[mattmaroon]

Anyone who knows much of anything about music would disagree that the quality is on par with anything from the 90s, the 70s, etc.

[tejohnso]

Maybe it's the quality of the popularized music that isn't on par?

A billboard top ten from the 90s or 70s is going to have legendary music on it.

A recent top ten is going to be ...well Rick will tell you it's pretty bad, maybe something passable once in a while.

But I think it's possible that there is a lot more quality music than there ever has been. It's just not rising up past the mumble rap, auto tune pop, or Taylor Swift copycats. Even Rick gets very excited about new music once in a while. Symptom Of Life by WILLOW comes to mind.

[matheusmoreira]

Yeah...

A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to talk with one of the musicians who played at a friend's wedding.

They turned out to be absurdly skilled musicians in general who can each play multiple instruments and genres. They've got their own songs, their own musical tastes, their own selection of tracks that they really enjoy playing for their audiences.

And yet they are reduced to playing popular radio stuff to make money. Lowest common denominator stuff that gets pumped out like products to a wide global audience. That's what people ask them to play.

It just feels soulless.

[lotsoweiners]

> And yet they are reduced to playing popular radio stuff to make money. Lowest common denominator stuff that gets pumped out like products to a wide global audience. That's what people ask them to play. It just feels soulless.

Why though? I’ve played in both original and cover bands and had the most fun playing “the hits” in cover bands to be honest. I think it is the audience feedback and knowing that we are playing beloved songs that I enjoyed.

[matheusmoreira]

> I think it is the audience feedback and knowing that we are playing beloved songs that I enjoyed.

That seems right... Out of every person in the wedding, this person remembered me because I sat down to enjoy one of the older tracks they were playing while everyone else was busy.

Maybe it's just their tastes. He told me they can play anything but they just really liked playing instrumental music a lot more than big radio hits. They really liked playing jazz which I also enjoy.

[sodaplayer]

> That's where I got my first taste of programming - writing a PID controller for a tank turret so I could point the tank's gun using my mouse.

Yeah, same here! I had done a couple of simple personal Flash games previously, but Garry's Mod is where I really felt like I cut my teeth on programming. Doing Wiremod/Expression 2 taught me PID controllers and some basic linear algebra, and after having helped some friends debug their code, taught me the importance of style and good practices.

[tiniuclx]

Wiremod, that was it! What a blast from the past. Garry's Mod is probably the reason I have a career in programming now. That, and Minecraft redstone!

[drchickensalad]

I was an admin on a huge wire mod server as a teen and it changed my life :). I might not even have gotten into software, don't even want to imagine that life

[ecshafer]

I am not sure if I buy the "de-professionalization" of the music industry. If that happened, it happened 70 years ago. beatles, beach boys, metallica. Many of the biggest bands of all time, with some of the best selling albums were literal teenagers.

[badpun]

They still needed expensive studios and technicians to produce a commercial-grade quality album. Nowadays you can try pulling it off at home by yourself.

[majormajor]

I think they have a point, though.

If you're talking about making popular music isn't the de-professionalization of the performers and (in many, many cases, especially for those groups like Metallica or The Beatles) the writers and composers more interesting than de-professionalization of the recording engineers? Which maps pretty directly to changes in tool technology, vs taste?

Though I think you could also argue the opposite, that there have long been huge amounts of "amateur" mass-popular music compared to, say, Mozart. They just didn't have recording technology to turn into Elvis or The Beatles or Dr Dre or whoever.

In games the analog is probably random card games, or Mafia, or dominos variants, vs big productions...?

[StopDisinfo910]

That’s a very bleak way of putting it.

A more positive way of framing it is that it has never been easier to make properly produced music/games.

If you have a lot of free time on your hands and want to make a good looking game today, you will have all the tools you need to do so and absolutely nothing stopping you from making something great. No capital required.

Obviously, it means that the field is now very crowded so if you want to live from it you will need to stand out a lot. But the activity in itself has never been more accessible than now.

Amusingly, it means the easiest way to enter the video game industry nowadays is probably just making games. This equally applies to music and video by the way. In all likelihood, people will fail to turn it into a job, but the entry cost has never been this low.

[raffraffraff]

And you're competing against games studios who spend millions on salaries for artists, engineers, designers, story writers to produce a game, and then spend 6x the salary cost again on marketing.

[lelandbatey]

I think if you look at the larger numbers, there is more of a middle class of game devs than ever before, they just ALSO exist in the shadow of a set of large studios that are larger than ever before. I as a game player feel like I'm getting more "games for me" than ever, even though the games I enjoy fall pretty far out of the mainstream (Farm Together 2, Cat Quest 3, Quest Hunter, Slime Rancher 2, Factorio, Traveler's Rest, Satisfactory, many many more).

All of those are games made by "small to medium sized" studios and sold enough to support their team (maybe not Quest Hunter, as that's older). My point is that there's just SO MANY games that're just mid-size and floating along. Basically no one is getting RICH on game dev, but there's more folks making a living there than ever.

[cedws]

I spent 1000+ hours with Garry’s Mod/Wiremod/E2 and I definitely attribute some of my programming knowledge to it. It was in Gmod that I figured out how to draw a circle with sin/cos.

[DonHopkins]

Another more constructive way to frame "de-professionalization" is "prosumerization", focusing more on the gain to consumers than the loss to professionals.

I was lucky to work on a AAA game called The Sims from 1997-2000, at the end of the era when a small team could make a product like that (the teams for The Sims 2-4 were enormous in comparison).

We didn't have the resources to ship a demo, so instead we focused on creating tools for user created content, releasing "SimShow" before the game was released to enable users to create and preview skins, so after it was released there was already a big collection of skins available (many that we could not have published ourselves like the Star Trek skins). So the fans were already producing content and sharing them on web sites themselves, before the release.

https://tcrf.net/Proto:The_Sims_(Windows)/SimShow

https://archive.org/details/sim-show

Then we released "Transmogrifier" to make custom objects, which was widely accessible because it only required inexpensive easy to use tools like Microsoft Paint or Photoshop, instead of requiring expensive and enormously difficult to use 3D editor tools like 3D Studio Max (Blender wasn't an option at the time).

https://sims.fandom.com/wiki/Transmogrifier

https://www.thesimstransmogrifier.com/TransmogrifierDocument...

Yahoo Groups were instrumental in enabling fans (kids, adults, even elderly) to make objects, share them, and help each other learn how to use the tools.

The great thing is that Sims mods gave people a purpose and motivation to learn powerful tools that would serve them well in many other aspects of life. I knew a grandmother who learned to use Photoshop just to make furniture for her grandchildren to play with.

Will Wright talks about the interrelationships of tool builders, content artists, web masters, story creators, collectors, browsers, and casual players, and organizes them into an ecological pyramid with many casual players at the base, then fewer collectors/browsers, storytellers, content artists, webmasters, and finally a few toolmakers at the apex.

SimFreak and SimSlice are a couple of prolific successful webmasters and toolmakers who met through the Sims community and got married, and are still producing some of the most amazing collections of integrated Sims objects like ZombieSims, and also working on projects with Will Wright's Gallium Studios:

https://simfreaks.com/

https://simslice.com/

https://zombiesims.com/

https://thealveys.us/

Will Wright on designing user interfaces to simulation games (1996) (donhopkins.medium.com)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34573406

https://donhopkins.medium.com/designing-user-interfaces-to-s...

Will Wright - Maxis - Interfacing to Microworlds - 1996-4-26

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsxoZXaYJSk

Will Wright's Design Plunder (With Slides)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c91IWh4agzU

[glimshe]

Just like in the music industry, people still believe they can be the outlier. Flappy Bird, more so than your examples built by skilled individuals, showed that "anyone could do it".

[chickenzzzzu]

Having a hit game and being an industry programmer/artist might as well be two completely different skills.

Sticking with the music analogy, it is the difference between programming your own DAW vs being the audio engineer/writer/producer/singer of your own rap album.

[ninetyninenine]

You wrote a PID controller for a virtual turret? Why? It’s virtual you can go open loop and the delay is negligible.

You don’t need a feedback loop here.