If a lone programmer wants to write tight code for games, they should build game engines or libraries that games can use and then sell those to game developers.
There exists large value added chain for specialized tools, arts and libraries.
There exists large value added chain for specialized tools, arts and libraries.
Programming is fun for a lot of people. They love the process, enjoy the reading and learning, get a kick out of things like optimising code for a speed boost. IMHO that's awesome. So few people have any real interests, so if you have one, indulge it.
Just call it what it is - a hobby - and reframe your thinking. No other hobbies are indulged because we expect to make money directly out of them, e.g. no one playing soccer in a park expects to go pro, they just love playing. Why should hobby coding be different?
Reframing it as a hobby changes the equation from $0.01 an hour, to "OMG, someone, anyone, wanted to give me money to indulge my hobby!" Then what starts as a time and money sink becomes instead what you live for, and a positive in your life.
This is the ongoing march towards post-scarcity. We now have enough people with skills, experience and tools necessary to produce a quality indie game and a desire to make one, that the market price is far below the cost of production, and rapidly approaching zero. Essentially, these developers are spending (resources: time etc; although sometimes money as well) to scratch an itch.
And trying to recoup at least a part of those losses by selling the result is not unreasonable, but it should be considered a best-effort optimization. In the end, you still end up paying for the privilege of, essentially, having other people admire your work. It reminds me of some sci-fi story I vaguely remember from a long time ago, about a true post-scarcity society where everything is free, except for other people's attention, which therefore becomes currency. There's nothing else to do for humans other than arts, so everyone is doing that - and now you're paying someone to e.g. read your book, and then they can use that money to pay someone else to look at their painting etc.
If we didn't have to worry about money, then fewer of us would have to... worry about money when making art.
> We now have enough people with skills, experience, tools, and free time necessary to produce a quality indie game and a desire to make one, that the market price is far below the cost of production, and rapidly approaching zero.
Where "free time" is that not used up by work that pays for food etc.
Which does mean that people for whom art is a hobby are destroying the market the people for whom art is all they want to do, except for truly great artists where the quality of the art is so exemplary that hobby artists just can't compete.
But I'm not sure why it's a bad thing in and of itself - nobody has a fundamental right to earn a living by performing some specific activity and no other. The job market defines what activities translate to paid jobs, and which ones can only be hobbies, and that is going to change over time. At the point of a true post-scarcity, everything becomes a hobby, but it doesn't matter because you no longer need a job.
post-scarcity can sound nice, but in practice it currently means post-scarcity for the few, while most people live with incredible scarcity. We might have enough for everyone on the planet, but we sure don't share it equally. And that's not going to change automatically.
When and where the goal would actually be achieved is hard to speculate; I hope to see it in my lifetime, but only out of sheer optimism.
I'm not sure that's true. I don't see much ongoing march towards giving most people more free time. Inequality is generally _growing_, not shrinking. There is no ongoing march of history, just humans in political struggle for how resources are distributed.
There's definitely a lot more free time available to people today than there were in any industrial economy prior to 8-hour work days and similar advancements in labor rights. If you unwind back to pre-industrial, some argue that agriculture provides for a lot more free time than we're used to, albeit seasonally.
But free time is only one part of the equation - you also need education/skills and tools to create things. These days, many industrialized societies provide education for free, or so cheap that it's accessible to a great deal more people than it used to be - and then, of course, there's the Internet. Tools are also much cheaper; again, think about it in absolute terms, e.g. how a $20 power drill compares to your typical toolset 100 years ago, much less 500.
Our societies have plenty of problems, and I don't encourage rose glasses. But we should also recognize just how immense the advance of humanity has really been, when you look in the rear mirror. Or not even the mirror... if you were born in a developed country, find an immigrant from a developing one, and just ask them how they feel about here vs there.
In the U.S., certainly. In India or Nigeria or Honduras? Not sure.
At any rate, while I agree that in general the health and standard of living of many people is going up -- I lack your confidence that the amount of _free time_, and other resources necessary to produce creative work without compensation, that the majority of people on the planet has is going up or will continue to. It will for some.
Even in the U.S., do the poor have more free time to produce creative work than they did 100 years ago? I seriously doubt it.
The only way to make money with games is to sell games.
The tooling market is hard.
From Fledgling Founder to 7-Figure Deals with Stephanie Hurlburt of Binomial
Stephanie Hurlburt (@sehurlburt) shares the story of how she went from being an employee to being half of a 2-person startup that sells software to gaming companies, and all the steps in between. Learn how she quit her job, met her cofounder, landed lucrative contracting gigs, built a product, learned about sales, and stayed sane while doing it.
When you're committing 1000 hours of your free time to building a game from scratch, spending 30-40 building your own (hacky, not that great) animation pipeline for the learning experience is worth it over a £90 plugin. You don't really win this on cost/benefit over and above getting someone excited by the possibilities of your tool. Worth checking out Buildbox[0] for example.
Obviously studios are a different beast and it make sense for parts of their workflows to be custom. If you want to get a start in the goldrush, sell pickaxes, not JCBs.
And in the professional market, the quality bar is pretty high.