The median title on Steam earns only $3,000 in sales over the first year: https://www.gamedeveloper.com/blogs/analyst-your-first-week-...
Considering cost of development and time, the average title most likely loses money. People were basically LARPing as game developers, and throwing money at Unity for the privilege. As economic conditions deteriorate, its reasonable to expect people to stop doing that.
Also consider the large number of places such as Hobby Lobby, Williams-Sonoma, or Home Depot that cater to hobbyist/amateurs rather than industry professionals.
That's harsh in my opinion. In entertainment and media there are always more people who want to do a thing than can be supported: musicians, actors, comedians, artists, etc.
Sometimes amateurs become pros. Sometimes people "LARPing" -- as you call it --make games I really enjoy. So I think its cool that people try their luck at game development even knowing most won't make a living at it.
Once I joined a team that was making a space ship combat game. All they worked on was 2d buttons, sliders, etc. Building a whole GUI from scratch for months. I stuck my head up to say maybe we could try some gameplay ideas? No it was important to get the menus right.
That number is probably way overstating the median revenue. It is based on a non-random sample (hey devs, send us your data for a survey) of 75 games. Looking at a larger dataset, a majority of developers make <$1,000 (average revenue: $294).
https://www.gamedeveloper.com/blogs/what-can-we-learn-from-t...
2013: 551
2014: 1,631
2015: 2,679
2016: 4,466
2017: 6,251
2018: 8,137
2019: 7,841
2020: 9,609
2021: 10,696
If you make a game, and it struggles due to very tough market conditions, you are not LARPing as a game dev. You are a game developer. There are countless gems on steam that have not gotten commercial success, but are well engineered and well designed titles.
I am technically a gamedev, but I am not a professional gamedev.
Your company has to have over 100,000USD in gross annual revenue to pay for unity, at which point you are no longer "LARPing"...
These days, if I'm thinking about creating an application, I'm defaulting to C#.
why the love for c++?
C++ is a pretty decent language with a few weird features.
I may be biased by programming in Qt + c++, the best UI development flow ever created
My issue is with automatic reference counting. It's just way too easy to hold on to a reference accidentally, especially now that lambdas / closures are an essential language feature. I don't have much Swift experience, but I do have a lot of Objective-C experience, and it's just way too easy to accidentally capture self or some other value. In game programming, there is very little concept of ownership. Everything exists as peers that can modify each other. This leads to a high likelihood of reference cycles.
So you want a fourth renderer? :)
If, however, you're a professional game developer who tries to get his game to run 60 FPS on a 6-year old phone (not a hypothetical example, I've led a project that had 60 FPS on iPhone 4 in 2016 with Unity), then you WANT the C++ and engine source code.
I've been working with Unity since 2009 and hope to never touch that giant flaming pile of shit again in my life. Having moved to frontend development still, I'm very happy to work with tools that mostly work, and if they don't, you can actually dig in and debug them, with healthy development culture that actually encourages you to do so.
Sorry for the emotional rant; 10 years of Unity experience (not really though, I've done other things in this time as well) do that to a person.
Speaking of which, whatever happened with iDTech?
Looking at the family chart you can see that the last version that was widely licensed was idTech 3 - from 1999: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/85/Quake_-_...
today.