Game development has turned into the same kind of nightmare that music is for anybody who wants to go into it. Unless you're really good at marketing/get really lucky, you're never going to make a living doing it because the market is insanely oversaturated and the gaming media focuses most of its attention on a handful of popular high budget games because that's what draws the traffic.

Another major problem is how long today's high budget games are. Not only the multiplayer "live service" casinos that are designed to addict their players and keep them playing in perpetuity but the modern single player open world RPGs that seemingly average around 100 hours of playtime. If somebody is playing 300 hours of that extremely bloated Assassin's Creed game about Vikings, they're not playing other games in that time and presumably have less interest in buying them. Likewise, stuff like GamePass and the new tiers of PS+ that offer access to an enormous number of games for a small subscription fee have to be cutting into game sales. And new games are also competing with 50 years worth of old games.

I wonder if many of the indie games, especially story driven games, might be better off as movies. Given how everybody carries a camera in their pocket these days, Hollywood movies are formulaic garbage and no actors are stars anymore, there's probably a market for innovative low budget movies shot in the woods on a single phone camera by a few friends and with little to no special effects. That seems like it'd be lower time/money cost and higher expected reward than game development plus you'd get to be outside doing interesting things rather than just sitting at a computer for years working on a game that will most likely be played by a few dozen people.