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You say making games is too easy when you mean creating the programs you play them on is easy. You entirely disregard the large number of other people and skills required. Most developers do this in most areas of expertise.

It depends what the OC was envisioning as their game. Not every game requires a "large number of other people".

The statement that making games is easy implies games in general, not "my first game" type games. Without significant qualification, the statement is no more true than saying "coding is easy." You have to engage in some serious logical gymnastics to justify it.

Likewise, it seems fruitless to argue over a general qualifier when the poster already clearly said they have a different definition. Better to spend more time aligning than talking past each other.

I'm not sure what exact action you're suggesting I should have taken. If you're objecting to my tone, well it's too late for that. I've spent a lot of my life hearing developers glibly dismiss the importance, complexity, and difficulty of most non-coding jobs. I'm not interested in holding a neverending stream of hands while developers embark on their journey to discover that other people's contributions and expertise are consequential. Sometimes people who don't know what they're taking about just need to hear the right answer.

>people who don't know what they're taking about just need to hear the right answer.

If that's your response to my statement, all I can say is: you're not owed an audience and your tone is a great way to have people ignore what may or may not be "the right answer".

But no, ironically enough you're proving my point. I'm simply saying to clarify what's on the users mind before going on a rant about what you assume they mean. There's no point in arguing about an aquatic fowl's eating when the user was talking about DuckDuckGo. And then doubling down by saying "but it's true ducks eat too much bread". At this point It's clear your conversation is a tangent no one is interested in taking.

> Mind you, never did I expect or even care if I made money. That was never the goal. But now I realize just to get some people to play my game would be a huge undertaking requiring tons of luck - just to rise above the noise. That was the deal breaker - I don't care about making money - but I do care about eventual players, at least if something will take months or years* to create.

I broadly agree but I think you're being too pessimistic about not having players. If your game is not novel (or maybe even if it is), I'm sure you can find a community that would enjoy it. Maybe participating in that community counts as marketing to you but I feel like sharing what you have created and marketing what you have created are separate.

Reddit is a good place for this type of discovery. Discords of other niche games in similar/adjacent genres would be another one. I feel like it's not as hopeless as you make it seem!

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.

> 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.

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.

> Wouldn't be surprised if something like ChatGPT allows games to be made in days in the semi-near future. If so, I just might make games anyway - still not for money, and now not for players - but just to finally let those ideas out of my head.

I'm currently doing exactly this. There's some games I never finished and released back in the 2009-2011 period when I tried self employment, so I'm using ChatGPT to build me a javascript game engine and Stable Diffusion to make some art.

The world doesn't need another vertical scrolling shooter, but I'd like games that don't waste time on loading screens and have nothing to do with the evil that is 'analytics'.

If your goal is only to have a few players rather than to make money, then find and advertise to the niche communities in genres closest to your game : if people like your game, the marketing is going to take care of itself !