“The real trick is staying known, staying relevant and staying excited about what you do. Our little ‘game industry that could’ has become the juggernaut that won’t be stopped. Ambition, hard work, perseverance, luck and shameless self-promotion – it’s all part of the deal.”
I'm sorry, but I'm not really enthused about what game development has become.
The games industry used to be just as covered in me-too crap. Today's AAA games are more consistently good experiences than they ever were in the past, though they're just as samey as well. The one difference is, the indie movement of today is much stronger than it has ever been- even back when being 'indie' wasn't far from being mainstream.
Point being, we're in a gaming golden age whether we want to admit it or not.
Steam, Humble Bundle, GamersGate, Desura, Indie Royale, Xbox Live Indie Games, iOS app store, Google Play all there to sell your game. Or just do it yourself on your website with paypal or stripe.
Kickstarter, IndieGoGo, 8-Bit Funding if you need funding.
Yeah, game development sure is awful these days.
^Of course there are more good books than there are good games or movies etc, but that medium has had thousands of years to produce winners and forget the bad apples. If you ignore the accumulated history of books you'll see that the top selling books are, in order: Romance novels (especially now with eBooks as people feel less embarrassed about buying them), self-help books, and then the popular trash you actually see advertised everywhere (Harry Potter, Twilight, 50 Shades of Grey etc)
Harry Potter is a wonderful series that brought the magic of reading and exploring imaginative worlds to countless children around the world.
Hardly "trash" as you characterized it.
The only descriptor you use is 'wonderful' so I'm not really sure why you think they're good. While I'm here: IMO (I read most of them) they were not particularly well written (the first one especially) and didn't have anything particularly interesting to say. I feel they filled that generations need for an Enid Blyton-style series of kids getting into scrapes, nothing more. Those kids could have read a plethora of other books with the same result.
If we deftly weave this back to the original topic: AAA gaming being terrible, we can note that Call of Duty brings countless hours of pleasure to spotty teenage boys all round the globe too. It does not, however, make them 'good' games (as the original commenter that I was responding too complained about)