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Comment by pram | Hacker News Reader

IDK man it’s a golden era for one-man indie games right now (I just finished Endacopia) and that can only increase with AI assistance. I wouldn’t be too cynical about it

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That also makes it a more difficult to make it a career than ever. There's simply too many games releasing. Steam is absolutely FLOODED with new games releasing, and it's very hard to stand out.

https://steamdb.info/stats/releases/

There's nothing new under the sun. The quality of your ideas and execution will still matter in this flood, as it always has been.

I think your ability to market will matter the most (which is also pretty much the same as ever).

Fortunately and unfortunately, a lot of those games in that deluge are legitimately quite good but no one will play them because 99% of gamers aren't looking for more games to play.

Just the ones they hear about by worth of mouth, or recurring entries in their favorite series, or from their favorite developers are already too much to keep up with. I'm certainly in that boat. My backlog only grows, and I have quite a bit of free time relative to some people.

I've been a long-time indie gamer and the appeal of older games has increased significantly for me since AI. Nearly an endless supply of top-notch human-crafted classic video games exist, virtually all for free or very cheap. I understand not everyone has the same taste as me but if they did I'd be surprised of there still was a modern gaming industry at all.

I agree. I open Steam sometimes and I'm met with a conveyor of games that look good enough for me to buy, but I can play a few of them at most before all of them are replaced with a new batch next month.

Absolutely, I'm a follower of a niche, local sport with a relatively small support base.

It never really made economic sense for a game studio to make video games for it.

Now there are indie developers creating extremely fun and truly impressive games of that sport with the help of AI.

Could you share examples?

Don't know what sport AlpacaJones is talking about but I can think of Gaelic Football and Hurling. Two sports that are very popular in Ireland (whose population is smaller than many major cities) but barely known anywhere else in the world. The total number of fans is way too small to justify a typical video game budget, but if you made a really good game based on either sport, it would probably sell well in Ireland.

https://www.gaelicstar.com/

To be clear, not my game. But as a GAA fan it's as good as any GAA game any studio released.

You may be right, I really don't know. I can't control the ocean, all I can do is learn to surf. I use the tools, bring home the check and go about my life. I just feel terrible for the people following after me who wont get to experience what I did. Maybe it's for the best, maybe not. Time will ultimately tell I suppose.

I have been surfing the wave since the 80s and all I can say is as cool as things have been through all of micro-computing history, I have no desire to return to the brutal tooling we had back then. And while the LLM-wave is more of a step function than linear growth like before, it's still a continuation of this which has been going on since I first touched a 6502: I can, with the newer tools, do more and get more done, and it lets me move further up the decision making matrix.

That does mean there is/will-be a deluge of slop and uninteresting "stuff" out there, and the problem now becomes producing things which are capable of standing out from the crowd. Something I'm not super good at.

But I see no point in valorizing the old tools and ways of doing things. Identify with the product, and the end goal. Not the tools used to get there.

Maybe there’s a narrow window to make hay right now, but that has to be closing fast for the same reasons.

I wouldn’t be giving kids any career advice around software development of any kind, myself. Now seems like the worst time in my life to be making long term projections on the subject.

I hold the opinion that learning about tech is important, especially as more and more of our world revolves around software.

Biased of course, but I'd keep betting on software over other fields when it comes to career options.

Well I’ve certainly been wrong before, and hope I am about this, but it all looks very fuzzy to me right now.

Maybe it's a golden era for making one-man indie games, but not for playing and selling those games.

Ehhhhhh. Its a golden era for one-man indie games that are successful.

But this is deceptive. Per game delivered one man games were likely far far more successful in the past. Simply because there were very few of them in a much smaller market.

There are countless indie games to day and only the best of the best really get any views. It is insanely hard to stand out in that market.

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