Hello, just wanted to share my story as a reminder with all the lay offs in the gaming industry, it has been terrible outside of it too. I’ve been working as an automation QA for a pretty decent software company and I was about to hit like 11 years on the job. Also on the side I’ve been trying to get my own indie game dev studio off the ground with releasing 3 small games in the past 3 years.

After saving for like 10 years and living in small rented apartments, last summer I finally managed to secure enough money so I can get a loan to buy my first apartment. After a year of dealing with contractors (yes, they are that slow!!!) I finally moved and was hoping to be able to focus my free time on my game again. However literally first Monday we have a meeting with a head of our department and they said we are practically being replaced with A.I. So around 60% of the company is gone across all offices in 3 different continents…

I guess my dream has always been to go full time game dev, it’s just I was hoping to be able to do it on my own terms and not kinda being forced into it. But with no real money coming in from my previous games I might not be able to make payments for the place I bought and spent most of my adult life saving for.

So now I guess I don’t have a choice but to go all in on my current game. If you want to check it out and leave feedback on how it looks or even wishlist, you can so here STEAM

Wish me luck guys and gals!

  • PalmTreeIsBestTree@lemmy.worldEnglish
    21·
    3 days ago

    Start looking. It’s a very saturated market. Unless you can get some YouTubers or streamers to play your game then it’s not going to make much of anything.

    • nullify3112@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      2 days ago

      Can you expand on why you think the market is saturated?

      Games are some of the most complex pieces of software you can make and they rely heavily on artistic elements, meaning that it’s not 100% technical work.

      It makes it hard IMHO to even become a game dev and make a game in the first place. Wondering why you think the game dev market is saturated given that assumption.

      • kazerniel@lemmy.worldEnglish
        7·
        2 days ago

        Can you expand on why you think the market is saturated?

        Not the one you responded to, but:

        More than 19,000 games released on Steam in 2025 — Chris Zukowski’s tally puts it at 20,282, which works out to about 55 games per day. And 2026 is running faster: SteamDB counted 11,979 releases in the first half of the year alone, a pace of roughly 66 per day that projects to something near 24,000 for the full year if it holds. (source)

        and roughly 3/4 of them has less than 50 reviews, and half has less than 10, which means basically no audience (source)

        • nullify3112@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          1 day ago

          Well that is an over-saturation of games. Isn’t that mainly due to AI tools making it easy to make all the elements you would need for a game in a mediocre way? People are still playing games and buying them and game devs still have to make them. Are you saying that the industry has been automated enough that the need for talent really isn’t there anymore?

          • kazerniel@lemmy.worldEnglish
            2·
            13 hours ago

            On the 2nd link it shows that in 2022, even before genAI tools broke into game development, Steam released 12,248 games, so on average 34/day. So genAI at most only doubled the output rate.

            Yes, there were many low-effort asset flips out there even before AI, but I think the main factor is that game development is a global industry, and from the pool of billions of gamers, tons and tons of talented and hard-working game developers emerge who all compete against each other for attention. And like in other creative industries, the handful of most successful companies on top command most of the audience’s interest, while the vast majority of aspirants can’t make a livelihood from this work.

            I found this article from early 2022 that says that at the time there were 44,000 game developers on Steam, 3/4 of whom only released a single game. (It doesn’t say the reason why - I suppose could be just starting their career, or their first release was so unsuccessful they didn’t continue trying.) 57% of developers at the time made less than 1,000 USD lifetime revenue.