In the past, making money and making great games had a lot of overlap.
But then the big studios realized how much some people are willing to spend on either the latest version of the same thing, to not have to wait for a timer, to skip a grind (especially one tuned specifically to make people want to skip it), to gain an advantage over other players, plus a bunch of psychological tricks and are so often chasing that money, which probably kills a lot of the passion for their staff that actually knows how to make good games until they either leave or start phoning it in.
But indie studios, while they can also be run by people just chasing the money, can also be run by people more interested in the creating a great game aspect than the money aspect.
You can see the same thing across the entire economy. The main difference is that regulatory capture and the amount of resources required to make a video game aren’t set up to prevent new players from entering the market and since games are digital they scale much easier than physical objects. Like some people have de-enshitified their cars or even made their own from scratch or an older one, but it’s not like they can just sell those de-enshitified cars to anyone, they’d need to ramp up production quite a bit to get the same reach viral indie games can get.











Going through the postal service might have been safer than other forms of travel because there would have been more explicit exchanges of custody. Like put a kid on a passenger train and they could just get off and get lost before getting on a connecting train and who knows what happened to them? They arrived on train A but never got on train B.
Whereas with mail, the kid becomes the operator’s responsibility. If the kid is handed over to the operator to ride train A but then is nowhere to be found at the destination, then that operator is the prime suspect. Or the operator hands the kid off to the next operator in the journey and the kid is now their responsibility.
And even if you have a babysitter, passenger stations are going to be a lot more crowded than cargo stations, so keeping track of a kid will be a lot easier, plus the driver is the babysitter for the postal service, so they won’t miss their train or take the wrong one by accident (unless they are routed incorrectly lol).