So I’m finally done with my video game. What’s next? Should I make another?

I will definitely make a second game. One of my brothers has long been interested in making video games, but never found the motivation to start. So I offered to collaborate with him and show him how to use the game engine. Then I showed him my list of game ideas, and we’re making the very smallest idea on the list.

After that, who knows?

As a person with multiple artistic hobbies, I am highly aware that I do not have to make video games. There are other things I could be doing with my time! Game dev as a hobby suffers from a number of core problems:

1. It just takes a lot of time to do.
2. It requires like a dozen distinct skills, not all of which a solo dev is going to be passionate about.
3. One of those skills is marketing, which practically nobody is passionate about.
4. Most people don’t want to play these games! It takes time to play games. You can’t easily vet a game’s quality without investing the time. People’s tastes in video games are completely scattered, such that what appeals to me will appeal only to a small number of players. And to find those players, you need marketing, see point 3.
5. The competition is professional, even among the most indie of indies. Commercial success is the community’s dominating standard for success. I’m very self-motivated and don’t mind failing to meet this standard, but the cultural environment is certainly not a plus.

Much is made about the tens of thousands of games released on Steam each year. To this I will add, publishing on Steam has a not-insignificant barrier to entry, and a platform like Itch has an order of magnitude more.

But tens of thousands of games is not actually that large in the scheme of things. There are 20+ million software engineers in the US alone. Or to make another comparison, there are about 3 million books published in the US every year. It’s actually a shockingly small number of people who create and publish their own games. I think there are good reasons for that.

Game dev was very interesting to do at least once. It was a constant learning experience. I have loads of unpublished journaling talking about different aspects of it. It gives me more appreciation for the games I play.

But I don’t think I’ll go out of my way to make more games, unless the feeling moves me. Which it might!