Indie Game Development

indie game developers who make nothing starting out get a possibly decent catalog with low effort, so its not all bad.

Give your money to smaller studios! Check out indie gaming marketplaces like itch.io

What part of their story are you referring to? There are lots of indie devs that appear to be having great fun making games and doing well to boot. Valheim, Black Rock Galactic, Celeste, Dead Cells, Papers Please, Stardew Valley, Enter the Gungeon, Don't Starve, Undertale, etc. were all pretty bit hits, certainly made their developers millions of dollars, and AFAIK the developers were having fun making them.

Same issue - who is going to play it?There are many indie games that never got made, lots of iterations of the current hotness (the Vampire survivors era may almost be over?)People still play CS:GO. People still play The Sims. There are an infinite number of alternatives.Professional game devs will talk about marketing because thats the problem when it comes to selling games.The alternative is to make game creation fun - which then gets you to Roblox territory. Have people make games

It depends on what you mean by "true" indie games. Valheim [1][2], by any reasonable interpretation of the word, is a completely indie game. It was made almost entirely by a single guy in his spare time after work, well at least until it blew up and he was able to expand the studio. And it was released with little more than a post on itch.io - 'Hey guys here's my game and a couple of pics. Let me know what you think.' And of course it did exceptionally well, because it&#

Fun video games never went away. Look for games by indie developers instead of AAA titles.

You could just play indie games.Maybe people are working themselves super-hard to make indie games, but it's self-directed and totally by individual choice. Tons of great indie games out there.

Worse quality of games leading to greater competition from domestic indie devs?

Love the indie game movement but think it'll take awhile for people to adjust to the higher failure rate that this will naturally spawn.

I think the indie games world, particularly amongst solo developers tends to attract a lot of idealists without a lot of experience. So you tend to get a lot of products made that don’t take a lot, if any time to work out if it’s something people want and don’t allocate time to telling them about it. Then a lot of games get made as developers first projects which is a terrible point to be learning how to do it. That so many make it to release and a few hit big hides a pile of corpses left behind