I had that thought popping into my head and I immediately berated myself. Duh! Always have been!
Joining the creative industry in general---animation, movie-making, novel-writing---has always been a terrible idea career-wise i.e. financially for societal reason I can't really elaborate right now, but the game industry I feel is particularly harrowing.
Societal reasons aside (e.g. less appreciation for creatives), games take so much effort to make and consume. Such that, for most people, they just stick to the same three games their entire life. This isn't because live-service or "free-to-play" games are trending; it's just because starting a new game, starting a game that's different from what you're used to, takes so much effort that most people don't bother to do it. Nor should they be bothered to.
So it's especially harrowing to want to make small games, to make different kinds of games, to want there to be many kinds of games to exist.
Like, I'm thinking of books. Books take about as much time to finish consuming as a game, I think, and about as difficult. But books take less effort to make. Or at least, less interdisciplinary efforts. There can be lots of different books in the market. And also because all books can be finished (as opposed to games, where some can be, some can be played forever), people who likes books will inevitably want to read more books.
Games, though? Games. Is the only viable path for a game developer who want a reliable career to somehow hit it big with a live-service/seasonal game? Is there ever space for smaller creators, for new studios?
Ah, I'm just woolgathering. If I don't make it here I guess I can try to have a career doing enterprise web development making the same apps over and over again for startups after startups.... But that's another rant for next time.
