Uh, yep, a lot of people who think they are game devs are actually morons, and/or just trying to be able to say 'I have a game that is listed on Steam'.
Yep.
this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2025
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I am not a programmer, but I guarantee I could gobble together enough free or paid assets to technically qualify as a game and have it "released on Steam". That's not a high bar.
And yet, I don't think we're headed for another crash similar to the 80's one, or that digital marketplaces are necessarily even oversaturated with games, since there's multiple ways of curating, sorting, and showcasing the best and most popular ones.
But I do think the onus is on consumers to use these tools and shop smart (and patiently, if they want the best deals), especially in this economy...
And yet I don’t think we’re headed for another crash similar to the 80’s one, or that digital marketplaces are necessarily even oversaturated with games, since there’s multiple ways of curating, sorting, and suffering the best and most popular ones.
The '80s crash was the result of physical hardware sitting unsold on shelves, such that retailers no longer wanted to keep them in stock anymore.
By contrast, the '20 deluge of slop isn't taking up inventory space. It's taking up marketing bandwidth. You're not going to dig a big pit and shovel in all the Ataris nobody wants to buy. But you might hit a point of saturation such that nobody can hear about the next BG3, because every media channel is inundated with ads for Mobile Command Wizard Fortress Nuclear Fantasy Final Ninja War Strikers.
I'm already seeing this in the mobile space. Finding a mobile game that isn't dog shit is virtually impossible.
Yeah, the gaming crash is imo, already underway.
Sooo many huge, recent, AAA or even "AAAA" basically catastrophic failures, so many games that are just gacha mtx'ing the fuck out of people...
And people don't have the money anymore.
The gaming industry is going to crash, but that won't actually really hurt gaming in general, imo, it will refocus onto smaller and medium sized teams, who focus on gameplay, style, actually competent stories and writing, anybody or team who can make something good without even needing a publisher.
Sure, there will still be big mega corpo games with recognized IPs and graphics thst you can only appreciate with a $2000+ GPU and such, but I think its gonna look a lot more like the 90s / early 00s pc gaming market, basically, wild fucking west.
And people don’t have the money anymore.
The joke of it is that these games don't even bother targeting "retail" players anymore. They're all hunting for the Whale Player - the individuals who will spend upwards of five or six figures on a game's loot boxes and other gimmicks.
The gaming industry is going to crash
I don't know what a "crash" looks like at this point. When your very model is "Free 2 Play" and your primary revenue stream is this tiny minority of players, what are we expecting the change? A bunch of these players aren't even in the US. They're gamers in ultra-wealthy Emirates states or failkids from Korea and Japan, with credit cards that have no real upper limit. And if they fail... so what? These are clones of clones. Reskinned copies of games that never had much of a production budget to begin with.
Or they're subscription based games that generate revenue off people who have simply forgotten to cancel their accounts. The Gym Membership enterprise model, where you're just collecting $15/mo from thousands upon thousands of people who got suckered in during the hype cycle and forgot they were getting billed.
Sure, there will still be big mega corpo games with recognized IPs and graphics thst you can only appreciate with a $2000+ GPU and such
This is where I think we might genuinely see a ceiling. If the supply of semiconductors ever hits a serious crunch, you're going to see the price of high end cards and consoles go well beyond the reach of retail gamers. And then we really will all be stuck on Stardew Valley, because that's the high line of computer graphics we can support.
But the idea that people will stop turning out new titles (or clones of clones of archaic titles) seems dubious. We're never going to have a cartridge graveyard. And we're never going to run out of three-person teams of novel developers pushing the next generation of Cult of the Lamb or Slay the Spire or Deep Rock Galactic.
That's not even a lot of money, and it at least creates a small barrier of entry. And there's still a lot of crap in Steam.
I see a lot if indies talking about their game development on other platforms, so hopefully by the time they list they already have an audience and can handle the fee.
But if a game is just low effort shovelware they deserve to lose it.
The market situation is really difficult, unless you are really really lucky. We've continued with a college project and eventually managed to release a hand-drawn coop top-down shooter, around 2 hours of story-based gameplay, that was locally pretty successful as far as marketing goes - we were in local national television, have several "best indie game" awards from conferences, even including Czech Game of the Year in student category. We had czech streamers playing the game, had reviews and even were featured in a Microsoft article about student gamedev, and we were featured in the New and Noteworthy on Steam for quite a bit.
We've eventually managed to get around 6000 wishlists, and the reception was generally positive.
After almost half a year after realease, we have only dozens of sales.
We don't have any investors we own money to, and never really made it for profit, but it is still difficult to see 6 years of your work that you though was going pretty well end up like this. I'm not really surprised, because it is local-multiplayer only story based game (although Steam Remote works), which will limit the target audience size by quite a bit, but I definitely won't be ever making a game where I expect that it will sell, and rather focus on smaller experiements, gamejams, and making games for making games sake.
Tying money into your gamedev is a recipe for disappointment.
Doesn't mean they were bad.
Just means the market is oversaturated :/
I would love to try making a game. Even games that I love to play still have a few minor things here and there that I wish were different. If I made the game myself, I could just change it myself and make it as close to perfect as I'm humanly able. Engines like Godot and similar make it so easy to do these days.
But the competition is extremely fierce. There are so many games on Steam that the chances of "making it" and being the next Hades or similar are just not that good. I'm clearly not the only one with a dream like this. That and the fact that making a game is a ton of work. Graphics, audio, gameplay, balancing, marketing, social media🤮, etc.
If I'm in the position someday where I don't need to turn a profit from it, then I may do it anyway, but I really feel bad for all the people who are trying to pursue their dream and yet may never make it there. We're in a golden age for the players, but for the creators, it's very difficult, to say the least.
The best thing I ever done in relation to my gamedev dream/career was to make sure I don't ever get into a situation, where my livelygood depends on the art/games I make. That's a recipe for disapointment.
It doesn't matter if it's only working in gamedev instead of general software development, because that's where you get way less money for basically the same code-monkey crunching Jira tickets job, only there's now a bunch of exec exploiting your passion and underpaying you, or if it's more bold attempt to save up money and be able to afford to make a game on my own, because then you have to sell it, and that sucks if your livelyhood is on the line.
The best course of action I could come up with is to just go work to a generic corporate in software development/cybersecurity, get a part time job (which will get you basically the same money as fulltime in a gamedev company), and use the free time for my own personal gamedev projects that I don't have to tie in any way to my income. Finding a comunity of similarly minded students or art collectives also helps.
I've mostly given up on larger projects, because that exactly a ton more work, and now focus on a short gamejams here and there (usually two to three days, a week or two max). Being extremely limited by time means that the project usually fits into my short attention span, I can experiment with the obscurest of game designs, and you get to meet cool people, especially when the gamejam is onsite. So, if you're at all interrested in trying out gamedev, I highly recommend looking into those - it will take a weekend of your time, and if it doesn't work or isn't fun for you, then you won't loose much.