With all the talk of layoffs and studio closures, I wanted to know what the opinions and general experience is like as an indie game dev. How viable is it, how successful can you really be with that career and what challenges can crop up?

I started making my own game a while back and got extremely discouraged by the layoffs and technical hurdles I was running into, to the point where someone told me maybe I wasn't cut out for it on discord. This really killed my drive, and it would be awesome to hear about some success stories or even some struggles that you may have overcome.

Hi,

I'm curious if anyone in this group has achieved success in game development, whether that's carving out a career or earning any amount of income from it.

I'm currently working as a software developer, but my passion lies in game development. I'm all too aware that achieving any measure of success in this field is next to impossible. Hence, I'm reaching out here, hoping to gather insights and advice from those who have walked this path in the past, or those who are currently walking alongside/behind me.

One of my specific questions is about the types of games I should focus on creating. Specifically, I've heard differing opinions on whether it's more advantageous to develop a series of small games with advertisements for mobile platforms or to invest in larger, premium games for platforms like Steam. Can anyone share their insights or experiences regarding this dilemma? Is there a clear advantage to one approach over the other?

Currently I am using godot to make a larger scale game, but I am considering switching to defold and making smaller scale games with ads.

I saw some folks here discuss making games for the playdate. How much should one consider targeting niche platforms like this? Some of the users I saw discuss this seem to have had good success.

Some general questions: How did you break into game dev? What were you doing before? Do you see game dev as a viable career, only as a source of side income, or is it just a hobby?

Any guidance or experiences you can share would be greatly appreciated.

How do people here keep up with upcoming niche games? Most of the blogs I've followed for this have been abandoned over time and I'm looking for new one(s). Ideally, I'm looking for something that:

• Supports RSS
• Highlights trailers or other creator-made pages showing off lesser-known games
• Focuses on the "hobby itch.io experiment" to "Annapurna / Devolver-published" segment of the Lo-Fi to AAA spectrum (nothing more AAA than that)
• Posts occasional reviews/interviews with games/creators (optionally)
• Has no/little focus on industry-insider news

I'm obviously biased towards "small-web" blogs or forums, but I'd love to hear about however you stay up to date with cool things creators are making!