Fear And Loathing, in this economy?

I have spent the week grappling with my own emotions which are: burnout, severe anxiety, depression, etc etc. It was not a great time. I think I spend an outward amount of time just trying not to "crash out" and it becomes difficult to quiet the mind. 

With everything going on in the world, and being subjected to everything at once, it is overwhelming. On top of that you have to maintain a job and enough professional emotion to not let things get to you. Worse is that once you are on a backslide, that's where the momentum is going - backwards. The only way I know how to manage things is through incredible physical exertion - by running 5 miles in the darkness after work. 

I have started a brand new Godot project, this time I want to make a plane combat game. I have been facinated with ww1 aircraft for a while and the challenges of air combat. I'm also a big fan of the Ace Combat series. I have gotten really good at starting projects and then going nowhere with them, so maybe this will also go nowhere. Other points of inspiration from this come from: WW1 movies about fighter pilots, the game SkyGunner, general steampunk garbage. 

Last week I had a blog post about Highguard and then this week they have laid off most of the staff. I know one person who works at Wildlight as of this post and he still has his job. But I'm left wondering what metrics of success a game needs to have to not lead to instant layoffs. I was wrong thinking the game would find an audience. The problem with Free To Play games is half the budget needs to be user aquisition, you are trying to get as many new players in as possible because 1 in 100 is going to spend money. I would have expected Highguard to have a months long ad campaign after release to remind people the game exists and it's free to play. The problem with that is - Highguard is a very hardcore game - so a lot of players will bounce off of it. 

Along with the employees going to the 5 winds Wildlight is losing a functional team that can ship a game - something that is actually pretty rare. With that team goes a lot of interrnal processes and pipelines, not to mention Wildlight uses it's own scripting system. When Midwinter shut down the system that allowed me to use a slack message to kick off a build with a single changelist's worth of work and have something ready to distribute for my own playtests also evaporated. 

If any of these teams or people were allowed to continue games would stop taking 5-7 years to make. Instead new teams and processes have to be rebuilt over and over again. Imagine if a buisness fails they also bulldoze the entire building. You know. 

Everyone is clamoring for "solutions" when the real problem is - money. Consumers dont have money because everything is now much more expensive and wages have not gone up. Venture Capitalists won't give out money anymore because they make more in intrest keeping money in a bank than they do funding 10 startups hoping that 1 is a success. It is incredibly expensive to hire american developers because everything in the US is more expensive, plus healthcare, plus rent. I frequently wonder if a move abroad is going to be a requirement in the near future because it will be impossible to make a living in this country that isn't "landlord" or "scam master"

I should try to end this on a positive note. It's sunny out, that's nice! I'm going to go stand in the sun for a bit.