post games

I lost my job this week. 

The current games industry, if you can call it that, is pretty much in free fall. In the span of 6 years it has gone from the Zero Intrest Rate Policy and Covid boom to whatever this is. Not even Fortnite is making enough money. 

Game hardware prices are going up as a result of the ram shortage driven by the AI hyperfixation. People are getting laid off as a result of the AI hyperfixation. There is no money being spent on people. 

So I don't know if I'm going to work in videogames again. Probably not at a studio. I am too burned out right now to do any little projects, and the amount of money they'd have to make to support me is modest but would require the steam page going viral and a protracted years long effort to make maybe $60k if I'm very lucky.

Despite making more money than anything, nobody in videogames can make a living. 

I don't have a large audience I can monetize with patreon, and I don't have the kind of runway or income-earning partner to mooch off of to turn around some kind of project. Every job expects a decade of hyper specific domain knowledge.

Due to the effects of hiring software, moving to another career is basically impossible. There are too many barriers that not even a robust human connection can overcome. I saw this even as early as 2008 when I first tried entering the game industry. 

Now there are no jobs and way too many qualified people trying to get those jobs. We have a PC game market that's owned by a single entity (Valve). 

I'm not optimistic about the future. The United States is in an economic depression aside from the growing healthcare industry (itself extracting wealth from the last demographic with money - aging baby boomers) and AI, extracting wealth from everything else. I fully expect to move back to my hometown and midwesterrn state to live with my parents rent-free because the world refuses to provide me with a way to make a living. 

with that out of the way, play my friend's game: Derelict Star!

I've only played a few hours but I am now hopelessly lost in a vast and dark spaceship trying to find powercells and bouncing around tricky platforming challenges. It's only $10.