would kill for some good vibes rn

Job hunt has not been going well. I have sent out about 50 applications and heard nothing back. Around a year and a half ago when I was last looking for work I would get about 1 callback per 10 or so applications. Every time I check linkedin there's posts from people who have been out of work for over a year and aren't getting any interviews. These people worked at studios with recognizable games and have pretty deep job histories. 

It has always bothered me how much power employers have especially over americans. You need a job to pay for food, shelter, and to survive. As inflation has increased over the past 20 years job requirements have gotten tighter and tighter, and it's become harder to get the kind of work experience that would allow for some kind of...agency? 

The last time there was any kind of expansion was the 2020 covid pandemic, a force majure for capitalism. Workers won work-from-home privelages and it was an employer's market. Videogames expanded because people had more free time. Now there is basically no free time. 

With the demise of many of Xbox's studios, and rising hardware prices, and the shrinking free time and purchasing power everyone has, I am not sure where videogames go from here. They're going to sell for less that $10, run on crappy hardware, and be something you can jump into and out of in an hour or less. They also have to take less than 6 months to make, because every release is a pull of the slot machine, and you need to make every pull as cheap and quickly as possible. 

Something’s gotta be written about how Steam has basically created a deflationary feedback loop where games get cheaper and cheaper, pushing quality down because it’s uneconomical to spend any extra time on a product. The market keeps getting flooded with cheaper and worse games because it's the only way to pull the slot machine lever. It's harder to find quality games without actual curation. Eventually, steam will be 99% slop, if it isn't there already. This will be fine for a while until Steam's image as a slop market gets solidified, if it isn't there already.

Eventually Valve is going to have to put money back into the market to ensure that quality titles are on the platform. This is basically the Steam Greenlight system all over again. When you got your title greenlit that was basically winning the lottery because the game market was so small. 

Amazon already ran into this problem, but it isn't one for them because they own the entire retail market. You have to buy something name brand because offbrand stuff 99% of the time is total garbage. Amazon owns retail so this doesn't matter, so I don't think Valve cares about being a slop market either. 

This has already happened years ago with the Apple App store and Google's Play Store. What happened is games move to F2P because getting new games or apps is basically frictionless. The problem now is user aquisition, which costs money in advertising. Often User Aquisition is very expensive, with developers paying up to $30 a user, and taking months to earn that back with In App Purchases. 

I have personally done back of the napkin math on how many sales of a modestly priced game I would need to live for a year, and it's about 8500 copies. Meanwhile, all of us are waiting for the AI bubble to finally collapse, taking the world economy with it, and in the ashes rebuild something. Rubble is easier to work with than what's out there now.