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The studio behind Star Wars Zero Company, which is currently a Steam bestseller, has reportedly furloughed the majority of its staff
(www.pcgamer.com)
this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2026
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At this point in human evolution, I can't understand how anybody would want to be in the gaming industry anymore. I would not blame any developer if they just decided "fuck it" and quit altogether. I'd applaud it, actually.
I wanted to be in the video game industry when I was younger and followed through with it by learning programming and pretty much everything I could with computers.
But then while I was in university, the story about EA's working culture broke. How they'd say hours were normal but they might need extra hours during "crunch time", which sounded reasonable until you learned that they just set deadlines such that it was always crunch time. The partners of EA workers did a class action suit against the company and won it IIRC.
That was enough for me to adjust my trajectory. I realized the suddenly obvious bit: people usually go into the video game industry because they have a passion for video games, which sets them up for exploitation like any other job that many people want to get in to.
I might still make a video game but I never intend to be a peon in the video game industry.
I always had this arrangement at the companies I worked for, except the "normal hours" were actually me doing next to nothing, and the "crunch time" was me genuinely busting my ass for a few weeks nearly every waking hour to get the software finished and out the door. It was nothing more than an extension of how I handled college rather than some arrangement that the companies intentionally offered. Management was always just so utterly fucking clueless about anything related to the technical side of software development that it was easy to fool them into thinking that my way of doing things was just normal for the field.
The corpo gaming industry, perhaps. I've seen various indie developers have a great time.
The 0.1% who actually hit it big. Let's not include survivorship bias here :)
You don't go into indie to hit big though. You do it because it's your passion, just like any other creative out there.
You can't pay rent or for food with passion. Indie as in making it your job is brutal.
Indie as a hobby while having a day job can be peachy (I'm doing it myself).
Yep and that's why it's really important to have government investment to increase the chances of getting games out there. For example, Untitled Goose Game got government grants and was a huge success - there are many other examples also. Without the grants, they wouldn't have been able to make it.
You don't really have to "hit it big" even moderate success (comparatively) is enough to pay the bills for a long while from what I've heard from a few indie devs online.