Devlog: Shifting Priorities
If you know a game developer, and maybe even if you don't, you probably know that 2023 was a terrible year for being employed in the video game industry. One source estimated that the industry lost nearly 10,000 jobs.
Unfortunately, January 2024 is giving all of 2023 a run for its money. So far it looks like the industry has shed close to 6,000 jobs. And we're only about 80% of the way through the month. This week alone has seen something like 2,500 layoffs across at least four studios, the biggest two being Riot Games and Microsoft. And it's only Thursday.
Which is to say that I picked a heck of a sucky time to leave teaching to become a game developer. I'm now competing with upwards of 16,000 newly unemployed people who have more experience than me. I recently saw a junior level job listing that had been posted 10 hours prior and had already received 2,200+ applications.
"No problem," some of you may say. "Just be an indie dev. It worked for the guy who did Stardew Valley" (or Spelunky, or Braid, or Papers Please, or even Minecraft or whatever example comes to mind). Sure. Those kinds of successes do happen, just like sometimes a scrappy kid gets into the NBA; most don't, however. About 7 out of every 10 games released on Steam make less than $10,000. Half make less than $1,100. And unless you are brutal with keeping the scope of your game super small and focused, it's a challenge to get more than one game out a year. Most of the ones you've heard of took multiple years to make.
I'm not keen on those odds. You can't win if you don't buy a ticket, but, well, the lottery's a terrible way to make a living.
Clearly my plans of the last six months or so needed some serious rejiggering. I have now rejiggered. Here's what my game dev plans look like now:
- The Pompeii project is moving to the back burner; it's super cool and I still want to do it, but it's just too big to do right. I don't want to do it wrong. It's there for when I'm particularly inspired or want to switch to something else or maybe attracts interest from more collaborators or whatever.
- I'll keep playing the solo dev lottery, but on a smaller project, code name: Jorrit. It's a much simpler idea and more flexible in terms of story and setting since it's, well, fictional instead of a real and world-famous historical place with piles of archaeological artifacts begging to be recreated.
- I'm going to broaden my job search beyond just game development.
Yeah, so on that last one, I've picked up some 3D modeling skills in Blender, which is cool. It's also a skill that can be used in more situations than the skill of building a game. Perhaps some contract work for advertising, or architectural renderings, or concept art, or whatever. I'll also fall back on some of my teaching and coaching work, though both of them tend to have a slow ramp-up. Most teaching jobs are hired either in late spring or in August with a start date in September. And it took me a year or two of full-time marketing to get my coaching practice to where it was my sole income source.
I have some posts coming up about the new fictional game project, which I hope to release this fall, so stay tuned for those. In the meantime, I've got a few things up on my Ko-fi page (including the easy-to-learn language I designed for gamemasters—which is where the code name "Jorrit" comes from) if you want to leave a tip or the like. I've got some cleanup to be done there to reflect my new priorities, but anything that gives me more runway is deeply appreciated.