Effort never equals success

Making things is hard

My friends group is primarily made up from creative people, hacking away at something all the time. Some work on the same thing for literal years, with no end in sight, while others juggle projects jumping back and forth between them. I’ve seen them redo the exact same idea two dozen times, constantly optimizing and upgrading whatever they can. But the sad reality is that probably none of us will ever reach the audience we hope for.

The primary field said group works in is games, and honestly it pains me to see good ideas go to waste because of how not just the industry is, but rather the players in general. If I go to steam or itch right now, I can more than likely dig up quite a few quality games on both platforms, that obviously deserve recognition, yet they don’t get any. Why? Because streamer bait garbage is simply more popular.

This isn’t a new thought I have, but something I’ve been getting more and more disappointed about with every passing year: You can work your whole life on a single project and no one will care, yet a random meme of a bad game has more potential to make it’s creator a millionaire, than you getting a single sale in your lifetime.

Partially I blame streamers and whatnot for this phenomenon, but I think more fault lies in the consumers. Sure, we have market saturation, but people seem to think less and less for themselves and simply regurgitate the opinion of either the hive mind or some recognizable face they see on the internet. This existed beforehand with celebrities, but I think it’s been worse ever since the whole parasocial relationships hit the world wide web with content creators.

I can probably point to social media being at fault as well, as a thousand more problems, but somehow I’m seeing the pure mentality of people being completely different nowadays. They do not look for products that are of quality, rather something that you can laugh at, joke about, meme it. Countless games are made deliberately horrible, just so that people jump on the bandwagon of pointing fingers at something, laughing then moving onto whatever else there is a week later.

Longevity seems to have lost all it’s meaning and power, unless it’s combined with dark patterns and the exploitation of humanities addictive behaviorisms. Long gone are the times where people looked at something objectively by themselves, and didn’t form an opinion based on a post on twitter or reddit. Yes, we had reviewers, we still do, but they’re not trusted that much anymore, let alone I wouldn’t trust most of them myself either, purely because of their bias. But the same thing goes for ‘influencers’ or whatever else.

What matters are the jokes that a streamer or youtuber can make on a video, which will make a piece of garbage seem like the golden goose everyone’s been waiting for. This is why a lot of indie games go unnoticed, and why some quick, deliberately bad and broken games make millions in a single month after their release, ultimately rewarding hack frauds for their bullshittery.

Yeah, ‘vote with your wallet’ is always mentioned in discussions like these, but that’s the biggest cop out ever. You can’t change the thinking of people who had been literally molded through years to become a certain way. They will never care, nor is there enough of a possibility for them to change their ways in the future.

You likely won’t be a runaway success

I honestly don’t care for the fact that crap sells, that has always been the case. The problem is that general quality and expectations keep going down because of this. And I’m not talking here about purely as a hobbyist myself, but also as a consumer. I have a hard ass time finding games or entertainment that reach a certain threshold of quality that I would expect from them. Devs and whatnot are discouraged by the simple fact that ‘babies first unity asset flip’ is much more acknowledged and hailed as the next coming of Jesus than a passion project of someone with great and original ideas. So why would they even bother then?

That’s pretty much the point.

If you want to make easy money, you won’t bother with quality.

If you want to make something of quality, you won’t think of the money.

It took me a lot of time to swallow this pill a couple of years ago, and I honestly do not expect to make a single cent out of anything I do as a hobby. I have a day job, I get by with unrelated work and I’m fine with that. I wouldn’t want to make games for a living or anything of the sort. I would have to either sell out or live in constant stress, neither of which I’m fond of. I can only recommend this mindset to others:

Only bother creating things that you enjoy. If you end up making money with: cool, but don’t let that be your no.1 expectation. You shouldn’t be wasting your free time on something you do not enjoy or think of it as your gateway to success. Call this a ‘losers’ mindset’ or whatever, it’s fine either way. Just don’t put unnecessary strain on yourself because of others.