Making video games is hard.
Damn hard.
Ask anyone who’s ever tried to balance a combat system, squash a game-breaking bug, or write dialogue that doesn’t make players cringe. Even the smallest games take incredible effort to complete.
It seems like, once upon a time, fans knew this. A new video game was a rare thing. You had to save up allowance money—or convince your parents—to buy it. And once you had it, you had to figure it out.
Most older games came with a manual. And you needed it.
Tutorials were minimal or nonexistent. Clues were scarce. Sometimes, you had to call a friend. Or a hotline.
But that was part of the magic.
Games were a labor of love—not just for the people making them, but for the people playing them.
We worked to understand our games.
We replayed them.
We got stuck.
We gave them the benefit of the doubt.
And we held onto them because, realistically, we weren’t getting another one for a while.
Flash forward to today.
Games are everywhere.
Steam sales. Free-to-play mobile apps. Game Pass. Backlogs upon backlogs.
We’ve grown up, most of us. We have more money, more options, and—ironically—less time.
It’s a recipe for discontent.
We still want games to be good. Maybe more than ever.
But now, we’re ready to walk away the moment a game stumbles.
A clunky UI? A weird combat system?
Too much text? Not enough?
Framerate dips? One unskippable cutscene too many?
We uninstall.
We refund.
We move on.
And then we wonder:
Why don’t games feel the way they used to?
It’s not like modern games are worse. In many ways, they’re better—objectively so. Higher resolutions. Smoother framerates. Better audio. Quality-of-life features we used to only dream of.
But technical improvement doesn’t equal creative impact.
A game isn’t “good” just because it checks modern boxes.
To be good, it has to stand out in its own context.
It has to resonate—not just function.
That’s the frustrating part for indie devs like me.
We’re trying to make something that matters.
Not something that simply “works.”
I don’t have a marketing department.
I don’t have AI-generated assets, a data-driven monetization loop, or some viral trailer made by a publisher.
I just have this thing I care about. And I want it to matter to someone else too.
But in a market so saturated with noise—where every game competes with thousands of others, and most players are rightfully skeptical—it’s hard not to feel invisible.
Worse than invisible: irrelevant.
Because for me, deep down, there’s always that voice:
“Your best won’t be good enough.
Some outsourced team will outperform you.
No one’s going to care.
You’re wasting your time.”
And honestly?
The only response I’ve found—the only one that works, even a little—is just to shrug and say:
“I’m going to make something I care about.
Something I think is beautiful or strange or cool or meaningful.
And maybe—just maybe—someone else will feel that way too.”
That used to be enough.
And maybe, in some way, it still is.