While most of your points are valid, they're nothing that can't be overcome with persistance and the willingness to learn, and I fear that you've painted too bl

While most of your points are valid, they're nothing that can't be overcome with persistance and the willingness to learn, and I fear that you've painted too bleak of a picture of the industry. I think the biggest problem is that making fun, engaging games is really, really hard. A lot of people assume that because they can program, and they enjoy playing games, making them should be relatively straight forward. But it just isn't. It's a creative skill that needs practice just like anything else. It's like making the jump from being a technically competent guitarist to writing music. Nobody writes great music on their first try, nobody writes clean code early in their career, and nobody writes hit games out the gate, except for prodigies so rare it's not worth thinking about. And I think what happens a lot of the time, is that someone who would otherwise be making $100 an hour writing code decides to make a game for the fun of it, ends up making 1-10 cents an hour on the time invested, and ends up writing a blog post to that effect. So it becomes an entrenched view that making games is a hobby that serious developers need to grow out of. My first game actually did make under 10 cents per hour of development time. But by my tenth, my best so far, it was up to $300+ (and counting). I still have hits and misses, and perhaps I'd be making more putting my skills to use in another industry, but money isn't everything. And I'm still not great at game design, merely competent - there's a lot of room for improvement there. Yes, you're right about the bad points of the industry, however, there's one big positive - if you're prepared to stick with it, for years with little reward, it's actually not that hard to reach a point where you're making great money, creating products that people love and that you're passionate about. And sometimes people in real life will notice your shirt and say 'oh, you play that too!'. Also, if done correctly, the path to making games is actually pretty safe - make them as a hobby, after hours, and release them for free. When 100k+ people download one of them from word of mouth alone, then it's time to consider whether you want to make a career out of it. If you can't make games after hours effectively, you couldn't make them full time, either.