This article misses it. Video game tooling got good enough that the velocity increased massively from 20 years ago where companies were writing their own engin

This article misses it. Video game tooling got good enough that the velocity increased massively from 20 years ago where companies were writing their own engines. There might be more folks working in games, but it's probably not the sole reason for the increased output. The team size for indie games shrunk dramatically while quality simultaneously went up due to tooling improvements. There's lots of supporting work for assets and logic that can be plugged in to game engines. Even when you need your own stuff, there's other forums to get that work as needed. This is distributed and shared work now instead of being under one studio roof. Plus the tools for producing that stuff probably got better too. The efficiencies are compounding. There's also been success with much simpler visual styles (Stardew), meaning not as much work needs to go into 3D modeling and advanced stuff like that. The worlds you play in now didn't necessarily have to get bigger either. Again, Stardew switches screens like old RPGs. It didn't seek to render a bigger world than games that came before it. Same for the distribution platforms. You no longer need a slow corporate entity to handle making physical disks and shipping them worldwide. This lowers the barrier of entry by a lot when combined with the previous gains. This author got used to the incremental graphics and technical improvements being marketed by game companies and thought that's how it always would be. That part still exists, but it's just in a much more crowded space these days.