Games are art. Some people do it for money, some do it to express themselves, some do it for fun. What's worthless to you is very valuable to someone else.
Yes but it's undeniable that the industry has changed recently. It used to be, someone would make a game to express themselves, it would be picked up by a major studio, it would be expanded and polished until it had mass appeal, and became the next "blockbuster" game. Now, it's, someone makes a game to express themselves, and they eke by on a trickly of income, they fight for placement among the sea of shovelware on the game store sites, and they never get picked up by a big publisher. Meanwhile, the big 3 game companies are creating the same formulaic game over and over and, through massive advertising campaigns, have captured all of the customers.
>someone would make a game to express themselves, it would be picked up by a major studio, it would be expanded and polished until it had mass appeal, and became the next "blockbuster" game.
Warcraft was a big success and Warcraft 2 was a huge success. Both of those games were published by Blizzard themselves. They were purchased by Vivendi a few years later.
I can’t think of a single game where a major studio picked up a small game then expanded and polished it into a blockbuster.
The closest I can think of is maybe DOTA. Where the creator of a mod was hired by valve to make a stand alone game. But that definitely wasn’t normal.
That's just wrong though. "Warcraft" was a "success" but it didn't reach a wide audience. They took on investment money and were able to get each subsequent game to a wider audience. Know anyone investing in indie games in 2025?
Unlike memecoins most games have utility via interactivity. I say most because there are definitely games like Banana that don't really have any interactivity, but it arguably had a different kind of utility: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aitVHsg0rWA
