I have complained not once nor twice about my place of employment on this blog. I’ve recently considered quitting once more, and as much as I blindingly want it, I realize being unemployed in the current job market is probably the worse choice overall. Still, I’d like to come here once more and complain about something I’ve seen not only in my job, but generally in the indie game dev space:

People who really like the idea of being a game developer, but don’t really like the idea of making the game.

Lemme explain.

My boss is someone who is ostensibely really in favor of indie developers, as he has helped organize many events for israeli game devs before and during my tenure at his company. He wouldn’t be making a game company were he not interested atleast somewhat in producing a game. However, in this company all he does is auxillary work to game development: he works on a game engine, he does marketing for the games we don’t have, he organizes collabs with other groups (or atleast tries to). Getting him to actually play the games we work on has been a months-long uphill battle from me.

He wants to make games, but he doesn’t like making the games.

Similarly we have our game designer. A guy who loves to brag about how much he’s worked with people, about the amount of games he’s been in the development of (a statistic I’m starting to heavily doubt after trowling his Linkedin history), and really likes to flex how he’s a senior game dev. However when it comes to work, he straight up does not work. He likes overseeing other people and telling them what to do, but he doesn’t do stuff like playtesting or balancing of his own volition. The primary thing he does at work is convince everyone else he is in the process of doing work, even when that work doesn’t show itself for literal months.

He brags about working in games, but he does not work in the game.

When I go to game dev meetups I see much of the same. There’s a free wework-like space for game devs in Tel Aviv that I occassionally go to, and I saw a guy working on his game there. It was a very early prototype, a lot of AI assets, but it had some potential; it was a strategy game where you played a president and the joke was that no matter what you did it ended in nuclear war. But when I talked to the guy, he was really reluctant to discuss the practical aspects of his game, and talked a lot about its business potential. He mentioned having issues with the art, and I asked him what kind of look and feel he wanted for his game, so he answered that pixel art was in vogue but anime 80s asthetics would sell better. I clarified my question, “what kind of feeling do you want your player to feel while playing?” He kind of stared at me before going back to his earlier shpiel. This repeated a few times: I’d ask something about the game, he’d respond about the business elements and very little about the actual fun. He talked about how the game could be ported to the Nintendo Switch and the PS5, how he knows people to convert it, and could not tell me what he wanted his own game to feel like.

He was dreaming of having a successful game on multiple platforms, but he does not dream of his game.

This seems to happen everywhere I go here. People don’t want to work on games, they want for someone else to make their game and for them to profit off of it. Coincidentally, these are all people who were using AI heavily and chuckled when I half-jokingly suggested they just code their own games. They want the rewards with none of the work, and don’t actually care for the work.

In the end, in every one of these cases I would sit back and wonder to myself: “If you didn’t care to make your game, why would I care to play it?”