Commenting On An Article That Brings Up Hobbyist Development As A Lifelong Career

16 1月 2025

What’s wrong with working a real day-job and doing games as a hobby? That’s sustainable! You set your own hours, you have money! No big deal.

This is from an article by Aura about how pivoting to indie game development would not save the world. She lays out some crucial details about how indie game development is still a career that is vulnerable to exploitation and market forces. For the most part, I agree with this piece.

But there's this part that really annoyed me:

Look, I don’t need to make a long argument here. I would just like to ask you to look at the current state of video games journalism. As the major sites died, and all the money went out of the industry… as the core audience of games bloggers aged and no longer were attending college, living with their parents… the ecosystem of games blogging largely rotted apart. Even big names like Uppercut Crit have closed due to burnout and lack of funds. Working on shit in your spare time is a lot of time and effort and, in most cases, people don’t do it forever. They almost never manage to do it as a lifelong career.

I've been writing about niche and free games for sixteen years. I'm playing a game that took five years to develop and is being released for free. This is a ridiculous section that goes against the very core of what I write about.

I get where Aura is coming from: burnout is real, making free games is not always viable for many people, there were times when I took a break from writing, and so on. But the idea that everything meaningful in hobbyist game development and criticism depends on turning your efforts into a "lifelong career" is downright insulting to many people who enjoy making games and sharing that joy with others.

The article is very interested in survivorship bias and income equality, which is a good thing to point out because many small businesses do crash and burn. But that logic doesn't apply to people who are interested in, say, participating in game jams for fun. Many people who work in free games may be interested in pursuing game development as a career, but a lot of the time it also comes down to people wanting to find community.

There are websites like Mogura Games and Indie Tsushin that write up articles on free games. And there's bloggers like yours truly who writes essays pondering on what makes these free games so interesting. While there may be profit in the horizon, we are doing it because we love these games and wish more people pick it up.

I'm not advocating a "pivot" to free game development. Not at all. It's just that art doesn't have to be so money-driven. I enjoy making games because I get to do something that isn't work. That is all I need. I think bloggers and mainstream game developers forget that games are not just about making money and making a living. It's also about having fun.

Look at the interactive fiction community: IFComp is thirty years old and still going strong. There are prizes to be won, but they're definitely not there for sustenance. They're there to incentivize people to join, collaborate, and create.

It's amazing that hobbyist development and the writers who write about them are treated the way the essay did. Imagine talking about hobbies like this: my mom gardens for fun, not for profit, but I guess she's not ready to turn it into a full-time career because she's just doing it for the love of the game; surely, that means it's worthless. What a bizarre idea.

I do not care about turning my writing into a career. There are times when I know I could have since my peers have all entered into the game writing scene with paying jobs. But I pride myself on writing about things that the scene can't write about, whether it be language barriers or because websites are notoriously uninterested in writing about visual novels and niche games that aren't offensive memes. I don't care if my readership is in the triple digits, not the thousands that could "sustain" this "career". It's just a hobby that I find very meaningful, and I have made a lot of friends doing it.

I know this may seem naive to people who see game development and writing as a career, but this "naivety" has kept me going for sixteen years and helped raise awareness of Japanese visual novels and niche media. SeaBed wouldn't have been translated and become a cult hit if a bunch of us hadn't written about it. I wouldn't have met the creators of Argus who said they saved our articles on their phones to read here and there, and heard from their own mouths that they were happy they made the game and someone played it. Suisenka wouldn't have become a household name if Amelie Doree hadn't made a video about it after learning about it from me and others. There are lows that can lead to burnout -- always a risk in any career or hobby -- but I doubt any of us would regret it.

The key point here is "regret". Is it all just wasted effort because we are vulnerable to exploitation and burnout? I don't think so. I am deeply aware that some of my tendencies are not sustainable in the long run because I have a day job on top of other commitments. But in the end, I keep coming back to them because I enjoy letting people know what I think about niche games and the effort people have put into them.

This was never meant to be a lifelong career. I don't want to think about the strategies and moves I need to make to climb the ladder. Instead, I want the freedom to make decisions that may be unpopular or even detrimental to my "career" if it helps illuminate certain aspects of the media that I find fascinating. This is not the "progress" that society finds acceptable, but it is the kind of progress that I find most fulfilling.

I hope my readers feel the same way.