I played skyrim, and i thought yes.. i want to make that...

and now i am a very successful CTO and cofounder of a video game startup thats blooming and already made 7 figure profits

no, no im not, i ended up making websites for very little money...

I swear games are like the gateway drug of development.

@irene Absolutely. Though it's fun in a way to do a web job at a small agency with two fingers in your nose once you've snorted enough gamedev. It's a comfortable kind of poverty.

Yeah. Learning to code to become able of making games. Realizing that making games is hard and also requires a shit ton of art skills. Becoming a web developer.

I sort of started that way too. And of course i never made a game.

in development a handful of things will kill you quick:

* no history of failure, first time projects, so you end up massively underestimating, time, money, and skills needed

* making games is not the same as playing them and when you realize just how true this is, and how hard it is to make good feature tradeoffs that are sarisfying w/o muddling the core idea, you'll become disillusioned

* good interface is fucking hard
and you will *never* be fully satisfied with the result

* marketing is *slow* and *seriously expensive and/or labor intensive*, more of a drip drip build up where there are rarely defining moments you can clearly point to and say "this is what made it successful".

* skills are always going to be a greater limitation than tools, but not having tools will hurt.

* there are now more games being made than people to play them. make of that what you will.

this and a dozen odd other obstacles. it takes real fortitude to make it. I wouldnt even wish it on an enemy.

@Wisecrack u forgot to mention that it’s just a ‘speculative marketing investment’

@dder yes that too!

the issue is obvious. you should have been shooting for the stars instead of the septic tank.