This is so cynical it overshoots the mark and lands way out there on the other side.
Why make art that nobody wants? Because it's fun. I'm by no means a creative, but I've got a folder full of terrible drawings, loads of google docs of stories that don't go anywhere that I wrote while bored/drunk/high/inspired/depressed, and five different game prototypes on Github. Nobody's ever going to see most of them. This is fine. Doing creative things is intrinsically fun if you've got an itch to scratch.
Why do people make 30 indie games a day? Same reason my mum spent 100 hours making an anatomically accurate wire sculpture of a crab to sell for $40 to a university to hang up in the aquaculture wing. It's fun. It doesn't detract from her work - she's retired, and even when she was working, she used different skills and drew from a different pool of resources.
This is from Jeff Vogel, who's averaged about one indie game a year since 1996. I think part of his attitude comes from working for 26 years and seeing the transition from smallish studios to a gigantic winner-takes-all market. It's certainly going to be harder to make money as an indie developer now, with raised expectations and a lot more competition, and there is some value in warning people about that.
On a final note, society is also... looking pretty good right now? We came up with multiple vaccines for a global pandemic in record time, most of the roads near my house are okay, life's improving steadily in the developing world, my state government is going on a massive spree to buy more trains and remove level crossings, and I could fix a small pothole if you gave me a sack of cold asphalt and a fencing bar. There are some problems with inequality, but they seem to be tied to governments abandoning full employment policies, and I'm sure people will notice eventually.
Meanwhile 100000 russian troops is being placed around ukraine border, 20% of russian households does not have indoor plumbing and some of people I know still does not believe in pandemic.
Im not sure where Im going with this but somehow I feel that that You should not mistake Your inner optimism with what is really going out there.
Remember Afghanistan vUSSR, Chechnya, and Ukraine v1.0?
I'm Australian. I see Russian aggression in the Ukraine in a historical context that includes a lot of proxy wars very far away from me. Sure, it probably sucks to be Ukrainian right now, but they're ~44 million out of ~7.8 billion. Maybe one day it will be our turn to be invaded, and that will be very bad for us, but I hope my inner pessimism won't be confused for what is really going on out there.
Its not that far, world is really small. For me its even worse because I live only few hundred kilometers from Ukraine border (its only half a day drive by tank if I calculate correctly).
And wars sometimes have tendency to extend their reach beyond what You would expect. If I remeber correctly Tobruk was defended by 14000 Aussies (and I think that was way before any kind of attack on Australia took place).
Why make art that nobody wants? Because it's fun. I'm by no means a creative, but I've got a folder full of terrible drawings, loads of google docs of stories that don't go anywhere that I wrote while bored/drunk/high/inspired/depressed, and five different game prototypes on Github. Nobody's ever going to see most of them. This is fine. Doing creative things is intrinsically fun if you've got an itch to scratch.
Why do people make 30 indie games a day? Same reason my mum spent 100 hours making an anatomically accurate wire sculpture of a crab to sell for $40 to a university to hang up in the aquaculture wing. It's fun. It doesn't detract from her work - she's retired, and even when she was working, she used different skills and drew from a different pool of resources.
This is from Jeff Vogel, who's averaged about one indie game a year since 1996. I think part of his attitude comes from working for 26 years and seeing the transition from smallish studios to a gigantic winner-takes-all market. It's certainly going to be harder to make money as an indie developer now, with raised expectations and a lot more competition, and there is some value in warning people about that.
On a final note, society is also... looking pretty good right now? We came up with multiple vaccines for a global pandemic in record time, most of the roads near my house are okay, life's improving steadily in the developing world, my state government is going on a massive spree to buy more trains and remove level crossings, and I could fix a small pothole if you gave me a sack of cold asphalt and a fencing bar. There are some problems with inequality, but they seem to be tied to governments abandoning full employment policies, and I'm sure people will notice eventually.