Many don’t turn around and try making a start-up game though, most just burn out of the industry forever.

I think a big reason for this is because they need to have some kinda airtight clandestine OPSEC if they want to work on anything themselves that they plan to show anybody.

It’s been common practice for AAA’s to say “Anything you make while you’re employed here at all is ours.” Sometimes even if you’re not AT the studio when you do it.

They just simply assume entitlement to your creativity.

So, quit and make that indie darling, right? But then you need a financial “runway” set up, which sets a hard time limit on production and adds a ton of stress, and you’d better hope it sells well enough to make back the lost income.

The indie successes we’ve seen are nothing short of extraordinary, but also a textbook example of survivorship bias in action. For every success, there’s a million projects that never got off the ground, much less sold successfully.

Facing all this…I celebrate the efforts that beat the odds, and love genuinely good games that simply didn’t sell enough to keep the ball rolling.

But I don’t fault anybody for just going into something more stable before burnout hits, and they would be destroyed from the inside out.