Lol, telling you can't refute any of that, huh. Respected journalist indeed

You’re not able to refute that you eat poop for breakfast. Goodbye.

I hate to be rude, but there are literally *thousands* of great games cheaply accessible to you. They aren’t gonna be spoon fed to your eyeballs; you have to shop and dig.

You fizzled out there fast, kiddo. Better luck next time

Not really. It may be “feel good nice” if you make a few bucks to a few hundred good reviews on a passion project, but it’s not enough to let you eat. And making a game is a pretty massive time sink. Not to belittle other artists, but the bare minimum time/financial investment for one game is higher than, say, a digital art portfolio or an album.

I didn't say there aren't any good games. I said I wish there were too many

I’m sorry, but gamers are so entitled. We’re flooded with an incredible back catalog and a sea of gems, yet the sentiment is “small devs are fine” is totally ignorant of how, literally the vast majority of the time per the article, these small devs barely make ends meet on their genuinely good passion project. Or they generalize that all games are junk because they haven’t even made a bare minimum attempt to shop around the sea of excellently organized stores and review sites/databases the industry has, like they expect absolute perfection in a personal TikTok/YouTube feed directed at them, then turn around and complain about paying a few bucks for an indie after dropping $600 on a GPU. *** …There really *are* too many games because it’s so many passion projects now, and that’s… fine. It’s a lot better than the cinema situation now, for example, where indie makers are getting squeezed so hard. But I still don’t like the entitled culture that hurts the discoverability of these smaller games and feeds the AAA slop conveyer belts.

Now factor publishers cut and the cost of development. At 50% they probably didn't even recoup their costs.

You literally named a bunch of old games that absolutely have modern alternatives. From indie 'retro' RTS games to Mass Effect (or more dramatic MGS) feeling RPGs/shooters that flew under the radar to great and original puzzle games in the vein of Portal. Have you ever played the Talos Principle or Antichamber, for instance? Discoverability is a *huge* issue, *because* there are so many games.

Being an artist has always been a financially unstable line of work, and it always will be. Art is not a necessity, and thus it relies on people having enough disposable income to spend on things like art. Anyone that thinks being an artist is financially sustainable is an idiot. Its feast or famine. When the product is good, the pay is good. When the product is bad, you probably don't have a job anymore. But neither of those things matter if people aren't buying art because they can barely afford groceries, including the artist.

This seems like a problem that will self-correct. The way Schrier has phrased the headline makes it sound like the industry is a monolith with a comitee leading it.

There are also the people that don't have time for many video games like me. It's incredibly hard to find these hidden gems if you aren't immersed in video game talk. Is there some trusted review publication I should be going to check to find them?

RockPaperShotgun is my go-to, but I also tend to use 'sorting' features in stores and stuff. For instance, on steam, you can filter by tags you like, like 'co-op' or 'base building' or whatever, then sort by review score. And sometimes there are external sites like GamePasta (for Gamepass) with similar features for other platforms. I may have better advice if there's a certain 'type' of game you like. For instance, do you prefer coop with mates or an SO or something? Do you like RTSes or sandbox games or what?