Looking through Google's ad platform recently, I was struck by how searches like "how to become a game developer" have tens of thousands of searches per month and $50 CPC, whereas technical searches like "level design in Unity" have ~ a couple hundred searches per month. The basic shape of the market is hordes of people clamoring to "become" a game dev, shady schools selling introductory courses for tens of thousands of dollars, and very few people doing actual work.
It's easy to romanticize gamedev. A lot of kids are probably curious about it too.
I imagine people at that level won't encounter a website like mine because it's too niche. But if you search "how to become a web developer" on it there are some interesting articles there: https://gamedevtorch.com/search?q=How+to+become+a+game+devel...
The fact that there is an entire phenomenon known as "the unity look" points very strongly at some kind of exponential decay function in skill acquisition over time.
I'm having to fight for my life to avoid relying on the real-time lights in a relatively simple Unity project. I've written custom code to move chunks of scenes to origin to fix the light mapper range and sampling issues. This is the kind of thing where 99.99% of indie devs would throw their hands up and switch everything to real-time mode (resulting in "the look"). And, they might be right to do so. It could be the correct decision, but I worry a lot these days with how tight the market is. Steam sees a ton of new games every day. Having distinct visuals can make a really big difference. Selling <100 copies of something you spent >1000 hours on is probably the most catastrophic outcome for morale. Play testing and good mechanics can sadly only make you so much money if everything else is lacking. In 2015 you could get away with it. Not in 2025. The cheap ugly games happen inside places like Roblox now. You'll never compete with that.
I’ve noticed this is true of a lot of markets. I think of it like a triangle: a huge base of newbies, a smaller layer of intermediate folks, and a tiny tip of experts. If you’re trying to do an education-based business it’s a lot easier to try to sell to beginners.