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you don't want a job in the games industry

June 13 2026

I know you're considering it.

Don't even.

You enjoy videogames. You play them, you think about them, you've had game ideas of your own.
You'd like to take it one step further.
You'd like to actually make games, and you'd like to work in a games studio in order to do so all day.

Stop right here.
You don't want to work in the games industry.
I'm telling you for your own good.

The medium of videogames and the games industry are not the same.
You know how many games get published on the internet every year, right?
If you erased all the games made by the big studios, the multinational corporations, the indie commercial success stories, that number would stay roughly the same.
What you've been told were the real, normal games is only a drop of water at the surface of the games ocean. The "norm" is an anomaly, a freak accident.
The real normal games are the games made by hobbyists, by groups of unemployed friends who want to spend their free time working on something together, by small teams that hope and fail to break into the market. They are demos of Sonic fangames never completed, Bitsies and Twines put together in a couple of hours to celebrate a loved one's birthday, RPGs with generic assets and elaborate stories dreamt up since forever, jam games forgotten and re-discovered by a dozen strangers each year, weird niche games that were miraculously pressed into PS1 CDs and then slipped inside breakfast cereal boxes, mods and romhacks and sometimes clumsy, sometimes brilliant experiments.

Do you want to make regular games in all their endlessly diverse beauty, or do you want to try chasing sanitized unicorns?

Big studios are run by millionaire tech entrepreneurs. These people have never wanted to make games, they only want to make lots of money.
Some of those millionaires also own the companies that make computers and consoles. They will tell you when to buy the next Playstation or the most powerful graphics board, not because their teams have made better games on it but because they themselves want your money.

Do you want to make games, or do you want to make more money for your millionaire boss?
This is not a question. You don't want to spend your days earning your boss a new fancy yacht.

So-called "real" games take years and hundreds of persons to produce. People work in teams dedicated to only a handful of highly specific tasks, never being able to grasp the full picture.
A game can take you a few hours to create on your laptop. A few days, a few weeks if you're starting to get ambitious. You can decide if you want pixel art sprites or if you prefer modeling little clay dudes that you'll take pictures of and implement in your program, and you can choose to write a deeply personal story - or to ditch the story completely.

Do you want to share you games with your friends, or do you want to tell them you were responsible for how the sheep react to the player character in the twenty-third level ?

I'm tired of knowing that a third of my friends have been fired from their jobs in the games industry because their bosses wanted to hoard more money, while the second third has suffered at least one burnout and the last has preferred to quit developing games before or after having burnt themselves out.
I'm tired of working for people who can't care bout their teams and for players who care more about the sexiness of their rare female avatars than the safety of female developers.
I'm tired of thinking about the political and ecological disasters that always seem to accompany discussions around big games and studios: genAI use, workers abuse, predatory commercial practices, hardware overproduction in the midst of a global climate crisis...
i'm tired of hearing about all those sufferings and how they're framed as inevitable, desirable even somehow, when they're only the product of a games industry designed to crush people and fill executives' pockets.

It's only one games industry though, and there are so many games spaces out there.

You have the tools readily available to make games as a hobby, to spend a few fun afternoons tinkering with Puzzlescript or RPG Maker or Bitsy or Ren'Py or Godot or Wareware or Pico-8.
You can ask your musician friend if they'd like to make a silly little song for your title screen and you can ask your big sister to paint a few landscapes with the watercolours she's been studying.
You can share your creation on itch.io or on your friends group's Discord server, and take pride when people tell you they've enjoyed every last one of the fifteen minutes it took to play it.
You can set up tiny festivals, encourage people to make stuff of their own too, talk about their games around you, build a web of communities together.

You can be happy making games already. You don't need a job in the games industry.

written for the Manifesto Jam 2026 on itch.io