I’ve been thinking about this for a week or so. I had a bit of an epiphany when it came to how hard it to make a living from video games, and also as someone who was a musician (briefly) and who is well acquainted with a novelist. If you have ever tried to make a career out of making your own video games, music, writing or art, then I suspect you are aware that it is hyper-competitive and very hard to make a living. I suspect its going to get way, way worse, and its got absolutely nothing to do with AI. Just a matter of population, scale, choice overload and numbers.
First I have to burst a bubble. You are not special. You might *think* you are, and everyone ironically thinks they are both special and has above average IQ. To quote the crowd chanting in unison in a classic monty python film “We are all individuals”. In reality, you, or more specifically your tastes are not individual. At least not to the point where it really matters given the problem of choice overload.
When I was a kid, there were 3 TV channels. Just 3. I remember watching the first ever show to be broadcast on channel 4. (It was countdown). These days we have blasted way way past ‘too many channels to count’ and we now have streaming and youtube. The amount of content available for me to watch right now is staggering. The problem thus becomes not one of availability but discoverability. There MIGHT be a youtube channel you would like 5% more than the one you are about to watch, but will you spend 8 hours scrolling to find it? As someone who sells games, I know you will not. In old language, being ‘above the fold’ was how you got noticed. (This is from which news stories you could read on a newspaper that was folded to fit in a display stand). These days being on the front page of steam is a huge big deal. Being on page 2 is way worse. On page 199 you might as well not exist.
There is a limit then, to how much effort we will go to in order to find something that suits our tastes. Given 20 choices, we probably pick the most suitable. We do not go looking for 100 or 1,000 choices. This is just human nature and probably a survival instinct. Maybe buffalo #199 has more meat on it, but if we don’t decide to hunt one of the first 20 we find, we will lose the light and go hungry?
So given that we do not have hyper-individual tastes, and that choice-overload funnels us into one of the top 20 choices anyway, what are the implications? Well the implications are awesome for a tiny tiny tiny tiny proportion of content creators, and catastrophically terrible for everybody else trying to make a living. And frankly, I think there is no solution. Let me explain with some illustrative numbers.
The year is 1546 and lute-playing is the new hotness. There is no ability to record music, and no powered amplification. The lute can be heard in just one room, so maybe 50 people can attend a performance. A lute is an expensive instrument few could afford anyway. A roaming lute pop-star has to travel by horse or donkey and cannot cover that wide an area. Perhaps you are the best lute player in somerset, and wildly reknown among the locals for your l33t skillz. You earn a reasonable living. There are rumors of even better lute players in Wales, Scotland, the Midlands, Kent and Sussex, but thats many days ride away so they will never come here. You have a decent middle class income, and are ‘pretty good’ at the lute. Life is good.
The year is now 2025 and Taylor Swift is a huge pop star. Recorded music is available and ubiquitous, deliverable to almost everyone on the planet. That population has grown by 1,632%, but thanks to the power of amplification and global media delivery, Taylor Swift can perform all over the planet, often to crowds of 90,000 or more in one night. Even if there were no recordings, she can entertain >1,500 times as many people as the lute player. The potential ceiling for revenue from entertainment stardom is staggering compared to 1546.
But hold on, with a huge global population, surely the industry can now support way, way more people than it did back in the lute days? NO. In fact probably FEWER people as a percentage of the population. In 1546 our village needed our local lute player, because local was all there was. But in 2025 Sting can ‘entertain’ people with his lute playing on a global scale. People are still being entertained, but they have not taken advantage of the global growth in population to have a larger number of ‘entertainers’. They do not need them. There is already enough choice. Way, way too much choice. We used to just have Joe ‘the lute guy’. Now we have more than 20 lute players. Enough already.
So what does this mean as we extrapolate forwards to an even more connected world and an even more global culture (witness the rise of kpop, and korean TV dramas like squid game, both relatively new, and the global rise of anime, again in global terms very new)? It means that the top 20 choices of anything can (and will) dominate the entire planet. Thats depressing enough as it is, but it gets worse than this. Because the population goes up, but the number of megastars we support doesn’t seem to change, it means the standards go up, and up, and up, until frankly you have to be a genetic abnormality, have serious obsessive mental health issues, or a staggeringly lucky combination of the exact zeitgeist skills and looks and charisma to even have a chance of being in that top 20.
Top athletes do not have much of a social life. How could they? Competition is extreme. Top models have basically never eaten a cake. Top musicians are absolutely oblivious to anything that is not a metronome or a practice schedule. Top artists have, for a very long time, been people who have a smorgasbord of issues you would not choose, but have the fortunate side effect of helping them create great art. Van Gogh was not a chill dude with work-life balance. This applies to entrepreneurs too. Elon Musk is clearly staggeringly brilliant and hard working, but also unimaginably stressed, distressed and in need of serious psychological help. Do we really think that is uncommon? Social media heralded a mass wave of ‘cancelling’ as people suddenly had access to the personal opinions and thoughts of celebrities who have a tenuous grip on reality, and the world outside their profession.
So my unfortunate and depressing conclusion is this: Global population growth and the persistence of choice-overload are combining to ensure that the standard of work required to be successful in entertainment is so high, that only people who dedicate every waking moment to it AND who have some sort of natural/genetic ability or mental health issue that helps them work can possibly, ever hope to succeed. And obviously as the standard at the top rockets up, the standards at all levels also rises alongside them. Can you have work-life balance and a career in writing/art/music/indie games? Of course not.
My first released indie game in 1997 was ‘Asteroid Miner’. It was on the front page of ‘download.com’ the biggest download site on the entire internet, for a week or so because ‘Look! someone made an asteroids game in color’. Its 2025 now and getting to the front page of steam (just one of many games stores, let alone stores in general) is staggeringly, impossibly hard. And it will only get harder and harder from now on. This is what it took in 1997:
Now the cheerful bit!
Do you want it though? If you have to become such a tortured soul, so in pain, so obsessed, so focused in order to ‘make it’, then is the price worth it? How many rock stars drunk or drugged themselves to death. Do you want to be Kurt Cobain? Do you want to turn out like Michael Jackson or Elvis? Do you want to be Elon Musk? That level of fame and recognition is impossibly hard to deal with *even for people with perfect mental health*. Be aware that when you look at people who are hugely successful in the entertainment field you work in, these people are often ill, unhappy, stressed. That might be the price you have to pay. It probably is not a price worth paying. You can get a lot of happiness and fulfilment by having a normal career and making games/writing books/making music as a hobby. Its probably a much more balanced and stable life.
And yes, I know that I have sold a ton of games and obviously done well, and don’t want to come across as telling people to give up on their dreams. I’m not the worlds perfectly balanced mental health exhibit either. I’m an anxious, stressed, hyperactive workaholic who finds it almost impossible to relax. Not many people would choose those characteristics, even it meant selling more games.