[kaiokendev]

> It’s like the rise of Unity in the 2010s: the engine democratized making games, but we didn’t see a proportional explosion of good game, just more attempts.

But we did? We've come a long way from the limited XBLA catalog. It didn't happen overnight, but doubtless we wouldn't have the volume of games we have today without Unity, Godot, Gamemaker, Renpy, RPG Maker...

[milesvp]

> we didn’t see a proportional explosion of good game, just more attempts.

I'm not sure the 2 of you are disagreeing. We definitely saw an explosion of indie games. In 2010, there were less than 10 indie games released on steam per month. By 2022, there were ~500/mo, and today there's ~750/mo (I expect that the 250/mo jump around 2022 can likely be attributed to LLMs).

What's hard to say is if this increase significantly increased the number of good games. Mostly because "good" is highly subjective, but also, I think something else happens. I've been playing games for the better part of 40 years, and what I noticed, is that in that time, the number of must play games each year has largely gone unchanged, despite the industry being orders of magnitude larger than it was 40 years ago. But that is also tricky, because 2 things happen every year, our standards get higher, and our preferences get more refined.

https://steamdb.info/stats/releases/?tagid=492

[kaiokendev]

You also still have the same amount of time you had 40 years ago. There are definitely more games available, and I would argue the proportion of high quality games has also increased massively, but since you're still limited by the number of games you can play in any given year, you'll never feel that increase.

[jonny_eh]

Since it led to more games, it led to more bad AND good games.

I don’t think we would’ve seen a Hollow Knight without Unity, built by a team of 2-3 devs.

[pjmlp]

As someone reaching 50 years old, we always had such indies, we used to call them bedroom coders, and distributions came in tapes, floppies in magazine covers, shareware CD-ROM and DVD-ROMs.

Maybe it only got visible to the consoles generation around the time of XBLA arcade, and even that was already predated by PS Yaroze and PS2Linux efforts.

Before Unity, we had SDL, Ogre3D, SFML,... but naturally all of those require more coding skills than engines designed with UI workflows in mind.

[sbarre]

I think "proportional" is the key word here..