All my favorite games that I'd been eagerly awaiting release around April have all been delayed - Cyberpunk 2077, Watch Dogs Legion, even the second Vampire: Bloodlines installment!
Still, it's probably a good thing for my work productivity...
I have mostly been playing indie games. I find as a get older, triple A titles don't really appeal to me anymore. I sometime wonder if its possible to make a living developing a procedural generated rogue like on steam.
8,243 games were released on Steam in 2019 and 3,434 so far in 2020.
Unless you approach indie development like a business and you have a concrete plan for gaining a following, your chances of making a living are near zero. That's not to say you shouldn't do it, but don't expect to make a living doing so.
As an example, David Brevik (of Diablo and Diablo2 fame) spent several years working on It Lurks Below -- a procedurally generated roguelite/dungeon-crawler. According to SteamSpy [1], he's sold 20k-50k copies at around $15-20 per copy, and as of today the game only has about 20 peak daily players.
So probably $500k-$1M in gross sales (and then Steam takes 30%) for someone of his caliber and reputation, after 3+ years in development and a year or so since initial sales. It's just an unbelievably difficult chance of making it financially viable.
I don't want to quit my day job, it gives me too much money/comfort for this to worth it. But I'm curious if it's possible to make beer money this way. The main problem is there is too much good free alternatives to low caliber games. E.g. I can do something like brogue, and sell it at $1 on itch.io. But who would buy it when they have brogue for free?
I'm going to echo the other user claiming it's near impossible. The barrier to entry in making a platformer or top-down game is super low. If you can start a regular blog (minimum 2 posts a month), with good gifs or video loops capturing enticing gameplay, create an email signup list with interested and/or invested players, and get the game into the hands of prominent streamers, and have a personality that isn't prickly with entitled gamers, then you might have a chance. But it's still not a guarantee.
However, if you can do the above for every game you make, and build a following, then yes, it's possible. You'll need the support of a partner, a low-cost living location, or a job that doesn't kill the enthusiasm you have for developing a game.
Can you elaborate a bit more? Haven't seen much besides how poorly they treated their employees when this all got started, but that's par for the course with Gamestop.
Still, it's probably a good thing for my work productivity...