A really good article on the fact that indies find it almost impossible to make money nowadays if you have any sort of dream of going commercial
The comments also give a good insight on the reality of things. Making the game you want will not make money, the only way to have a remotely decent chance, other than getting that rare lightning in a bottle, is to make tons of throwaway games that try to mine wallets with IAP and are filed with ads.
So in a sense, the chance of even succeeding in the commercial space if you’re not a billion-dollar entity is practically non-existent, so goes the idea of just perhaps making games as a hobby, on a shoestring budget, and perhaps try to make a few thousand dollars over its lifetime (as some indies have already done).
There is one thing that might help, and that would be to de-democratize game development by axing the idea of Unity, Unreal and Source for free and instead charge perhaps 1000 USD minimum (to weed out the hobbyists), but even that might not work if upcoming FOSS solutions end up being extremely powerful and once again allows hobbyists to make games). The other thing would be for the stores to enforce a minimum game length and quality (no hacked together simulators for instance and no pre-made assets for core components), but people might end up protesting that decision as fascism.
So, amidst all of the effort to make Blender more suitable for indies, was game development democratization worth it, did it become more of a curse on the entire industry rather than opening a gold mine?