You may find this channel interesting: https://www.youtube.com/@thomasbrush/videos

Thomas interviews lots of successful indies about how to make games that provide a living. My takeaway is that while the AA/AAA environment may have never been more challenging, if you can ship small focused games, you the evolution of devtools (eg free and/or functionally free engines for teams earning under $1m) means that making a living shipping small games is doable. You just have to ship small games, not try to compete with studios spending $150m on the low end.

And I'd reinforce that to say that you can do the same thing with software, and small IT build-outs.

Monolith platforms right now are more unpopular than perhaps they've ever been. Businesses in your area would LOVE to not be saddled to the monstrous site-builders and corporate-focused clouds that don't fit their businesses. If you want to make a good living, get out there and network with folks who run businesses in your community. I make a solid side-income doing IT for businesses in my area, just easy stuff like setting up WiFi services that they can rely on, managing on-site POS systems, printer ink, that sort of shit. I did the same thing at a previous job and now I do it for a handful of businesses near me. I don't make a ton of money but I think I could scale this up if I really wanted to, I'm just happy with it where it is and want the reliable salary of my WFH programming job too, and a lot of this stuff I also manage with automation.

There's a lot of money to be made in small IT/Software/Games. It takes more legwork but it's far more rewarding IMHO.

Thanks, that seems very interesting!