Entry level average salary for Game Designers is around 50K USD, or $24 Per Hour equivalent, veteran positions make over 100k USD. For artists that number is even higher, from 60k to 120k.
In the last 3 years alone Indie games have gone from about 10% of the market to 20%. The game market as a whole has been seeing massive growths. There has never been a better time to abandon the corporate overlords and make your own games with small teams and studios.
That might be nice, it would be cool to have coherent independent stories instead of: “There is literally only one path and this random person who means nothing to you or your mission personally is in your way, kill them! (reading their pocket journal is optional)”
I do feel like the second chapter was better than the first in that regard, though.
often requires biting the bullet and doing something like working for a big soulless company
No, it really doesn’t. People who chose that path in the last few years made a very clear mistake. A decent enough artist to get hired by Triple A can absolutely get plenty of work elsewhere, and it’s getting easier every day.
The base game can be done in like 5-8 hours on a leisurely pace, the current speedrun WR is 57minutes but there are only 6 runners who’ve submitted to it so feasibly you could get a lot better times than that.
I’ve actually got a video on YT where I perform the “I Was Not Expecting You, Human” achievement to Slay Warden Krieg, who is the game’s midboss, in Veteran Mode with a character under level 11, and it was an hour and thirteen minutes from character creation to finish. The last 10 minutes are just the Krieg fight itself. This could be done much faster without the level requirement, though, because you could get more damage and better items.
The major problem with it is the enemy scaling. Every area has a minimum level and a maximum level, and as the character levels up so do the enemies. That means if you keep leveling in an area until you dwarf the enemies, it just keeps making it harder in the next area, so you’re incentivized to stay at the minimum level for that area and ignore the vast majority of enemies. Even farming for good loot comes at the added cost of making the mobs harder. I used to use a site that shows the level range for areas but I can’t find it anymore, sadly.
Slower? I tried to speedrun PoE once and because of a build mistake in Chapter 2 Act 3 it took me 14 hours to beat the base game before maps. Terrible time, but still.
Allow me to inform you. It’s an EA Game which is supposedly Singleplayer Wizards Call of Duty and it cost at launch $125 USD. When it released to mixed reviews and low sales numbers they laid off half the staff.