Hi everyone.
I don't know if anyone will ever read this nonsense, but it doesn't really matter. Since this is my first post here, I'll explain in it what's going on.
When I was a kid, making games was my hobby. In those days life was simpler, I could not fill my head with all sorts of sad thoughts, and just program for my own pleasure. I didn't hope that my games would be played by anyone but me, it was just fun for me. What I did back then could be called games only with a very big stretch. Those "games" had no sound, no menus, not even text (because rendering text on pure openGL is a surprisingly difficult task). And there were no graphics there either, just lines and circles.
That's how I continued making games until the end of university. I won't dwell on how game development became my job. Perhaps I will write about it sometime later on this blog. But basically I just continued doing what I was doing before, it's just that now it makes me money. And that was my mistake.
The problem is that modern gamedev doesn't work that way. About 30-40 years ago, you could make a game by yourself, put it on the Internet and get rich off of it. Even in the late 00s you could make a "fart ball" app, put it on the app store and make hundreds of thousands of dollars. But now it's not like that anymore, dozens of new games are released on steam every day. And on mobile platforms this stream is even bigger (but it's not exact, maybe I mixed up something). And many of them look as cool as I will never be able to do in my life. It's very easy to get lost in this stream and that's exactly what happens to most developers. No, of course, sometimes there are happy exceptions when some flappy bird or 2048 suddenly shoots out and gains a shitload of downloads, but it's like winning the lottery.
Every time I make some new game I dream in the back of my mind that it too will miraculously become a super hit. And I suspect that other solo developers have the same thoughts. But miracles don't happen time after time.
I started making money in gamedev in 2016, so it turns out that I've been doing it professionally for 7 years already. The first 3-4 years everything was pretty good. The number of active installs (that is, those who have the game installed on their phone) was steadily growing. But then the trend reversed and the activity started to gradually drop. I have no idea what exactly was the reason for the growth of popularity of my games (well, I know that it was completely dependent on Google Play algorithms, because only it promoted my games) and I don't know why the trend reversed. But I do know that if nothing changes, in the future it will simply lead to the fact that the income from my games will not be enough to live on and I will have to find another way to earn money.