The real "tough pill to swallow" is that games are media and media culture is inherently about picking a minuscule number of winners, based on merit but also a huge amount of randomness. People don't seek out media based on pure merit, they seek out media that other people also like so they can share it together. It will always coalesce around a small number of lucky winners.
Sane people don't take up oil painting or singing or writing and expect to bring in enough patrons to fund it as their career. They might hope for that, but they know how slim the chances are, and they do it for the love of their art. Gamedev, I think being based on an engineering discipline and bringing in people with that mindset, is often seen as something different, where if you just do all the right things you'll eventually find success. It's not.
I think more game devs need to be content making something that is for them and their own sense of purpose, regardless of whether they ever find validation outside of it. Making a game with the sole purpose of making a successful product is just such a setup for heartbreak.
My father could have been a great comedian but he didn't believe that that was possible for him, and so he made a conservative choice. Instead, he got a safe job as an accountant, and when I was 12 years old, he was let go from that safe job, and our family had to do whatever we could to survive.
I learned many great lessons from my father. Not the least of which was that: You can fail at what you don't want. So you might as well take a chance on doing what you love.
I made music for 12 years before getting into software and then into game development.
You must be as Sisyphus pushing the boulder up the mountain. No one thanks him, no one cares, but he must do it.
There's a philosopher who mused that Sisyphus must be happy as he has meaning to his every day life. He wakes up and knows what he has to do. Just like Sisyphus, you gotta push that rock and find happiness in it regardless of the outcome.
I have made so much art in my life that no one will ever see, hear, or care about, but I'm still out here working on a game for hours on end.
I enjoy it.
I pity the man who wants a coat so cheap that the man or woman who produces the cloth will starve in the process.
I agree with you about Linux user's entitlement. I can't stand most open source users. They don't donate, most never say thanks at all (which would cost them $0), and they barely even take the time to write a proper report, and they just keep pestering you for news/updates about the fixes that they are demanding. There's an endless flood of shitty low-effort tickets. If you close the issue tracker, they make new tickets or open tickets on your other projects to talk about the "closed" projects. Most act like monkeys who never even do basic research to help themselves.
That is why I quit open source about 7 years ago, because you will not find more entitled users anywhere else in the world. I am with you on that. Heck, when a developer proposes ideas to get paid to ease the burden (like optional payment/donations via Flathub's new proposed features), Linux users throw hissy fits about "muh capitalist greed", all while they themselves expect to get paid at their own jobs. Linux users are peak hypocrites. Wannabe commies who sip starbucks lattes while getting paid at their own jobs, while expecting every developer to slave away at their feet.
Most Linux users should literally go fuck themselves, since they demand that unpaid volunteers (slaves) should be their slaves forever until all developers burn out and quit.
Most games are failures (from the perspective of those who fund them), which means every penny spent is viewed as an enormous risk. This downward pressure forces development studios to under-estimate projects and cut costs wherever they can, in the hopes of securing publishing deals. In practice what this ultimately means is even if a studio secures a publishing deal, every penny they receive is absorbed into development rather than profit, and in the highly likely scenario that a game's development is slower than expected, publishers may not be willing to spend any more money, but still expect the developer to deliver, meaning the studio needs to eat into whatever reserves it has to continue paying people, or (more commonly) simply require crunch to meet deadlines.
All of this results in downward pressure on your salary, a volatile industry where layoffs are common, and a handful of major success stories every year which rake in an obscene amount of money over a few weeks and then fall off once the next flavour of the month is launched.
It's impossible to predict what will be successful, and there are a million hoops to jump through for a game to even have a chance at becoming profitable - multi-platform support, localisation, licensing and legal, platform release-checks, distribution platform fees, multiplayer, live-service costs etc.
And, if you somehow navigate this minefield and actually launch a game, then you had better hope the marketing (you've budgeted for marketing, right??) has been paying off for months already and that your game is eagerly awaited and has also managed to avoid being launched on the same day as some other game, and that scandal-ridden streamer SnottyBoi92 hasn't trashed your game to a million potential customers within 5 seconds.
On top of all of that, you have a customer base which idolises a handful of franchises and a wildly meme-driven gaming culture which makes it almost impossible to even understand what about your game will actually end up resonating with people in the first place. That weird thing you saw once during development and could never replicate? Congratulations! That's now your top-selling feature and every single customer has managed to replicate it flawlessly. However, the streamer who discovered it has earned more from their video of it than you will ever see in your life!
If you ever fix it, you're toast. On the other hand, maybe that thing is mildly irritating and breaks immersion in the wrong way for 0.3 seconds, in which case your entire game is a bin-fire and you are an incompetent, player-hating vulture that is motivated solely by profit. If you don't fix it immediately, you're toast, and if you do fix it, well, screw you anyway.
Every new hire has a million game ideas and a passion burning brighter than a thousand suns, and dreams of creating the next genre-defining super-hit, so they're willing to work for buttons just to be given a chance. Burnout rates are high and layoffs frequent, so the machine has a continuous supply of fresh meat to keep costs down even if by some miracle the game is actually profitable, so don't be getting any ideas about a pay hike after you just gave up 2 years of your life creating what every critic is calling "Literally the greatest feat of human endeavour in history". There will never be a sequel, because unfortunately in the time it took to create your game, one developer out in the countryside in a country you've never heard of and strongly suspect doesn't actually exist had a great idea, produced a janky but highly memeable game in 6 months, and is now richer than god. Your next game will be a clone of that one, assuming you survive the layoffs as shareholders finally saw some profit and want more of it. Unfortunately it will never be released, because Microsoft bought your studio in a fit of hysteria and has now closed you down because a spreadsheet somewhere said that Windows constantly recording your screen and then "doing an AI" on all of your personal data was more profitable than any game could ever be.
Welcome to the industry. You've been invited to the asylum - don't turn down the opportunity of a lifetime.
My dog probably chased 10,000 squirrels before he ever caught one. He just likes chasing them, I guess.