Jonathan Blow did a long interview on the Full Time Game Dev Podcast about the state of the industry in 2025. The interview predates the most recent data releases on the state of the industry.
Blow states that it’s the hardest time in games that he’s seen since he’s been a professional dev. He attributes part of this to market saturation and the cost of entry being low. These days, it’s both easy to make games, and hard to makes games (if your goal is to make money or a polished experience).
“If developers can’t survive, they can’t make a good version of their thing.”
I appreciate that the interviewer asks if the low cost of entry is attributable to AI and Blow says it’s not, which I agree with. His reasoning is that most of these AI tools aren’t made with games in mind so they don’t fit the needs of game developers and I was glad that the conversation wandered away from from AI pretty quickly.
Blow echoes my own frustrations on enshittification across software generally, though he doesn’t use the term. “People have a hard time believing that software is in a declining state when they can see new toys all the time.” This descends into a conversation about engine bloat, but I’d be genuinely curious on the positive alternatives. He notes that his game compiles in 2 seconds, which is fantastic, but I wonder about the authorial affordances of his toolset. I worry that the tradeoff is a worse authoring experience for creatives, but I’d love to be proven wrong.
The interviewer asks if open-source can solve the problem of software worsening, and Blow observes that most open-source software is not particularly good or user-friendly and we have to ask why. He doesn’t give an answer to why this might be true, but I agree with him (generally, Twine is of course a notable counter-example), and would love to read more about the cause on this. Because the interviewer has a point: in theory open-source software should be a better experience, and yet…
When the topic turns to running a studio, Blow says he doesn’t enjoy it, and I feel him there. When it comes to remote work, he talks about it being much harder to make efficient, which for him translates to higher dev costs. This got me thinking.
I don’t believe it’s inherently less efficient, but efficiency in a remote setting requires different work models and processes, and probably needs specific roles on the team, which many indies may not have. But the way Blow talked about the changes he’s noticed made me wonder if a shift to remote work makes contracting models more appealing. This might be starting to codify some thoughts for me around the industry moving more and more work to outsourced devhouses.
Blow doesn’t believe in succinct answers; for every answer he gives, he gives one or more examples of how or why he believes that, which means his answers are long, detailed, and full of digressions that indie devs, especially newer ones, may find interesting. This will be a comfortable conversational pattern to the neurodivergents among us, but the interviewer seems uncomfortable with it.
I haven’t seen this particular interviewer before, but he seems fidgety, bored, and restless, and his tics are particularly distracting for me. Still, the interview contains some interesting nuggets for indies and junior devs; experienced and veteran devs may just find themselves nodding along.
