>>714332013
Frankly, being a good artist/dev and having good ideas are two incredibly separate things.
Like, take Chris Sawyer, for example. The dude was a fucking programming GOD, but he spent 90% of his career just doing ports of other peoples games— and that's fine! The guy found a good career doing good work, and when he finally came up with some good ideas of his own (Transport Tycoon, Rollercoaster Tycoon) he had already built up the funding and respect of publishers to get it done.
The issue nowadays is that small-scale publishers don't exist, small-scale games don't exist. So all of the people who would ordinarily be high-level programmers and artists working within someone else's vision at a AA studio and eventually figuring out the kind of game they REALLY want to make are stuck making indie project portfolio pieces and burning through the few ideas they have, which usually aren't enough to carry an entire paid project.
