Are We Making Games, or Just Chasing Numbers?

Doing Math Instead of Feeling

When you look at indie hits from the outside, it is ridiculously easy to fall into the trap of doing math instead of feeling the game. You see a title explode, check the Steam reviews, multiply the units sold by twenty bucks, and think: I could build that. Look at the mechanics; they are simple. If I just ship something like this, I can make real money.

The moment that thought takes over, the work starts dying.

Chasing a payout makes you cut corners on the soul of a project. You stop asking what a scene means to you and start asking what an algorithm wants to see. You build systems to hold player attention rather than moments that genuinely move them. The quality drops because the heart is gone, replaced by a spreadsheet.

One Thousand Hours of Blurred Moments

I realized this after looking back at my own habits as a player. I have put over a thousand hours into Valorant, and honestly, I regret a lot of it. For so long, it stopped feeling like a game and turned into a chore. The only reason I still jump in today is to play with friends and actively bring fun back into the lobby, showing them that a game can still just be about laughing together instead of an exhausting competitive grind.

What actually scared me was looking for the memories inside that time. After a thousand hours, all my clutches, aces, and tense rounds are completely blurred together. I put an enormous slice of my life into a system where intense moments never actually turned into real memories.

A Melody during a war

Compare that to playing REANIMAL with my partner. It is one of the best horror experiences I have had in a long time. There is a specific scene where you climb up through a ruined building and come across a soldier playing a piano right in the middle of a brutal war. It stopped me completely. It was quiet, strange, and somehow nostalgic. It felt like an honest pocket of peace inside horror. It felt like actual life.

You see that same sincerity across the games that stick with us long after we turn them off. The patient grief in Firewatch. The quiet weight of the world in Red Dead Redemption. The isolation and wonder in Outer Wilds. The relentless cycle of falling and picking yourself back up in Celeste.

None of those titles were engineered just to keep you clicking on a treadmill, and none of them were born out of someone calculating a quick return on investment. They exist because their creators cared deeply enough to pour their own point of view into the mechanics, the pacing, and the world. They treated the medium like art.

Making Something Real

Games are one of the few mediums where you can literally walk around inside someone else's perspective. When I build things, I do not want to make something hollow just to chase a bag or trap someone in a dopamine loop. I want to build something that carries what living has taught me, even in small ways.

When you create out of honesty and care, people notice. Money is just the byproduct of making something real, not the reason to start.