I meant the 1984 thing in jest, not as a serious dystopian scenario, I mean, we're on the site that has the :19: :84: and :gamer-gulag: emojis, it's typically not brought up in a serious manner.

Literally nobody is forcing you to be a whale

Of course, as I said, I'm a pirate. I've literally spent like 5 bucks on games in my entire life, and it was only because all the Valve games were like 90% off in a bundle, I've never bought anything else.

the thing about video games is that they really aren’t that difficult to make

Don't really agree with this one. Certain kinds of video games may be easy to make, but there's lots that aren't. I really dislike the general industry direction of prioritizing graphic fidelity, which definitely adds a ton of the monetary and manpower costs, but even if we move away from that, games are still going to be pretty difficult to make, because the actual game design part is a lot of work, and it's not something that you can solve by throwing resources at the problem - you can just hire more artists to pump out assets (admittedly, of dubious quality if there isn't a coherent artistic vision), but sometimes, an aspect of the game's balance is just going to stump you for weeks. It takes those indie devs years of their life to get their games out, it's not as if you can just download Unreal Engine and pump out a fully-formed FPS in a few months (or at least one with well thought out mechanics - you can do a shitty asset flip of course).