I would really like to get into the gaming industry, despite the horror stories you regularly hear about working conditions. The main problem for me is that I'm really old (>50), and there's no industry near where I live.
Nothing is stopping you from downloading Unity or Godot.
The actual business sucks though. It’s very hard to make money or stay employed. Industry legends are on LinkedIn soft begging for work*.
Edit: Work , not workers.
It’s a fantastic hobby though
And this is where things get... a bit weird - game developers that want to make a living out of what they do are competing with people who'd do it for free and who have no risk if their thing fails. It's the same in most creative fields - why would my employer pay for a band or dj at corporate events if we have some hobbyists working for us that will play for free / for fun?
The odds of making enough money to match even a lower end tech salary are astronomically low.
But learning Unity to learn programming is how I became a programmer in the first place. I’ve done very well for myself.
Even now I find games push me to develop my skills. Vs actual work which is usually boring.
For sure, but to make anything bigger than a toy game, you'd need a set of skills that is not easy to come by in a single person. Say, coding, graphics, and sound are completely different area, and within each, you typically have sub-specializations...
That said, if anyone's up for founding a purely virtual game dev studio, hit me up!
Now the smaller toy games tend to be more fun for me.
However, if you're looking to be part of a larger team, that is indeed a challenge with the limitations you mentioned.
It's a really weird market, it's both one of the biggest industries in the world (bigger than music and movies combined), yet also high unemployment and poor working conditions / work/life balance, with AI throwing another spanner in the works. Meanwhile a lot of people that want to work in it aren't just in it for the money, they have genuine passion for the craft / industry - which is actually rare in most IT jobs, most enterprise jobs aren't exactly exciting material.
But I agree, kleiba should give it a go. I don't want to downplay the value of a co-located team with industry experience but these can be overcome.
Note that GP said ‘get into the industry’ and not ‘take it up as a hobby’.
Also, without having tried at all, I'm doubtful whether I could land a gig. Even though I've worked in and around IT most of my professional live, I don't have any relevant experience. And I doubt that I could work in an entry-level position: I'm old on the one hand (not attractive for employers) and have more bills to pay now than I did in my 20s (not attractive for me).
It also gives you a chance to see how much you like it before you commit. If you don’t enjoy it enough to keep up doing it purely for fun, you might not like it enough to want to do it as a high pressure career choice.
If you have any games on PC there is a huge community making mods available on the Nexus mods website. That is one way to start, tons of people have ideas to improve existing games and have found an outlet for it there. I would never have finished Silksong without those mods. There are also a ton of mods via Steam, Skyrim has a all sorts of mods from gameplay to visual changing all sorts of behavior and looks.