I view game making as an art form, so while I think it'd be great to make money at it, I hope I never have to do it for that reason alone. Same with drawing, but as my cartooning skills should make finding some sort of cartooning job extremely easy, I don't think I'll ever need to fall back on game programming, and cartooning is always fun. Even if my cartooning never gets past some local paper or magazine, it immediately gives me a combination of skills that practically no one else has... so I’ll hopefully be able to branch off into one of those if I have to.
And really, to make money game making, I think your games have to be pretty top class anyways. Being passionate about a game should make it even easier to make top class, and thus make more money off of.
@Drew, what you need to do is find one thing in game dev you do REALLY well, and exploit it. Make every game you make in that genre, so you can re-use and update your engine, and spend more time on actualy making the game really good. That seems to work for starwraith 3d games, and it should work for you too... And it looks like it's working for cash curtis as well, with the rpg engine he's built, but we'll have to see.
I'd say the two best things in D&C were the cinematics and the co-op play. Maybe you could expand on those somehow... I don't know, but finding a nitch is the way to go, preferably one that isn’t beaten to death by the big companies.
Oh! I just rememberd Time Ship. That was a great game as well. You could probably do well if you advanced that somehow…
