You can argue that making games shouldn’t be about making money, but it is what it is–an INDUSTRY, and you need people and gear and liscences to make games, and it costs a lot of money. I love games and I don’t make them because I want to earn money–but I need to make SOMETHING from my job, and I need money to make games. The way it’s been told to me is “Game designers love games. We’d be making games even if we weren’t working in the field. So we might as well make money from it.” I also need money to PLAY games. And eat. There’s no way around it–you NEED to make money to survive. In case you forget, the starving artist is largely unsuccessful, unimportant, unremarkable and mostly UNHAPPY.

Sure, you can make a game by yourself and reduce cost down to you your own personal expenditures, saving you a loooot of money, but that can still be a huge cost for one person, and imagine the manhours that have to go into one person making a whole game themselves. Not only that, but the likelihood that you achieve high-caliber quality work compared to the rest of today’s games is next to nonexistent. It just won’t be that impressive because you have too much to do, too much to focus on to pay attention to the miniscule details one dedicated person could. That’s why we have development teams. It can be good–but it doesn’t mean people will buy it. I mean, what’s more interesting to the MASSES: a game made entirely by Joe Somebody, or a team made by multinational rock stars that are responsible for a wide array of games that you’ve already played and love?

Sometimes you get the little star in the sea: Google “bob’s game”.
But that’s really a one-in-a-million light. The rest of us can’t do that.