why is the indie game scene filling up with dumb asses?
A number of things.
1. Game development has been democratized like never before. You have free engines like Unity, Unreal, a number of HTML5-based ones, and that's just scratching the surface.
2. Part of the democratization is seen in how one can self-publish games now. Used to be you need to suck up to a publisher to even have a chance at distribution. Not anymore. $100 over at Steam, $99 per year on iTunes, $25 at Google Play can get your own stuff published.
3. There are tons of assets that can easily be procured (either cheaply or flat-out piracy). It's not just from Unity aasset store, but other sources like Open Game Art and such.
4. The internet also made it possible to let other people code for you. Either from asking full solutions via Stackexchange to just finding someone in Upwork (formerly Odesk) who'd sell their whole game for relative peanuts (some offers are as low as $25).
5. Creating a new concept is fucking hard. Or even taking an existing concept and adding a new wrinkle to it is hard. Also, game designs are not patent-protected so any lazy bum can just take any one and copy it wholesale.
6. The premise of quick cash from riding the coattails of other successful indie titles is hard to resist for many.
Morons with just enough brain power to know how to quickly whip up shit that follows the current bandwagon that's selling like mad, but not enough brain power to make it actually viable beyond use of the same suffix.
Kind of like the .com crash.
Agreed.
There is no cost to license Unreal tho, they just take part of the profits.
I believe Unity has a leg up in that you can code for it using Javascript, so any web developer can easily dabble with Unity without having to learn new stuff syntax-wise.
Unreal, I believe, uses LUA (I've been told it's easy, but I don't dig the syntax, myself) then C++ if you need more control, a sharp dive from other high-level languages. Could be wrong on this, though.
