(Future of Game Development - 2)
Should indie developers focus primarily on such addiction-inducing mechanics, then? To me, it is a rather personal choice. If a group of developers are well-versed in trespassing the audience's self-disciplinary mind based off of clever social engineering tricks, they may consider going for it because it would mean that their skillsets share a great deal of commonality with a pool of knowledge that is optimal for generating revenue. A major problem, however, is that this is a highly competitive niche, and thus most developers won't even stand a chance unless they are extremely skilled in psychological manipulation and possess sufficient capital to make it happen on a large scale.
So, what are the alternatives? One obvious solution would be to just quit making games because selling a game nowadays is a notoriously competitive business (It's better than trying to sell oil paintings and such, but still). This is, however, not a desirable option for many indie developers because it is not so handy to suddenly change one's field of expertise. Should truck drivers just quit their jobs once self-driving cars become the norm? Maybe, but it is still reasonable to say that an occupational shift should not be too drastic; that is, their new jobs should probably be ones in which they can still utilize a significant portion of their existing bodies of knowledge, so as to prevent them from having to re-learn everything afresh.
The same logic applies to the case of game developers. People who have been developing videogames as a full-time occupation should strive to be able to move onto similar types of profession when searching for alternative opportunities.
Those who have only been focusing on a particular aspect of game development, whether it be programming, graphics, audio, or narrative, may be able to find alternative career options fairly easily. A software engineer who has been engaging solely in the networking part of games, for example, might be able to leave the game industry entirely and just start working for various network-related services such as e-commerce, social networks, etc.