He's really old (>50) and there's no gaming industry near where he lives.

I know what he said:D What I was trying to subtly get at is that tooling and knowledge is available, so why does he need organizational support? I am not asking willy nilly.

Most people need a paycheck and Americans need health insurance.

Note that GP said ‘get into the industry’ and not ‘take it up as a hobby’.

Unless you can show either experience or level of interest ( hobby ) that effectively produces a portfolio, you can't ( sans pre-existing connections -- but then you wouldn't be posting on HN ). And that is the point other people in this thread made.

Oh got it, was on the fence if it was a willy nilly question or not.

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.

Thanks, I believe you're asking in good faith. But note that I wasn't necessarily asking for support, I'm often times just openly interested in any kind of feedback.

Like I said, there is no industry near I live, but I'm committed to my area because of the family.

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).

I moved from software in medical to communications to gaming in my 20s. It’s possible but even back then was difficult, I had just the right set of skills and gaming knowledge to fit into a couple of slots and I also only had to support one other person at a time when it was a lot less expensive to survive in USA, I also took a risk and took a much lower salary for years for the opportunity. It paid off financially for the most part but that was entirely happenstance. I also was on the pointy end of the hiring process once I got in - it was impossible for anyone who had not completed a game to get past the resume screening process - only new grads and they still had to have done projects for school and on their own. If you have not done any work on your own games or mods at this point you have no chance of getting hired by a game developer at least from my experience a few decades ago.

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.

I suspect you may be getting ahead of yourself by going straight to thinking about landing a paying gig. Everyone I know who ever even thought about getting into games started out by making them as a hobby. You might need a few years’ worth of that under your belt before you would have enough of a portfolio to compete for jobs.

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.

No worries. And it is a fair reason. I was merely curious. That said, it is now the best and worst time to try ( and you won't know which until you do ).