this post was submitted on 04 May 2025
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Serious, genuine question:
Has a team of, or single Zoomer game dev(s) ... made... any... game?
I am not gonna pretend that I somehow know all games and all game dev teams by age, but uh...
Yeah, are there any notable games made by a team that is majority composed of people born after '96 ish?
Like... I am a millenial, and I am well aware of the ludicrous greed and mismanagement of AAA studios, how even most AA studios end up getting fucked by some kind of IP rights/funding issue, if they live long enough... I'm still pissed that EA killed Maxis... and I am also well aware of many games with primarily millenial dev teams... very often devolve into, or revolve around 'millenial speak' / 'millenial writing' ...
Most of us millenials, outside of the tiny number of mod teams that actually stuck together long enough to form a game studio, or just outright form an indie dev studio... yeah most of us just jumped into the megacorp game dev meat grinder and then acted both entitled and surprised to find out that 'corporation bad, actually.'..
But I seriously cannot think of a mainly zoomer game dev team that's made anything other than pretty much shitty asset flips and/or outright scams, enternal alpha/early access type bullshit.... or maybe mobile, gacha type games?
I would love to be informed that I am an idiot and there are some really good zoomer made games, but I am ignorant of their existence.
Hell, even a seriously good mod by zoomers would count, I know I was modding many games before I even got out of highschool.
The interesting answer by the way is that there is a glut of them as Roblox, is actually a game mostly about making other games.
Its a more realized version of VR chat essentially for kids and alpha and Z is full of game devs who though are unfortunately in a single engine but with skill can actually transition to others and often do.
Some real talent is being cultivated but they are mostly unseen by looking at the places they aren't.
See, I am aware of the ... Im gonna call it 'Roblox Capture' phenomenon... and I am very, very concerned by this.
As you say... there legitimately are tons of neat gamemodes being made up by Zoomer (and presumably also Gen Alpha) budding game devs...
But as you say... its quite difficult to transition out of Roblox and learn all the other stuff you need to make your own game, especially if you are incentivized not to, by both the carrot of potential income, and the stick of everyone throwing a shit fit (cough, I mean uh, 'difficulty in overcoming the momentum of the network effect') if you try to move to your own platform.
Roblox... has a very, very predatory digital and real world currency scheme.
The Roblox owners are making way, way, waaaay more money off of their young gamemode devs than the tiny slice of the pie they actually get.
And... its also basically a lottery, like being a youtuber or an OF model or whatever: 99.9% of people make basically no money, 0.1% make a decent or sizeable amount... and you only ever hear about, or from, the tiny minoirty of successful people.
And thats to say nothing of how fucked up MTX and dark patterns are for the average user.
Basically, Roblox achieved a huge scale, fully realized version of what many pay to play GMod Roleplay Servers do/did as well as Roleplay Servers for like GTAV and RDR2 and other games...
You are right though that this is the interesting answer =D
A huge amount of games in the indie scene are made by zoomers. Lethal company was made by a 21 year old. The current game industry is composed of mostly millennials, but still a lot of zoomers.
Hey there ya go!
I didn't know Lethal Company was made by a Zoomer.
Apparently he has been modding/making Roblox gamemodes/doing itch.io releases since he was 10!
LC isn't exactly my cup of tea personally, but that is definitely a good example, LC has been quite popular.
Thank you for informing me =D
Yee game development is very accessible nowadays. Fortunately it still requires great effort to make a good game.
You didnt exclude game jam games and there are a lot of those. There are also quick games that are not meant to be expanded so they wouldnt count as eternal early access
Thats true, I did not explicitly exclude those, but I think you can tell that ... I am trying to mean a game that... someone would actually pay for, a game that has at least some level of popularity, general cultural impact.
Some game jam games do kind of achieve this, some are later expanded into more fully fleshed out games that later release...
But generally speaking, a game jam is more or less a speedrun tech demo of you or your team's ability to whip up something fairly basic... and most of these do not usually go on to have any real impact or popular awareness or even a niche following that expands outside of other game devs.
Its like a training routine / job interview process for a game dev.
I am not trying to insinuate no zoomers are technically capable of making a game, of course many obviously are.
I am trying to match the context and language of the OP, referring to a much more generalized: 'what has been the effect of zoomer game devs on the kinds of games produced by game industry broadly?'