“Did you know if you don't claim to work 80 hours a week, potential investors will probably shun you? You don't even get the respect from some of your peers in game development who think that not working crazy hours is ‘lazy,’” he explained. “Those are the people who put pressures onto others to work more hours. The same people who will please their leads most and go up the ladder eventually, to feed this vicious cycle of immaturity. You are correct about developers being stunted teenagers. I've worked with them long enough to admit that.”

Working those hours, and being stuck in that environment is only attractive for a very short time, and Boucher-Vidal claimed that the average life-span of someone in the game industry is around 5 years. “The real problem however is not that they are immature when they get in, but that too often they get out once they reach maturity,” he said.

It’s an amazing statement. Game development becomes much less attractive once men and women get to the age where they want to get married, start a family, think the big thoughts about their life and where it’s going. We need to ditch the romantic idea that your best work is done when you’re in your 20s and willing to give everything to the project; men and women in their 30s and 40s are creatively fertile and thoughtful in a way that only comes with age and experience. That’s also the age people are less likely to be satisfied with the lifestyle of a full-time developer, and the industry chases them out.

I would love to see more games developed by older people.

look on kickstarter then

Holy smokes: http://www.kickstarter.com/discover/categories/video%20games

That's a lot of games!

Project Eternity has raised $4 million?! http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/obsidian/project-eternity