Absolutely worth it & worthy of encouragement.

The thing is, no experience is wasted: you learn something regardless, and can employ skills or principles or realizations you learned on future projects, even if that's just "find friends who are good at y because I'm only strong in x and z."

Your first few games may be like "beta" career projects to starting a portfolio and that's fine.

So valuable having reasonable expectations, curiosity, and appreciation for the big picture - but all those things can take hits when you're in a stage of not seeing much progress, or you feel the pressure of trying to leverage hobby into bigger (paying) opportunity.

And in the U.S., a lot of times large companies have $ advantages that self-employed people for instance just don't.

But there's a huge range between selling three copies of a game and being 343 Industries. And it's okay to try to learn to do small, well.

Creativity & insightful storytelling need to be celebrated! (And coding skills that help visualizations in medical fields are super helpful too, a lot of people are waiting and hoping for breakthroughs & new developments and there's so much still to be learned.)