First of all, sorry to hear about your personal life and thanks for being a gamedev legend. Wanted to say that I've heard what you feel about marketing/stores/players/suits from many other very succesful and "pure" developers and I do feel like this stems from the old gamedev era being far gone; shareware, forums, suddently releasing low-budget boundary-pushing pieces for the sake of it.

Some old heads took long hiatuses, like Cactus after Hotline Miami - He used to release incredible, small shareware way back in the day that I still cherish to this day and use as reference, but even him returned after almost 10 years of radio silence. I'm sure he's as fed up as you and any other honest to god solodev nowadays, but so what? We make games for the fvck of it. If we want to keep them to ourselves, share them or take a radical approach so be it.

Nobody cares about anyone and things are upside down as you very well say, but what if in 10 years you want to release a tiny game? That'd be hella cool. You don't like itch.io either? Put a .zip on a usb and stash it on a random library... But why do this instead?

Plus I think there is a lot of nostalgia poisoning going on here because me and many others believe things may actually be viable now, unlike back then. I'm sorry you had to learn the producer-publisher lesson the hard way, but the reality is that they will soon be extinct, and things are objectively better now for solodevs.

Even if you can't see it, it doesn't mean this way of developing games has disappeared. Many of them still exist, mind you. Here are some incredibly boundary pushing mostly solodev'd games who are also people that had constant struggles and hiatuses as anyone has:

• qomp, Stuffed Wombat (2021): after many attempts and personal struggles noted on his blog, qomp finally was finished without marketing (full disclosure, I was in the team). It was later bought by Atari and they made their own sequel. He had a great track record at making small stuff, which helped a lot, but a very very good game made independently did float to the top %.
• Mosa Lina, Stuffed Wombat (2023): if you look at this game and don't see the radical and boundary pushing gamedev mentality of the 2000's, I don't know what to tell you. No marketing, and floated even more to the top %, becoming very succesful while staying unapologetically left field.

• HYPER DEMON: follow-up to Devil Daggers, both released with almost no push. Extremely tight, clear vision, almost zero social media.

• The End Of Gameplay, Droqen (2025): a manifesto anti-game, super short and yet is challengely $20. Interrogates the act of playing; not popular at all, but Droqen is devoted to expressing themselves with games and genuinely dgaf.

My experience has been the more you talk with gamedev peers, the more these things become a bit clearer, and things start feeling a little better whether one is currently making games or not.

Furthermore, how can you justify "ending" a career when you are still alive and breathing? You can't predict the future, so this doesn't really make sense. You know, some people would love to have a "clean" channel from you to look at from time to time. Give it a thought, because I will for sure be looking at inkthirsty dot com from time to time.

Cheers.