I get that your main message is probably "Just go out there and make games rather than work for the corpos, you won't regret it!" and I sympathize with it, but if you didn't plan to crowdfund (which is a skill on its own) you'd need a lot of money from your own pockets to pay editors and artists.

I have a lot of respect for you and your work, yet I must say you make this sound way simpler than it actually is. The "skill issue" is around two decades of experience in making games or managing some aspect of making a game. Even TC, 2025's hit in miniature wargaming, has 3 industry vets on it.

But breaking into tabletop is also much harder. That industry is much more insular and gatekept and especially grueling if one plans to go indie. I'm sure 15 years of experience in videogames helped. I have a third of that and all I can hope for is one more rejection e-mail written by ChatGPT