Same with the music industry. Professional for profit schools for audio engineering jobs that don’t exist, tons of home recording gear you must have, publishing companies to distribute your music, expensive studio time. So many ways to throw away your money, so many hobbyists willing to play for free or cheap (I’m guilty) that music venues don’t need to spend a dollar to book shows every night. Music sucks for most independent musicians and they have to hustle really really hard to make a living wage. Otherwise they just have to teach lessons to earn money which can really take away time from further developing your craft.

I’ve been a hobbyist and am increasingly exposed to professionals, people trying to make it and I feel sorry for them. Way more skilled at music than I will ever be at programming, yet struggling to keep a roof over their heads.

I doubt most of these tool companies make much of their money from small indies. For one, a lot of these small indies seem obsessed with writing their own tools (there was a good article on here a few months ago about "how to take seven years to ship your indie game"). For another thing, a lot of the biggest tools are moving a model where you pay out of royalties rather than up front (Unreal Engine being a recent high profile example). Precisely because so many indie devs want to use these tools but can't afford them, so this payment model allows them to pay off the back end rather than up front.

Dev tools are for all intents and purposes at this point free. Unity is free, Unreal is free, several other engines are free or close to free. "online media w/ads" is somehow exploiting devs? That seems really reaching. App stores might be over priced but they are world wide. Compared to before app stores when there was no way to reach a global audience. It's easy to argue both ways. As for ads they aren't special to games people mis-assessing their own chances. They're just ads.

This also applies to many small offline businesses. The B2SB supply chain profits from selling picks & shovels to a steady stream of new hopefuls.