It's absolutely not a profitable side gig. Everyone and their dog can use AI to ship a game. Steam is overrun by cheap games.

Games like Minecraft and Stardew Valley were developed with a very large number of man-hours over several years.

If you want to do it as a hobby, great, but it's not going to buy you a Civic. If that's what you want, do some side work in your trade and you'll make a couple grand within a few months.

As a side gig to save for a used car you might be better off offering IT services to your neighbors (assuming you live somewhere residential). People often need help doing relatively simple computer tasks.

Treat this like a hobby, not a job. Treating it like a job is a sure fire way to kill any interest in it, by expecting to make money off it. That stress of needing it to make a game that will sell can lead to burnout.

Maybe you'll make a nice game that will be loved by 2 people. Or 20. Or even 100. Perhaps you'll even make that 1% game that will sell millions.

This shouldn't be your motivation.

Make the game you want to make. Don't try to make what you expect will be popular. Don't try to predict what the next popular genre will be. You would probably have better luck in a casino than predicting the next popular game. Just make the game you want to play.

And then when you're done with that game, take what you learned and put that into the next game.

don't go into programming today, it won't pay off

unless you really want to, then i recommend doing it as a hobby

Your expectations should be to do this as a hobby, or at best to hope to find a job in the game industry by using your work as a demo project. Imo, ymmv and all that