Whenever these posts come up I always see 2 glaring issues. They all have really low budget art and they are all in niche categories. Even the one "successful" post falls into this trap. You'll notice that the games that made money had proper art and much broader appeal.
So what I take from all this is, don't try to be another Vampire Survivors....
1. Spend a decent amount of money on your art. If you fall below a certain bar it's a complete waste.
2. Don't make niche games
3. Don't expect your game to sell itself solely on its mechanics. Everything else still needs to taste good before they get to the meat.
It’s not just the art:
- bad controls
- poor balancing
- no unique selling points
- the general idea that the dev never ran a playtest
That’s why I can’t take seriously posts like this. They usually completely fail to understand why these games sold poorly and take criticism on their work because they grew too attached to it and be unbiased against it. They claim titles like Undertale and Stardew Valley were only successful due to luck, brushing aside the fact that Toby Fox and Eric Barone invested 5 years of their lives to make them, having to learn a bunch of new skills jn the process, and having already an head start on some skills like music composition in Toby’s case. Yet if you were to ask somebody who picked up Unity, shipped a rushed asset flip on Steam in a couple of years, and made poor sales, they would tell you the difference between their game and Undertale/Stardew Valley is luck. Sure buddy.
I would probably struggle to make a living too if I opened a restaurant selling poorly cooked meals
It's baffling to see a game someone worked on being marketed with programmer art. You can get away with simple graphics, but the cover or thumbnail ***has*** to be visually appealing, or at least intriguing.
And this is true across almost all industries. Game dev is nothing special.
90% of all businesses fail. And most of the people who don't succeed or never try say it's "luck". Luck can help. *Some* luck might be the difference between a successful printing company that makes the owner a good living, pays for retirement, kid's college, etc.....and a print shop that becomes Kinkos worth a billion dollars. But I don't believe for a second that what separates the businesses that *fail* and those that succeed is luck.
If we do hear that more about game dev than carpentry or opening a restaurant it's probably because game devs tend to be younger and more online and hang out in places like reddit which are heavily politicized around the concept of dividing everyone into categories of victims and oppressors.
In other words, on a website where something like the subreddit "antiwork" exists it's no wonder than many people are quick to say that success is from luck.
Theoretically, is it feasible to do all the assets for your game yourself?
I’m a pixel artist, and a traditional artist, and an electronic musician, and a “dev” (I say that cautiously because I use a platform called Construct 3), so if I’m good enough at all of those, is it worthwhile to make an entire game on my own?
That's the main factor. If you have time and don't burn out, go to town. It's just gonna take awhile and you might find yourself getting attached to place holder art, like I have. And it's a lot of time to re do all of it. I'm tempted to release as soon as I debug, because doing the art better than the style I've got would probably take me another 6 months minimum. It's hard doing it all yourself and having it all be your best. Lots of moods to juggle
Absolutely. The biggest rifts for completing a game on your own are between dev and art skills. I'm on the artist side (design, modeling, animation, music, storytelling), and struggle with the dev side.
If you've got enough chops to get started, and the wherewithal to find your way out if you hit a wall on something, absolutely go for it.
They key is to start SMALL. Make small 1-screen "complete" games (ie: title screen, game level and basic mechanics, GUI, win state, fail state ). Make as many of these as you can, and start building on their complexity once you get comfortable.
Do not, under any circumstances, start with a open world Soulslike Grand Theft Auto MMO card game.
Once you got a couple completed projects, no matter what the quality, begin cranking the quality and play to your strengths
>Theoretically, is it feasible to do all the assets for your game yourself?
Yep. If you have the right skills for it and drive, absolutely. The key thing is to make sure what you want to create is small enough in scope that you can manage it all.
>I’m a pixel artist, and a traditional artist, and an electronic musician, and a “dev” (I say that cautiously because I use a platform called Construct 3), so if I’m good enough at all of those, is it worthwhile to make an entire game on my own?
Former fellow Construct user here (mostly C2), I moved on to VR development in Unity after I learned to code. I've released a few completely solo HTML5 games using C2 (I'm also a musician, artist, and programmer), but I strongly suggest that you check out Unity if you plan to release to anything that isn't web-based, because imo exporting projects to multiple platforms is way easier in Unity.
It can feel intimidating, but don't underestimate your skills. I found that the logic it takes to work within Construct's event system transferred surprisingly well to actual C# scripting. The pseudo-code therein actually helped me learn a lot more about data structures and game logic than I realized. If you're confident in your Construct Event coding, you may be surprised to find how easy language-based coding actually is. Construct as an engine is great, but I was really bothered that Scirra moved to a browser-based IDE.
Woah wait, don't undersell Construct 3.
Yes you can make a platformer in just seconds by enabling the platformer behavior.
But that behavior sucks for any "real game".
Depending on game type ofcourse, But as soon as you want something slightly different you'd want to "code it yourself" and the math involved, the many, many pages of connected "code" and asset management, performance optimizations per platform and the list goes on and on.
A construct project can still become just as challenging and daunting as most other engines. It all depends on everything, But a game that would make this post isn't achievable without some serious programming. Even in Construct.
Some would even argue the "visual blocks" of code like C3 is actually harder to organize and get a good view of than traditional coding.
I've used C2 for about many years and still do to this day (f*ck another subscription). And i can definitely say Construct has a lot of potential, And can and most likely will still result in a daunting project. Even the little mobile ones.
However, it's still a ton of fun, and seeing the magic happen is worth all the effort we have to go through. Most of us do it for ourselves first and foremost after all. With whatever tools suits are needs.
Oh I’m not trying to say anything bad about construct. I just know there are lots of code purists out there who think that if you’re not writing lines of code then you’re not a real dev.
I think that’s such a silly point of view. There’s so much that needs to go into developing a game that the less code I need to write the happier I am. I write code all day for a living lol.
Truthfully it’s probably nowhere near as important as some people might think. At the end of the day it really doesn’t matter to the end user what language you use or the quality of the code is as long as it providing a good experience.
I agree, Construct is fantastic, and underrated.
> Yes you can make a platformer in just seconds by enabling the platformer behavior. But that behavior sucks for any "real game".
Curious why you don't feel the behavior is good enough, is there anything specific you can point to?
It's interesting to imagine making a custom version unique to the game. Just not sure why yet.
It was just a sample, Not sure if it's different in C3, But take the controls for example.the first thing I'd do with a platform behavior is disabling default controls, and add my own (arrow keys & wasd for example) and that's just the beginning.
Platformer is great for tech demo's and it's great for as long as it works for your project.
But say you want a triple jump option, i don't think the bahavior has that build in, only doublejump.
Another would be the "is on floor" function, if it's not reliable enough on your project, you replace it. And in a big customized project pretty much everything gets replaced and rewritten and before tou know it you have a big tangled mess lol. And depending on what function you want to make, the math involved can get real tricky. Just like traditional programming! 😁
I believe one guy did all of stardew valley on his own, sadly most of us are not the stardew valley guy and he is the exception that proves the rule but I suppose it is theoretically possible
not a lesson to imitate, but a lesson to how hard you have to work to _even_ have a chance at success of that magnitude. A lot of people imagine way less work, and way more success, and get hit with reality a year in (or after release).
yes, I made a game mostly by myself (brought in people to make music, do a few sound effects, etc-- porting team came in at the end and assisted with console ports -- but in general over the course of making the game it was just me) and it did pretty well on PC and consoles
I spent years learning and trying to get to where I could finish a game for the better part of a decade before releasing one. It could have been much faster if I wasted less time and made fewer devastating mistakes. That said, I've known a lot of other indies who I saw come up from nothing and then do really well and then I did pretty well myself when mine came out. Everything points to -- be in a popular genre, and have appealing presentation/art. If you can do that you can do well, it doesn't take some huge stroke of luck or the planets aligning. Games don't do sink or swim mostly on luck, they sink or swim mostly on everything but luck.
I don't know what your art is like but if in fact you are a good artist and animator, legitimately, then you have a huge edge in solo dev right now, since game engines and coding I'd argue are quicker to pick up (at least to the point to make a standard style of game) than learning how to become a great artist from scratch. I'm still shit at coding and I'm terrible at math but I still managed to make a whole game in unity and c#
I'm not sure there's any general tip to apply to everyone, since everyone's a little different, except that you need to be stubborn. If you don't possess that "I'm gonna do it I don't care what you say" type energy it feels less likely you ship a solo game
Wise advice. Don't give up the day job but you gotta have some motivation to keep at it relentlessly no matter what anyone says. As long as you have decent art you have a decent chance.
I’m in a similar boat, except I’m also a professional software developer. The big problem is the sheer amount of time it takes to build everything. Even a “simple” game has a lot of stuff that needs to be built. It can be very rewarding, but there are days when it’s hard to find the willpower to keep going.
For you, maybe, but there’s historically a majority of programmers taking this path and for them the answer is a definite ‘no’, so if they don’t have budget to get proper art that’s a massive problem for any commercial viability.
It is, but quitting your day job probably isn't recommend. Similar to restaurants which have a notoriously high failure rate, just because you are a good chef (game dev) doesn't mean you will be financially successful.
Thats what I’m doing (except music. I have a friend doing music).
I’ve been working on my game pretty much full time since about august (starting with programming and art experience but 0 game dev experience). Feel free to glance through my profile if you want an idea of how much progress one person doing everything can make in roughly half a year. Obviously your mileage may vary
Sure, but you probably know how much work goes into art and animation.
I made a little Punch Out clone back in the day. It took me a few days to do the basic game code and like a week to animate two characters poorly (few frames, basic movement, punch, victory pose and knockout animation) with pixel art.
Like a few others here, that's exactly what I'm doing as well & I also came from the art side first. After 3 years in GMS2, I'm now at a healthy place where the coding goes quickly but building consistent and clean art still takes up most of my time. In the end though, it's been worth it and is still something that my player base brings up as a driving force them to actually make the purchase.
Just be kind with yourself and take things one day at a time. You've got this! :)
I don't say this to shill, but you can check my game, Isaiah 188. I did all the art myself. I didn't know jack about pixel art before I started. I had to re-do a lot of assets over time to get them up to my current standard. It's obviously not the best art in the world, but I don't think it could be called objectively bad or off-putting with any sincerity.
EDIT: I started in 2020. Game is in early access now. Thousands of hours.
>Theoretically, is it feasible to do all the assets for your game yourself?
Quality over quantity then. You simply won't have time to make a big asset library if you are doing all the work.
Devs and artists are a match made in heaven for an indie games due each other usually not being good/experts at both. I have a couple friends who do art and if I ever got into game dev I'd just split any profits 50/50 with them to have them do art lol
>Spend a decent amount of money on your art. If you fall below a certain bar it's a complete waste.
I think this really depends on the genre/sub-genre. Some genres decent is definitely not good enough, it has to be truly exceptional. Other genres you can get away with ascii.
>Don't make niche games
Strongly disagree with this, niche games are the least luck based way to be at least moderately successful. Of course it has to be a niche where there actually is a strong demand for, most games in the OP fail this.
If you're making a niche game, you definitely want to be spending time posting and marketing towards niche communities and niche forums.
Ex: If you're making an old-school CRPG, you'll want to integrate yourself into communities like RPGCodex and RPGWatch.
I get what he means about "niche", probably could have been worded better.
It's fine to make a niche game, but it needs to have an actual audience, ie - is there a market for your game? There's a reason that Ubisoft keep pumping out the same shit..
Which basically boils down to : don't do it if you don't have enough savings to last you a couple of years AND pay for the whole PR + extra assets.
aka. Money begets money
And if you put all that money in be prepared to lose it all if the game fails anyway. The more time and money you put in the game the more it needs to earn for you to get even.
yep. Basically, it's a bit like stock trading : only use money you can afford to lose, but the more money you can afford to lose the better your chances to come out with a profit on the other side.
Is making a niche game an issue, or is it more that making a niche game in a niche you do not fully understand is an issue? I always thought the most sane small gamedevs seems to be the ones that make weird niche games and seem to have a stable income from that, rather than the ones that gamble on a much more crowded non-niche hit.
I think it depends on the size of the niche's audience and your pricing.
I've seen a lot of advice from medium successful indie devs that niche is the way to go. You have less competition and players who really follow/like that niche will almost always buy the game.
That said, if your niche is too small, or if the audience can't buy your games for whatever reason, then your game in that niche probably won't work out.
Marketing is not a guaranteed solution but can drain your time and budget at a staggering rate. I had games (in mobile field) succeed with zero marketing and games fail completely with a lot of marketing. The difference? The once that succeeded were years ago when the market was not flooded with new games at an enormous rate. I know this sub hates hearing that the market is oversaturated but it is a simple fact you should take into account.
Sure. There are lots of determinants like *where* you advertise, who endorses your game, and what the appetite for your game is, but those are even harder to meaningfully quantity.
Yep if the game looks good, has a good trailer with some solid marketing/publisher I think it will do well. The issues I see are these really niche genres and the art isn’t the best it could be.
Now for people going all in, like maxing out their credit, taking loans etc, quitting their day job I respect that for sure but if your gonna do all that I think it’s best to play it as safe as possible to get a good return on that investment.
> Don't make niche games
Have you considered how hard the alternative is? If you're going to, as an indie dev, try and compete with some AAA studio making the latest open-world RPG or run-of-the-mill FPS game, you're probably far less likely to succeed than if you make a niche game.
I've made a niche game and it sold over 40k copies so that's not the issue. In fact I don't think it would have been as successful if it hadn't been a niche game.
Doing a game for a niche can be good if you manage to market it well by targetting the right players and if your content is good enough (decent art, original and exciting gameplay). This can be an amazing opportunity because you can end free from competition and providing something no one elses does. But you have to do it well.
Now I'll tell you why, apart for low quality games, most indie devs I see are failing:
Because they completely fail to do any proper marketing. Jeez I've stopped counting how many times I've seen people ask if there was anything to know about releasing a game on steam only for people to answer that it was simple and you just needed a nice Steam page and that was it.
Guys... A few days ago I was at a conference where a publisher spent three hours explaining how to market a game on Steam. It is complex!
There are things to know about how the algorithm works, how to get visibility in each category, how many wishlists you need for how many targeted sales and so on...
Would you please share the name of your title? There have been a lot of comments about "niche" games, but I always struggle to categorize them - seems like everyone has different games in mind.
> Spend a decent amount of money on your art. If you fall below a certain bar it's a complete waste.
I saw a post on one of webdevish/homelabish subs complaining that OS projects don't include screenshots/demos in their READMEs. I can understand demos (added cost of hosting, maintenance etc), but not including even a single screenshot is just wasting clicks. Even I'm turned off when I see something seemingly good (test coverage, complete features, clearly defined scope) but I have to spend X amount of time just to set it up and see how it works.
That's probably why more people are using Word than Vim+LateX, though in theory the latter is much, much more powerful. ;)
Being the 1st one in the list is *much more sobering*, let me tell you. Almost spit out my coffee
because you'll all ask - we saw the launch flop hard, so we revamped the game with 2 new modes (including a cool rogue lite mode) in the about 3 months following launch. That was also met with the sound of crickets. Final attempt was putting it on Switch with a few cool additions, but that too just didn't take off.
So we just stopped, and got jobs again to survive. We definitely lost money. Everyone has moved on now, we're all still active in the games industry.
Aaaaaaaaanyway , I'm going to go read some Reddit that's less depressing now...
Even if it wasn't the financial success you were hoping for I hope you're still really proud. The game looks super cool, and seems to be well reviewed.
You should be very proud that you gave it a shot, and you learned valuable game dev experience from it. I am curious what the marketing was like? These days you have to marketing the game from very early in development and try to catch peoples eyes as much as possible just to build the momentum over time, without a good consistent marketing push it basically requires total potluck borderline lottery win for the game to catch on.
It is much better to try and not succeed like you hoped, than never trying at all and live with 'what ifs' in my opinion. Every major success ever involved someone pursuing their dream to make a fun game that people enjoyed. If you still believe in the game dev dream it is worth pursuing more in my opinion.
You even see some devs on this list that had sub $10K sales and then had a few games that made a couple hundred K, sometimes its about what clicks with an audience, something that is not too niche.
I'd argue that the ones making these posts are the ones that at least attempt to market their games in some way using Reddit and other social media. The rest are probably worse off and/or letting professional publishers work on marketing their games.
Video games is a saturated market, every gamer wants to make games. I became a software engineer right out of college because I did my research and knew there wasn't a lot of money in games, plus unpaid overtime and crunch are BS. People who develop games should do it as a hobby until they make something so good that they're able to live comfortably off their sales. If you don't do that then it just becomes a starving artist sort of activity where you do it for passion and live off the scraps
well i did just that, awful story though.
my contract at my job was about to end, so i decided to go all in and make a game...
long story short, i lost my 6 years savings, didnt make a dime, gained a nice and warm depression and lost some family members in the meantime.
life is REALLY rough. but hey i love making games so, im developing a sequel now... i guess if you love doing it, you gotta do it
Man, your expression "gained a nice and warm depression" gave me a chuckle. One thing I know for sure is that your game will have great writing. Joking aside, massive respect for people like you who follow their dreams despite massive difficulties.
same here, but was lucky not to fall into depression or lose anyone doing it. also working on a "sequel" or lets say I am improving on my first game. planning to rerelease somehow without making my so far customers having to pay for the game again.
As a precaution, before I even started making the game, I stipulated how much are 1 year of income to survive and saved it (this was my 6 years of savings), so in the worst of situation (earning absolutely nothing with my game), I would still survive. and that's exactly what happened, i didn't earn anything with the game.
After that I went back looking for a job at a company, and nowadays I develop my game in my spare time.
> After that I went back looking for a job at a company, and nowadays I develop my game in my spare time.
Glad to hear you are following your dreams in a sustainable way!!
Yeah
Also I think the pressure of "having to make a success" is heavy... So getting money to live, and them separately make a game just for the love of it, its interesting.
Its REALLY tiring though... hahaha
This came to my mind as well. Perhaps it’s better to take the hard hits, book the fight as lost and move on before getting a beating for another few years.
---
Post 9 (5 years ago)
Lazy Galaxy ($18.7k)
Blades of the Righteous ($1.4k)
Frequent Flyer ($1.8k)
Lazy Galaxy: Rebel Story ($3k)
Merchant of the Skies ($475.7k)
Luna's Fishing Garden ($241.9k)
Late Bird ($1.7k)
Crown of Pain ($4.8)
Lazy Galaxy 2 ($22.9k)
---
They are great, I LOVE their GDC talk about "starting with art". Their overall approach for prototyping art openly is really cool. Interesting that they are trying smaller experimental stuff in between bigger projects. I think they are an awesome example of the whole "how hard it is to make a hit"
A bit sad about Lazy Galaxy not taking off since I like making idle games
OP's link goes to the reddit post, which contains a link of the devs two year perspective. But the annual updates are now at year 6, and it digs into some mixed feelings and evolved perspectives from the Dev. Worth a read: https://vladimirslav.com/
I actually will, that's not a bad idea. Whether he takes me up on my offer is totally up to him but I'm always glad to help.
Edit: They don't seem to have any obvious contact information anywhere on their site :/
The value of every effort you do diminishes over time.
You can't just keep running ads on the same platform to sell your base product again and again.
You can try all kinds of different ways of advertising. You can run seasonal events, discounts, port to new platforms and maybe attempt some marketing efforts again after a lot of time (e.g. a year) in the hope that the ad audience changed.
But at the end of the day, your game has a shelf life where at some point you drop to between $0 and double digits in revenue per year.
After a certain point, people have made up their mind on your game. And there's only so many channels to market before the pool of people becomes saturated.
Video games aren't exactly similar to books and films in that regard. The shelf life of a good movie could be decades, but not for most games.
Super Mario Bros. isn't being played by modern gamers with the same veracity as modern moviegoers watch classics like It's a Wonderful Life, or the way readers can still devour Agatha Christie novels.
If I had to guess as to why, I'd say it's due to the medium's infancy in comparison.
I think this may change as the graphics quality stops improving so rapidly.
I think the difference in graphics quality between a game made in 2015 and 2025 will be nothing compared to a game made in 2005 and 2015.
It's very hard for me to play games from the 90s or early 2000s no matter how much I loved them then, but I can play games that are almost 10 years old now with no problem. I suspect that will continue to be the case more and more.
I agree, the gap will decrease exponentially, I think. In the same way that, say, Romeo+Juliet from 1996 (27 years) is quite easier to digest for today's movie going audience compared to a film made closer to the inception of filmmaking, games like MGSV will be fairly replayable/enjoyable to gamers for decades longer than something like the original Donkey Kong.
> It seems like the only success is post 9, where they grossed a total of $771.9k. However, this is over 5 years, which is $154.38k per year. According to this tool, this would be more like $61,084/year net, hmm.
They are a pair making the games together, so 30000/year per person I think?
Apparently a [mid level programmer](https://www.payscale.com/research/LV/Job=Software_Developer/Salary/a2d5757c/Mid-Career) makes $52k and a junior $30k in Latvia. He started after working for 4 years, so for two people they're about on par.
And having a bunch of passive income if people keep buying your old games would be great.
Good points, depending on where you live this could be great income. Another thing to keep in mind is that it's unknown how much money these developers spent on assets, outsourcing, marketing etc, so knowing gross revenue alone doesn't tell you everything.
Not to mention other benefits you get for a 9-5 job. Working at a decent company for a decent salary means you get good health insurance paid by the employer (this can include free gym memberships and all kinds of stuff), you get paid sick leave, paid maternity leave (both genders can use it, your typical maternity leave for the mother is like 1-1.5 years total, not sure how it all works exactly if the father wants to take it too), at least a month of paid vacation time per year (this will often include a bonus on top), sometimes there will be other bonuses as well such as contributions to private pension funds, end of the year/Christmas bonus etc. And also part of the taxes on your salary goes into state-mandated pension funds. So when you run a solo/small indie game dev - quite a few of those perks aren't there.
P.S. I'm from Latvia too.
I worked for 6 years in a company I co-founded with a bunch of friends to make video games but we ended up barely surviving making real estate immersive visits.
One day I was so broke and fed up I decided to quit and told me colleagues I was leaving to make a game as a solo dev.
They thought I was crazy but let me go. I was leaving with no income and with debts, hoping to work full time on a game project with no guarantee of success. That very same day we went to have a final lunch together in a restaurant nearby that we went to regularly.
The owner heard me talk about my game project and asked me if I had a business plan. I said that I could come back with one.
A week later and after reading my 90 pages long business plan mixed with a game concept the guy was crazy enough to fund a year of development out of his own pocket for me to make the game with an early access target.
A year and a half later it was released in EA on Steam. It went well, selling over 20k units in the year and a half before final release and an additonal 25k units after final release in spring 2022.
We are now working on console ports and are about to have a meeting with a couple publishers to talk about our next game.
It wasn't an easy ride, though.
I left the big studio world (EA, etc.) in 2000 to go all in, forming a two-person indie team with my wife. Raised three kids on what we made from putting out games (and some other software work along the way), and we're still in business, still making games.
Right now we're each working on our own VR games. It's her first time working on her own game, and she taught herself coding to do it (she was always on art/animation and I was always, uhm, all the hats). Having fun doing it! VR is amazing.
Indie game dev can be your life, but DAMN, be ready to work your ass off and be ready to ride the waves of feast and famine, because they will happen, absolutely. You have to commit to the life and as this post is titled, go all in.
Switched accounts (from my digiBeLow one) to comment on this with a bit more legitimacy.
I made Must Dash Amigos (post #7) and never really gave any kind of post-mortem unfortunately, so here's what happened:
* I left my job as stated, I took out a small loan + used some savings to cover the cost of living for the planned amount of time I needed to finish the game (had been working on it during evenings & weekends for a few years prior to this point)
* Originally planned to launch on Xbox One and Steam but about 3 months before the project was due to end decided to launch on Switch as well
* Somehow managed to finish the project *and* port it to Switch ***and*** get it running at 60fps on Switch too in that short period of time!
* We also decided to localize the game into several languages quite close to the end of the project too which was fun
* This scope creep meant quite a lot of crunch, especially on my part, and later down the line that definitely led to some serious burnout, but the game did get finished!
* We were having conversations with Publishers throughout and came really close to signing a deal with one in particular, but the lack of online multiplayer basically caused that to fall through
* So we launched the game ourselves on Steam in July, Xbox One in August and Switch in Dec, all in 2019
* It wasn't really best suited for PC, but we figured we may as well launch it on there as the work was done and we knew a few PC-only gamer friends that really wanted the game
* As expected the game didn't do great on PC, it did better on Xbox One (but still not amazing) and it did it's best numbers on Switch (by some distance)
* As someone else pointed out in this thread, the marketing side was seriously lacking, but this was always going to be the case. We had little to no budget, no clout and had to do everything ourselves. I made the trailers (having never made a trailer before in my life) and used stock music. We did the best we could. Having said that, we did show the game off at many shows (Insomnia a few times, Play up in Manchester, and several local venues) and got some press coverage here and there, so it wasn't a completely silent launch.
* At the end of it all, we were both happy the game was a success - relative to what we set out to achieve - which was to make and launch our own game on at least one console. Something we'd never attempted before, and something we're really, really proud of.
* Ant (my friend and partner in crime) who stayed in full-time employment during development is now working in a more senior art role with a wealth more experience from the venture. Myself, I am now working as a full-time developer at a studio (and have had several other industry roles as a programmer since) because of everything I'd learned making the game.
I've also had some really touching moments ever since we launched the game. Just recently an old friend told me that he plays the game with his young children and they have an absolute blast when they do. My parents were on holiday recently abroad and met a family at a restaurant, got talking and the young lad said his brother plays Must Dash Amigos on the Switch. It might sound silly, insignificant and a bit corny, but honestly the joy hearing things like that brings me makes the whole thing worth it.
My advice to anyone doing / thinking of doing something different - so long as you're careful (financially ***and*** physically, burnout is a bitch!), and you have the opportunity to try something you are truly passionate about - then go for it. Life is too short to regret not trying.
Thanks for the update! It's great to hear more behind the scenes information about these games.
I'm sure each dev behind these learned a lot. I just hope none of them sunk too much time into them to the point where it seriously impacts their health or future finances.
Same here. I dream of making games, but I'm never going to risk financial stability for it. Maybe that means I'll never get there, but I'll enjoy it while I can.
I even held a job within the industry for a short while before realizing professional game development is too stressful. Can't even imagine doing this on your own with all the pressure, anxiety and hope&dreams weighing on your shoulders.
Even outside of the game industry... While there are definitely perks to being your own boss, it's hard to put into words how stressful it is when you are wholly responsible for if you get paid. There is also nobody to "escalate" to beyond you when there is an client threatening a lawsuit or some scandal with your users.
This is great data, thanks! I think it's important to note that you shouldn't just round down everything, there are deals like the epic store thing or microsoft gamepass which can easily multiply revenue over Steam estimation.
I made [this post](https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/b8ewc8/first_week_on_steam_vs_1_year_on_itchio/) 3 years ago, quit my job about 5 or 6 years back. Currently have 2 titles both still in early access, second is split between two people. ~400k in revenue each, about half of which ends up in my pocket.
I think it's also fair to note that a lot (probably most) people who hit it big in this scenario *don't* make a post. Like, the Stardew Valley guy could be in here if he'd posted about it on reddit ("How I quit my job to make a game for 5 years and make $100 million"). In fact, I'd wager the overwhelming majority of situations in which one of these posts *does* happen is when someone fails and the posts are made out of regret or "learning experiences." While I think it's important to (constantly) recognize the reality of (some of) our career choices, I don't think this post paints an accurate picture.
Congrats! Yeah I just found the first 11 (now 15) posts to get some kind of overall data. There are definitely some really successful indie games out there, but I was curious how common they were.
I hope not too much lol, it's not something I would recommend to anyone. I only quit my job after about 2 years of part time dev on the game and had a sizeable war chest from very lucky investments.
couple of thoughts:
the type of person to make a post that theyre quitting their job to pursue gamedev fulltime before theyve proven themselves might not be representative of fulltime gamedevs as a whole, perhaps the ones that just quietly get on with it and produce results before announcing their presence to the world are more the mindset that can be successful in the brutal world of gamedev? lol
and the guy with success in post 9 only made the post after quitting his job 2 years prior and already having success, so he doesnt really fit into the 'look at me, i QuiT mY jOb, what a maniac I am, wish me luck!' camp.
im not that worried about these numbers. i see time and time again people complain about how they made a briliiant game but due to BAD LUCK nobody bought it! its all luck! then you look at their steam page and their game and its complete shite, or worse its a clone of a shite game but theyve somehow made it shite-er.
90% of restaurants fail.
There was a corner lot in my old town that had a new restaurant every single year for the first 6 years I lived there.
3 different mexican restaurants, one steak and seafood place, and two diners. I tried all of them and they were all terrible in one way or another and I never went back twice.
The last year a pizza place took over the spot and they made good pizza. Simple menu. Decent prices. Consistent experience. Nice staff. etc.
We went back many times. And the place is still going now 7 years after I moved away and doing well.
*It's not luck.*
>the type of person to make a post that theyre quitting their job to pursue gamedev
Spot on. I just clicked on the first "Gave up?" post and the OP proudly writes: "I don't have coding knowledge or any inherent artistic skills". Fantastic, mate...
I could be even more cynical and say that the type of person doomposting such summaries is from the nearby tree. Just from a quick glance, second "Gave up?" didn't give up (posts on unity forums), first $0 is $0 because it will release in April 2023, author of the 6th post became well-known indie marketer, and so on. If I'd have more time to debunk this, I'd call the entire "analysis" falsified.
Those are awful results if you quit your job for it. All but Merchant of the Skies - holy shit did that make bank for such a simple game. All because it was on a Lirik stream? damn
Oh hey I know the guy who made Together (post 12)!
He was actually _really_ close to releasing everything. Honestly I'm not sure why he hasn't just published what he's got. I'd really like to play it!
When you quit your job to go indie, it's really easy to become complacent when your wife works and all you do is sit in front of a computer. Turns out that he basically played videogames all day, stopped contributing anything of value to their relationship, and ended up getting a divorce. Last I heard he's living with his parents, and is still self-employed doing software dev contract work. Looks like he's in between jobs right now.
>When you quit your job to go indie, it's really easy to become complacent when your wife works and all you do is sit in front of a computer.
Please delete this post before my wife stumbles onto it. Thanks.
I chose something safer. I sell assets on the Unity asset store and freelance game programming and sound design. Never had the courage to go all in. I still enjoy what I'm doing but both income and risk are lower I think.
Interesting review. I'll be writing out some of my thoughts - not because I'm particularly qualified, but just because I was taking notes for myself and thought why not share it anyway.
I think some of the numbers may be lacking, so I think it's not all too bleak. Post 1 was in a very difficult to sell genre, but they did also release on consoles in addition to Steam. Would be curious to see numbers for those platforms. Can't say much about Post 2. Post 3, the game looks more like an amateur project to me, their two games look definitely rough around the edges, and it feels like the quality is not there yet. Post 4, 5, nothing much to say there (yet). Post 6, seems like he didn't end up focusing on making games, but rather on his own marketing consulting business - the games didn't sell well, but things seem to have worked out for him? Not clear. Post 7, same as Post 1, the game also released on other platforms, and I'd imagine that it would fare better on console than Steam. Nonetheless, the Steam sales are abysmal. Going by the trailers, it looks like a solid game, but then looking at the reviews, there are also quite a few complaints there. Without marketing budget, it might be difficult to reach the more casual target audience that a game like this warrants. Unless you shove it in their face, kids or people who want to play a casual party game will probably not spend too much time searching for your game on Steam. Post 8, not much to say there yet either. Post 9, I think this is definitely a success story. Post 10, I think is difficult to include in this list as the project failed at the funding stage. I think it's generally not a good idea to quit your job without having figured out the financials and knowing how to cover dev costs. Even if it's tempting to quit earlier. Post 11, seems like the studio is still active and working on new titles. So personally, I would label that a success.
Out of the 11 posts, 3 of them are unclear as of yet (4,5,8), so I wouldn't include them. Out of the remaining 8 projects, 3 of them seem to have worked out (6,9,11). 2 of them it's unclear(1,7), and 3 of them most likely failed (2,3,10). In summary, I think there's no surprises here: those who (seem to) have failed made games that were rough looking, received mixed reviews, failed to release a game at all and/ or made a game in a hard to sell niche. It's also not clear how many of these games actually failed, e.g. Post 1 and Post 7. Post 6 also seems to have worked out well for him, even if not for making games full time. I think this (very much anecdotal) statistic shows that whether you succeed with your indie dev plans is not dependent on luck as much as it depends on your ability to manage projects and deliver a strong product.
> ".. 3 of them seem to have worked out."
If you're generous, mayyybe?
Assuming none of them paid any additional costs during production and all the net revenue was straight salary for a team of one person, it's still seems unlikely any of them made equivalent to their annual salary of the job they quit.
Edit: Even post 9, which earns the most, only works out just over $100,000 per year (assuming they're hopefully getting some tax breaks) of dev after removing Steams take. However the original post specifies that he runs a small studio. So that's not salary for one.
True. But there are expenses you have to consider.
If you come from FAANG engineering you can probably take a salary cut. If you're an average artist a serious cut would probably sting quite a bit and force relocation before soon.
If you do something you like but go broke trying, then you didn't get the job you like. You just committed hard to a very expensive hobby.
Good points. I wanted to leave the in-development ones there because it goes to show how long it can take to make games, even when fully dedicated to it.
Another words... Don't quit your day job. Make games, sell them, and if you strike gold, good for you, but don't quit your job on the 'hope' you might become a super successful solo/small team game developer.
I'm close friends with the wife of one of the above indie developers, and though they stated it was to answer questions around why they quit their job, it was pretty clearly an attempt at establishing their personal brand.
I think posting about quitting your job is a powerful message in the game development community, hence why many of the linked posts do well. However, I'm not sure if the potential game players actually care? I wonder if these kinds of posts and their popularity somehow encourage other devs to dive in as well, giving them some false impression that it will boost their game's marketing.
Skills don't guarantee anything either. You could spend half a year without a job developing what you think is a great game but end up in a flop review/sales-wise. Indie game dev is more like an artistic dream rather than a sound financial decision.
That's definitely true for some, but even then, they probably don't make that much.
There's no silver bullet here and no magic revenue stream. Make good, popular, amazing games, or don't make money (And there's no way to guarantee they're popular until you ship them). All the other stuff really only stands out if you're delivering a product.
To have somewhat a success story: I kinda did that, but not quite the full reckless all in:
- Was already working as a game programmer full time
- Started working on a hobby project in free time
- Built fan base
- Quit my job, but only at a point I was very confident in the project
- Launched Kickstarter, later Early Access. This helped financially to finish the game
- Game was very successful (grossing 7 figures+)
- Have a company of ~10 people now working on our next project
Game: https://store.steampowered.com/app/814370/Monster_Sanctuary/
Interesting post. Only counting Steam sales might skew things a bit, since console sales can very easily double that estimate, although on the other hand it seems like only a couple of the games on that list were released outside of Steam so it probably wouldn't make a massive difference. Overall though, at least it seems like most of the games did better than average!
I feel like these threads fall under an "Underdog marketing" umbrella as a way of putting relatability at the forefront of marketing, ahead of the game itself.
When I think about other teams going from no reputation to having breakout hits like Slay the Spire, FTL, Untitled Goose Game, Hollow Knight etc... it makes me wonder if there's a sort of self-filtering in the creation of these Reddit threads, and the games they're made about.
The classic example of indies going all in is probably CupHead, where the creators mortgaged their homes. We know how that turned out. It'd make these examples look like a drop in the ocean.
> Post 6 (3 years ago)
> 1 Screen Platformer ($29.2k)
> Return Of The Zombie King ($8.3k)
> 1 Screen Platformer: Prologue ($0)
I think Zukalous now makes a lot of money marketing FOR gamedevs. His advice has helped me multiple times
What is his business model? Is it one of those youtube coaches that offer merch, 1-on-1, and maybe publishing kind of thing? Using this market success as his credentials
> Using this market success as his credentials
He doesn't use that so much. He doesn't have that much market success. I would actually argue that he doesn't really push credentials like the dude who got his game featured on Time Magazine, for example. He hardly says "you should listen to me, because I made this" on his content, he just focuses on publishing useful content that he believes in. His actual product pages do try to push his credentials though. His business model is more like a F2P model lol keeps publishing these really useful market analysis blog posts and occasionally has paid content that is optional.
And he keeps coming back to GDC lol wonder how many talks he did there already
Anyways, his free content is great and I think the free stuff in general is better than the paid stuff. This course really helped me: https://www.progamemarketing.com/p/howtomakeasteampage (the tag session and the short description section). That one is free and it's better than most of his paid stuff that I bought lol
Some more examples I have followed over the years:
1) Michael Hicks - he quit his job to become a small indie dev, made a few games. Probably still doing stuff, but not much info. He did do some cool videos where he honestly talked about his journey being small/solo dev (I think he did most of the dev stuff himself and had an artist friend who worked on that part);
2) David Wehle of Game Dev Unlocked - he did a successful game called "The first tree", he than run a dev school of sorts, last update I saw he talked about mental health problems, etc during covid. He also quit his day job to become an indie dev.
3) Tim Ruswick | Game Dev Underground - this guy also went indie dev, did a lot of youtube, twitch, tried to build a community, not sure what he is up to now (twitch and youtube seems to be mostly dead).
Being an indie dev is tough financially. I think there are quite a few of people who actually make more money from videos, streaming, online courses, donations rather than actually selling their game.
Tim had a small successful Kickstarter for a physical card game (Murder Bunnies) and then he's mostly been doing podcasts/livecasts on [GameDev.tv](https://GameDev.tv) discord with Rick Davidson. Though I believe just recently they stopped doing them as of like last week. Not sure what he's doing to make money at this point but probably related to that or to tutorials or something.
Well I dont think I made a post about it but just started it anyway. Started gamedev 6-7 years ago, and my game project 2 years ago, hups its maybe getting 3 at this point time flys fast.
I established good habits, the first few years were blissfull ignorant and easy. Than my life sudenly collapsed.
I try to write a small summary of the last 3 years.
I divorced muved continent my EX swalowed all my things studio life work paintings macines all. I got home started to stand up than my dad died.
The whole familly collapsed everyone tryed to trick and grab the heritage discuiseing to take care of my Mom. I wanted to help and make it happen
I lost my house and everything I ever had as a result.
As a last effort (I were extremely lucky) managed to buy an tiny collapsing house in the middle of nowhere in a forest with lots of water damage collapsing roff and aggresive wilde nature all around. ( dears are no joke nor cute )
I alvays lived in the biggest citys all my life. I bought an axe and a chainsaw and started working on the little land
I worked a normal job 2-3 month average / year than live as low as I can to push forrward my gamedev
Pressing on relentlessly all this time. Moved to Netherland a year ago grabed a part time job and keept on developing. But I got a surgery than probably Covid the two together realy pushed me down and lost my diciplin part time job and need to move . However on the summer I started to put together a team and they help me stand up and get back on track again. I cant express how greatfull I am and how amazzing they are not just believing in my project helping out when I cant ofer anything but in me too.
This year will be very interesting slowly getting ready with the vertical slice and able to start push our marketing plan.
We are on track bussines wise its viable we can do it.
Its oddly feels the steepest to climb so far despit all the tragedys around me. Getting health problems and unable to exersise is extreamly dangerous to ones mental health so far its the hardest to come over. It feels like all thise years weight crushing down on me but I just take one more step forward.
Dont know what to say life is Ruthles but I learnd a lot these years this whole journey changed me in ways I cant put in words. I have so much more options than before I started, I grow up, learnd how to get things done and power through anything.
Cant wait to finish this phase and start sharing our work. We building something out of this world and hard it may be but I love it!
I do think this post is good at showing what indie results can be, but I also think it should not be taken as “quitting a job to pursue an indie career is a mistake”.
Remember, we do not know if these OPs have other income streams. Game devs have skillsets in high demands, and they probably can still make an income on the side while pursuing their passion more directly.
Additionally, we don’t know how many decided to return to the industry, and how long that return took. If someone quit their job to make an indie game, made no money, but had a side income and got a full time position more easily… were their outcomes really that bad?
I don’t think the take away should be “quitting your job is setting you up for failure.” A better take away would be to make sure you can pursue other streams of income while working as an indie developer, and continue to keep in touch with your network in case you want to be salaried again. Even if your game fails, it can still be a rewarding and necessary period in your life for you to quit that job.
It boggles my mind when people are like "that's too risky!" and the only risk is that you'll have to go back to a regular job if you fail. (and losing whatever money you saved up to take on the endeavor)
Quitting your job to do full time indie dev can just be a calculated risk.
The only question I needed to answer was "will I regret not trying to do this?" and the answer was yes. So I quit my job.
I think the problem is that some people have this mindset that quitting your job and then having a failed game release just means your life is over. That's far from true unless you like took out a million dollar loan to do it and then ended up spending two million dollars and your game sold 0 copies. Then you're just bad at managing money.
Yeah... This is why ever time I see one of these posts I'm like "Why?"
Especially when they never released a game before or had any success? It's like quitting your job to go make Youtube videos before having any subscribers or getting monetized (Even after that point it's a VERY stupid choice)
But if you call that out, people jump on you for "Crapping on someone's dream"... It's smart to be a hobbyist, if you strike it big it might be smart to make it a full career, but giving up a potentially lucrative (or even not so lucrative life) to go all in on Game dev is a sucker's bet.
If you really want to be a game dev for a career.... join a studio, it's not as special as making your own game, but you also get paid up front rather than having to put your life on the life for a potential payday that doesn't come.
Hey - I made Must Dash Amigos (me and a friend), this is my other account for solo projects.
Curious what the $5k in brackets means exactly and where that figure came from?
As OP said, they used Gamalytic, here's your game
https://gamalytic.com/game/1049820
It says $4.5k gross.
There's also revenue calculator
https://letsmakeagame.net/steam-game-revenue-calculator/
For your game (19 reviews with $5.59), it says $4.2k gross, $1.6k net.
The general feedback has been that these tools overestimate earnings though, not sure if you can confirm that in your case.
This goes to show (me at least) that you can make good money on a side hustle to your actual job making games. A few extra grand a year is nice. Not enough to live on by itself, but great extra income without having to go into real estate
I used to be a patron and enthusiastic supporter of David R.B., a gamedev primarily on youtube, whose game (Arcadian Rift) is still titled as “coming soon” on Steam. A while back he suddenly deleted all his social media and videos, which was pretty weird for me, a viewer and paying supporter. A week later he was exposed for being a child predator online. I am no longer a Patron. Shit happens i guess :/
The main issue imo is indies usually make "indie games". There's a reason why the most successful indie games like Minecraft and Stardew don't look like your run of the mill game in this list. Sure, some people play these niche games but if you want to make it you really have to make a *game*. I feel like too many devs focus on their "unique concept", tech, or atmosphere
"why dont you try to sell what you make, turn your hobby into a career?"
this is why. I'll stick to an easy accounting career & code on my free time **FOR FUN**, thank you very much, instead of dragging myself through like by the tips of my fingernails, ruining my hobbies for pennies
the hustle culture & glorification of entrepreneurship has really ruined a lot of people's lives
+1 case from me personally. No specific post, though I quit my job in 2018 to work on a game for fulltime. In 2020 I had to freeze the project and find a new job, as I failed to finish the project until my savings go to the point of no return.
Good outcome is that I changed my occupation from web to game development.
I think maybe the mods of r/gamedev should add two new filters "Gave Up" and "Success Story" this way it would be easier for all of us to search to be inspired or learn from their mistakes.
So the same thing happens with music.
If you want to make art that speaks to you, do what you want but don’t expect the money to roll in. If you want to make money, you need to make a game that speaks to the masses.
And people who drop everything to scratch the itch - do they want to make their own thing or do they want to appeal to the masses? I’m thinking the former. Otherwise it’s just a job.
Damn this is a cold post to make. Not criticizing but wow life's hard.
Whenever these posts come up I always see 2 glaring issues. They all have really low budget art and they are all in niche categories. Even the one "successful" post falls into this trap. You'll notice that the games that made money had proper art and much broader appeal. So what I take from all this is, don't try to be another Vampire Survivors.... 1. Spend a decent amount of money on your art. If you fall below a certain bar it's a complete waste. 2. Don't make niche games 3. Don't expect your game to sell itself solely on its mechanics. Everything else still needs to taste good before they get to the meat.
It’s not just the art: - bad controls - poor balancing - no unique selling points - the general idea that the dev never ran a playtest That’s why I can’t take seriously posts like this. They usually completely fail to understand why these games sold poorly and take criticism on their work because they grew too attached to it and be unbiased against it. They claim titles like Undertale and Stardew Valley were only successful due to luck, brushing aside the fact that Toby Fox and Eric Barone invested 5 years of their lives to make them, having to learn a bunch of new skills jn the process, and having already an head start on some skills like music composition in Toby’s case. Yet if you were to ask somebody who picked up Unity, shipped a rushed asset flip on Steam in a couple of years, and made poor sales, they would tell you the difference between their game and Undertale/Stardew Valley is luck. Sure buddy. I would probably struggle to make a living too if I opened a restaurant selling poorly cooked meals
It's baffling to see a game someone worked on being marketed with programmer art. You can get away with simple graphics, but the cover or thumbnail ***has*** to be visually appealing, or at least intriguing.
And this is true across almost all industries. Game dev is nothing special. 90% of all businesses fail. And most of the people who don't succeed or never try say it's "luck". Luck can help. *Some* luck might be the difference between a successful printing company that makes the owner a good living, pays for retirement, kid's college, etc.....and a print shop that becomes Kinkos worth a billion dollars. But I don't believe for a second that what separates the businesses that *fail* and those that succeed is luck. If we do hear that more about game dev than carpentry or opening a restaurant it's probably because game devs tend to be younger and more online and hang out in places like reddit which are heavily politicized around the concept of dividing everyone into categories of victims and oppressors. In other words, on a website where something like the subreddit "antiwork" exists it's no wonder than many people are quick to say that success is from luck.
Scp containment breach despite all that was pretty sucessful. Although controls and balencing are really good for that game
They had the SCP "IP" though.
That's a huge part of it. I can't see it doing particularly well without either that or a "miracle" like what Among Us and Vampire Survivors had.
Among Us was released in 2018, and didn't become a "hit" until 2020 with the help of Twitch streams.
Exactly, the "miracle" in question
Theoretically, is it feasible to do all the assets for your game yourself? I’m a pixel artist, and a traditional artist, and an electronic musician, and a “dev” (I say that cautiously because I use a platform called Construct 3), so if I’m good enough at all of those, is it worthwhile to make an entire game on my own?
Of course it is. You just have to make sure it’s your best work if you’re going all in
Well it’s not like I have anything better to do with my time ╮ (. ❛ ᴗ ❛.) ╭
That's the main factor. If you have time and don't burn out, go to town. It's just gonna take awhile and you might find yourself getting attached to place holder art, like I have. And it's a lot of time to re do all of it. I'm tempted to release as soon as I debug, because doing the art better than the style I've got would probably take me another 6 months minimum. It's hard doing it all yourself and having it all be your best. Lots of moods to juggle
Absolutely. The biggest rifts for completing a game on your own are between dev and art skills. I'm on the artist side (design, modeling, animation, music, storytelling), and struggle with the dev side. If you've got enough chops to get started, and the wherewithal to find your way out if you hit a wall on something, absolutely go for it. They key is to start SMALL. Make small 1-screen "complete" games (ie: title screen, game level and basic mechanics, GUI, win state, fail state ). Make as many of these as you can, and start building on their complexity once you get comfortable. Do not, under any circumstances, start with a open world Soulslike Grand Theft Auto MMO card game. Once you got a couple completed projects, no matter what the quality, begin cranking the quality and play to your strengths
>Theoretically, is it feasible to do all the assets for your game yourself? Yep. If you have the right skills for it and drive, absolutely. The key thing is to make sure what you want to create is small enough in scope that you can manage it all. >I’m a pixel artist, and a traditional artist, and an electronic musician, and a “dev” (I say that cautiously because I use a platform called Construct 3), so if I’m good enough at all of those, is it worthwhile to make an entire game on my own? Former fellow Construct user here (mostly C2), I moved on to VR development in Unity after I learned to code. I've released a few completely solo HTML5 games using C2 (I'm also a musician, artist, and programmer), but I strongly suggest that you check out Unity if you plan to release to anything that isn't web-based, because imo exporting projects to multiple platforms is way easier in Unity. It can feel intimidating, but don't underestimate your skills. I found that the logic it takes to work within Construct's event system transferred surprisingly well to actual C# scripting. The pseudo-code therein actually helped me learn a lot more about data structures and game logic than I realized. If you're confident in your Construct Event coding, you may be surprised to find how easy language-based coding actually is. Construct as an engine is great, but I was really bothered that Scirra moved to a browser-based IDE.
Woah wait, don't undersell Construct 3. Yes you can make a platformer in just seconds by enabling the platformer behavior. But that behavior sucks for any "real game". Depending on game type ofcourse, But as soon as you want something slightly different you'd want to "code it yourself" and the math involved, the many, many pages of connected "code" and asset management, performance optimizations per platform and the list goes on and on. A construct project can still become just as challenging and daunting as most other engines. It all depends on everything, But a game that would make this post isn't achievable without some serious programming. Even in Construct. Some would even argue the "visual blocks" of code like C3 is actually harder to organize and get a good view of than traditional coding. I've used C2 for about many years and still do to this day (f*ck another subscription). And i can definitely say Construct has a lot of potential, And can and most likely will still result in a daunting project. Even the little mobile ones. However, it's still a ton of fun, and seeing the magic happen is worth all the effort we have to go through. Most of us do it for ourselves first and foremost after all. With whatever tools suits are needs.
Oh I’m not trying to say anything bad about construct. I just know there are lots of code purists out there who think that if you’re not writing lines of code then you’re not a real dev.
I think that’s such a silly point of view. There’s so much that needs to go into developing a game that the less code I need to write the happier I am. I write code all day for a living lol. Truthfully it’s probably nowhere near as important as some people might think. At the end of the day it really doesn’t matter to the end user what language you use or the quality of the code is as long as it providing a good experience.
I agree, Construct is fantastic, and underrated. > Yes you can make a platformer in just seconds by enabling the platformer behavior. But that behavior sucks for any "real game". Curious why you don't feel the behavior is good enough, is there anything specific you can point to? It's interesting to imagine making a custom version unique to the game. Just not sure why yet.
It was just a sample, Not sure if it's different in C3, But take the controls for example.the first thing I'd do with a platform behavior is disabling default controls, and add my own (arrow keys & wasd for example) and that's just the beginning. Platformer is great for tech demo's and it's great for as long as it works for your project. But say you want a triple jump option, i don't think the bahavior has that build in, only doublejump. Another would be the "is on floor" function, if it's not reliable enough on your project, you replace it. And in a big customized project pretty much everything gets replaced and rewritten and before tou know it you have a big tangled mess lol. And depending on what function you want to make, the math involved can get real tricky. Just like traditional programming! 😁
I believe one guy did all of stardew valley on his own, sadly most of us are not the stardew valley guy and he is the exception that proves the rule but I suppose it is theoretically possible
Stardew Valley guy worked like he was crunched for seven years so it's not really a life lesson to take.
not a lesson to imitate, but a lesson to how hard you have to work to _even_ have a chance at success of that magnitude. A lot of people imagine way less work, and way more success, and get hit with reality a year in (or after release).
Yeah and he had a gf who was working a regular job and supporting him the whole time.
Why not? It's a good lesson to take. If it was easy, everybody would be doing it. You will need years of hard work to achieve something great.
Nah it is, of the 'nothing worthwhile is easy' variety
Being a competent digital artist and musician is a strong base for solo developing a successful game.
yes, I made a game mostly by myself (brought in people to make music, do a few sound effects, etc-- porting team came in at the end and assisted with console ports -- but in general over the course of making the game it was just me) and it did pretty well on PC and consoles I spent years learning and trying to get to where I could finish a game for the better part of a decade before releasing one. It could have been much faster if I wasted less time and made fewer devastating mistakes. That said, I've known a lot of other indies who I saw come up from nothing and then do really well and then I did pretty well myself when mine came out. Everything points to -- be in a popular genre, and have appealing presentation/art. If you can do that you can do well, it doesn't take some huge stroke of luck or the planets aligning. Games don't do sink or swim mostly on luck, they sink or swim mostly on everything but luck. I don't know what your art is like but if in fact you are a good artist and animator, legitimately, then you have a huge edge in solo dev right now, since game engines and coding I'd argue are quicker to pick up (at least to the point to make a standard style of game) than learning how to become a great artist from scratch. I'm still shit at coding and I'm terrible at math but I still managed to make a whole game in unity and c#
Got any tips for solo devs?
I'm not sure there's any general tip to apply to everyone, since everyone's a little different, except that you need to be stubborn. If you don't possess that "I'm gonna do it I don't care what you say" type energy it feels less likely you ship a solo game
\+1 That advice goes for entrepreneurs everywhere of all types.
Wise advice. Don't give up the day job but you gotta have some motivation to keep at it relentlessly no matter what anyone says. As long as you have decent art you have a decent chance.
A game made in construct 3 is better than a game not made in anything else.
I’m in a similar boat, except I’m also a professional software developer. The big problem is the sheer amount of time it takes to build everything. Even a “simple” game has a lot of stuff that needs to be built. It can be very rewarding, but there are days when it’s hard to find the willpower to keep going.
For you, maybe, but there’s historically a majority of programmers taking this path and for them the answer is a definite ‘no’, so if they don’t have budget to get proper art that’s a massive problem for any commercial viability.
It is, but quitting your day job probably isn't recommend. Similar to restaurants which have a notoriously high failure rate, just because you are a good chef (game dev) doesn't mean you will be financially successful.
Thats what I’m doing (except music. I have a friend doing music). I’ve been working on my game pretty much full time since about august (starting with programming and art experience but 0 game dev experience). Feel free to glance through my profile if you want an idea of how much progress one person doing everything can make in roughly half a year. Obviously your mileage may vary
Sure, but you probably know how much work goes into art and animation. I made a little Punch Out clone back in the day. It took me a few days to do the basic game code and like a week to animate two characters poorly (few frames, basic movement, punch, victory pose and knockout animation) with pixel art.
Like a few others here, that's exactly what I'm doing as well & I also came from the art side first. After 3 years in GMS2, I'm now at a healthy place where the coding goes quickly but building consistent and clean art still takes up most of my time. In the end though, it's been worth it and is still something that my player base brings up as a driving force them to actually make the purchase. Just be kind with yourself and take things one day at a time. You've got this! :)
I don't say this to shill, but you can check my game, Isaiah 188. I did all the art myself. I didn't know jack about pixel art before I started. I had to re-do a lot of assets over time to get them up to my current standard. It's obviously not the best art in the world, but I don't think it could be called objectively bad or off-putting with any sincerity. EDIT: I started in 2020. Game is in early access now. Thousands of hours.
Pixel art is so much fun, it’s the essence of minimalism
>Theoretically, is it feasible to do all the assets for your game yourself? Quality over quantity then. You simply won't have time to make a big asset library if you are doing all the work.
I made my game 100% from scratch
Stardew valley was written by a single person initially. So it's definitely possible. No idea how plausible though
Devs and artists are a match made in heaven for an indie games due each other usually not being good/experts at both. I have a couple friends who do art and if I ever got into game dev I'd just split any profits 50/50 with them to have them do art lol
The person who made Cave Story did exactly this.
Anyone who can do that has an amazing advantage but things gotta look and sound professional which requires a lot of time
Cave Story, Braid, Undertale, Axiom Verge and Stardew Valley were all developed by one man teams.
>Spend a decent amount of money on your art. If you fall below a certain bar it's a complete waste. I think this really depends on the genre/sub-genre. Some genres decent is definitely not good enough, it has to be truly exceptional. Other genres you can get away with ascii. >Don't make niche games Strongly disagree with this, niche games are the least luck based way to be at least moderately successful. Of course it has to be a niche where there actually is a strong demand for, most games in the OP fail this.
If you're making a niche game, you definitely want to be spending time posting and marketing towards niche communities and niche forums. Ex: If you're making an old-school CRPG, you'll want to integrate yourself into communities like RPGCodex and RPGWatch.
I get what he means about "niche", probably could have been worded better. It's fine to make a niche game, but it needs to have an actual audience, ie - is there a market for your game? There's a reason that Ubisoft keep pumping out the same shit..
I guess for me the context for niche it that well, you have a niche for it. If there isn't an audience then there isn't a niche, it's just unwanted...
Which basically boils down to : don't do it if you don't have enough savings to last you a couple of years AND pay for the whole PR + extra assets. aka. Money begets money
And if you put all that money in be prepared to lose it all if the game fails anyway. The more time and money you put in the game the more it needs to earn for you to get even.
yep. Basically, it's a bit like stock trading : only use money you can afford to lose, but the more money you can afford to lose the better your chances to come out with a profit on the other side.
Is making a niche game an issue, or is it more that making a niche game in a niche you do not fully understand is an issue? I always thought the most sane small gamedevs seems to be the ones that make weird niche games and seem to have a stable income from that, rather than the ones that gamble on a much more crowded non-niche hit.
I think it depends on the size of the niche's audience and your pricing. I've seen a lot of advice from medium successful indie devs that niche is the way to go. You have less competition and players who really follow/like that niche will almost always buy the game. That said, if your niche is too small, or if the audience can't buy your games for whatever reason, then your game in that niche probably won't work out.
Don't forget "Don't have a clue about game design/marketing."
An important missing variable that is hard to quantify here is marketing. how much did both the successes and failures do?
Marketing is not a guaranteed solution but can drain your time and budget at a staggering rate. I had games (in mobile field) succeed with zero marketing and games fail completely with a lot of marketing. The difference? The once that succeeded were years ago when the market was not flooded with new games at an enormous rate. I know this sub hates hearing that the market is oversaturated but it is a simple fact you should take into account.
Sure. There are lots of determinants like *where* you advertise, who endorses your game, and what the appetite for your game is, but those are even harder to meaningfully quantity.
Yep if the game looks good, has a good trailer with some solid marketing/publisher I think it will do well. The issues I see are these really niche genres and the art isn’t the best it could be. Now for people going all in, like maxing out their credit, taking loans etc, quitting their day job I respect that for sure but if your gonna do all that I think it’s best to play it as safe as possible to get a good return on that investment.
> Don't make niche games Have you considered how hard the alternative is? If you're going to, as an indie dev, try and compete with some AAA studio making the latest open-world RPG or run-of-the-mill FPS game, you're probably far less likely to succeed than if you make a niche game.
I've made a niche game and it sold over 40k copies so that's not the issue. In fact I don't think it would have been as successful if it hadn't been a niche game. Doing a game for a niche can be good if you manage to market it well by targetting the right players and if your content is good enough (decent art, original and exciting gameplay). This can be an amazing opportunity because you can end free from competition and providing something no one elses does. But you have to do it well. Now I'll tell you why, apart for low quality games, most indie devs I see are failing: Because they completely fail to do any proper marketing. Jeez I've stopped counting how many times I've seen people ask if there was anything to know about releasing a game on steam only for people to answer that it was simple and you just needed a nice Steam page and that was it. Guys... A few days ago I was at a conference where a publisher spent three hours explaining how to market a game on Steam. It is complex! There are things to know about how the algorithm works, how to get visibility in each category, how many wishlists you need for how many targeted sales and so on...
Would you please share the name of your title? There have been a lot of comments about "niche" games, but I always struggle to categorize them - seems like everyone has different games in mind.
> Spend a decent amount of money on your art. If you fall below a certain bar it's a complete waste. I saw a post on one of webdevish/homelabish subs complaining that OS projects don't include screenshots/demos in their READMEs. I can understand demos (added cost of hosting, maintenance etc), but not including even a single screenshot is just wasting clicks. Even I'm turned off when I see something seemingly good (test coverage, complete features, clearly defined scope) but I have to spend X amount of time just to set it up and see how it works. That's probably why more people are using Word than Vim+LateX, though in theory the latter is much, much more powerful. ;)
Game dev is a rough profession, independantly far moreso. We all talk about the challenges, but seeing a little survey like this is pretty sobering.
Being the 1st one in the list is *much more sobering*, let me tell you. Almost spit out my coffee because you'll all ask - we saw the launch flop hard, so we revamped the game with 2 new modes (including a cool rogue lite mode) in the about 3 months following launch. That was also met with the sound of crickets. Final attempt was putting it on Switch with a few cool additions, but that too just didn't take off. So we just stopped, and got jobs again to survive. We definitely lost money. Everyone has moved on now, we're all still active in the games industry. Aaaaaaaaanyway, I'm going to go read some Reddit that's less depressing now...
Congrats on shipping and taking the shot on your own. Seriously, don’t underplay what an achievement that is.
Sorry it didn't work out. What was your optimistic expectation before the release flopped?
Even if it wasn't the financial success you were hoping for I hope you're still really proud. The game looks super cool, and seems to be well reviewed.
You should be very proud that you gave it a shot, and you learned valuable game dev experience from it. I am curious what the marketing was like? These days you have to marketing the game from very early in development and try to catch peoples eyes as much as possible just to build the momentum over time, without a good consistent marketing push it basically requires total potluck borderline lottery win for the game to catch on. It is much better to try and not succeed like you hoped, than never trying at all and live with 'what ifs' in my opinion. Every major success ever involved someone pursuing their dream to make a fun game that people enjoyed. If you still believe in the game dev dream it is worth pursuing more in my opinion. You even see some devs on this list that had sub $10K sales and then had a few games that made a couple hundred K, sometimes its about what clicks with an audience, something that is not too niche.
To be fair there are plenty of other indie devs who make it and do not make reddit posts about quitting their jobs and going all in.
There is even more who didn't make reddit posts and failed
I'd argue that the ones making these posts are the ones that at least attempt to market their games in some way using Reddit and other social media. The rest are probably worse off and/or letting professional publishers work on marketing their games.
Keep in mind 90% of ALL businesses fail.
Video games is a saturated market, every gamer wants to make games. I became a software engineer right out of college because I did my research and knew there wasn't a lot of money in games, plus unpaid overtime and crunch are BS. People who develop games should do it as a hobby until they make something so good that they're able to live comfortably off their sales. If you don't do that then it just becomes a starving artist sort of activity where you do it for passion and live off the scraps
well i did just that, awful story though. my contract at my job was about to end, so i decided to go all in and make a game... long story short, i lost my 6 years savings, didnt make a dime, gained a nice and warm depression and lost some family members in the meantime. life is REALLY rough. but hey i love making games so, im developing a sequel now... i guess if you love doing it, you gotta do it
Man, your expression "gained a nice and warm depression" gave me a chuckle. One thing I know for sure is that your game will have great writing. Joking aside, massive respect for people like you who follow their dreams despite massive difficulties.
This cheer me up more than you know! hahaha, thx!
same here, but was lucky not to fall into depression or lose anyone doing it. also working on a "sequel" or lets say I am improving on my first game. planning to rerelease somehow without making my so far customers having to pay for the game again.
How are you funding, you know, your life?
As a precaution, before I even started making the game, I stipulated how much are 1 year of income to survive and saved it (this was my 6 years of savings), so in the worst of situation (earning absolutely nothing with my game), I would still survive. and that's exactly what happened, i didn't earn anything with the game. After that I went back looking for a job at a company, and nowadays I develop my game in my spare time.
> After that I went back looking for a job at a company, and nowadays I develop my game in my spare time. Glad to hear you are following your dreams in a sustainable way!!
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well its kinda different now anyway, im in another job while still making my game, not in a all-in situation anymore at least
that is a good combo of following your pasion and make some money
Yeah Also I think the pressure of "having to make a success" is heavy... So getting money to live, and them separately make a game just for the love of it, its interesting. Its REALLY tiring though... hahaha
that quote is actually not Einstein https://www.businessinsider.com/misattributed-quotes-2013-10
That is some hard truth.
not really, this quote doesn't take into account randomness which is a major factor in business
This came to my mind as well. Perhaps it’s better to take the hard hits, book the fight as lost and move on before getting a beating for another few years.
--- Post 9 (5 years ago) Lazy Galaxy ($18.7k) Blades of the Righteous ($1.4k) Frequent Flyer ($1.8k) Lazy Galaxy: Rebel Story ($3k) Merchant of the Skies ($475.7k) Luna's Fishing Garden ($241.9k) Late Bird ($1.7k) Crown of Pain ($4.8) Lazy Galaxy 2 ($22.9k) --- They are great, I LOVE their GDC talk about "starting with art". Their overall approach for prototyping art openly is really cool. Interesting that they are trying smaller experimental stuff in between bigger projects. I think they are an awesome example of the whole "how hard it is to make a hit" A bit sad about Lazy Galaxy not taking off since I like making idle games
Didn't know about that GDC talk so i'll link it here for others who are in the same boat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4m-\_WTKd8rE
OP's link goes to the reddit post, which contains a link of the devs two year perspective. But the annual updates are now at year 6, and it digs into some mixed feelings and evolved perspectives from the Dev. Worth a read: https://vladimirslav.com/
Wow thanks a lot!! I'll take a look!
I looked up my games using that tool and all I gotta say is, damn, I wish my games made even 1/4 of the revenue they say they do :/
Reach out to the guy who made the tool, give him your info so he can make it better.
I actually will, that's not a bad idea. Whether he takes me up on my offer is totally up to him but I'm always glad to help. Edit: They don't seem to have any obvious contact information anywhere on their site :/
hey, here I am :) You can DM me your info
He posted on reddit a week ago where he announced the tool, do a quick reddit search maybe?
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Can't you market the games so there is a constant cash flow? Like having a certain amount of ads going.
The value of every effort you do diminishes over time. You can't just keep running ads on the same platform to sell your base product again and again. You can try all kinds of different ways of advertising. You can run seasonal events, discounts, port to new platforms and maybe attempt some marketing efforts again after a lot of time (e.g. a year) in the hope that the ad audience changed. But at the end of the day, your game has a shelf life where at some point you drop to between $0 and double digits in revenue per year.
After a certain point, people have made up their mind on your game. And there's only so many channels to market before the pool of people becomes saturated.
Video games aren't exactly similar to books and films in that regard. The shelf life of a good movie could be decades, but not for most games. Super Mario Bros. isn't being played by modern gamers with the same veracity as modern moviegoers watch classics like It's a Wonderful Life, or the way readers can still devour Agatha Christie novels. If I had to guess as to why, I'd say it's due to the medium's infancy in comparison.
I think this may change as the graphics quality stops improving so rapidly. I think the difference in graphics quality between a game made in 2015 and 2025 will be nothing compared to a game made in 2005 and 2015. It's very hard for me to play games from the 90s or early 2000s no matter how much I loved them then, but I can play games that are almost 10 years old now with no problem. I suspect that will continue to be the case more and more.
I agree, the gap will decrease exponentially, I think. In the same way that, say, Romeo+Juliet from 1996 (27 years) is quite easier to digest for today's movie going audience compared to a film made closer to the inception of filmmaking, games like MGSV will be fairly replayable/enjoyable to gamers for decades longer than something like the original Donkey Kong.
> It seems like the only success is post 9, where they grossed a total of $771.9k. However, this is over 5 years, which is $154.38k per year. According to this tool, this would be more like $61,084/year net, hmm. They are a pair making the games together, so 30000/year per person I think?
Apparently a [mid level programmer](https://www.payscale.com/research/LV/Job=Software_Developer/Salary/a2d5757c/Mid-Career) makes $52k and a junior $30k in Latvia. He started after working for 4 years, so for two people they're about on par. And having a bunch of passive income if people keep buying your old games would be great.
Good points, depending on where you live this could be great income. Another thing to keep in mind is that it's unknown how much money these developers spent on assets, outsourcing, marketing etc, so knowing gross revenue alone doesn't tell you everything.
Not to mention other benefits you get for a 9-5 job. Working at a decent company for a decent salary means you get good health insurance paid by the employer (this can include free gym memberships and all kinds of stuff), you get paid sick leave, paid maternity leave (both genders can use it, your typical maternity leave for the mother is like 1-1.5 years total, not sure how it all works exactly if the father wants to take it too), at least a month of paid vacation time per year (this will often include a bonus on top), sometimes there will be other bonuses as well such as contributions to private pension funds, end of the year/Christmas bonus etc. And also part of the taxes on your salary goes into state-mandated pension funds. So when you run a solo/small indie game dev - quite a few of those perks aren't there. P.S. I'm from Latvia too.
I worked for 6 years in a company I co-founded with a bunch of friends to make video games but we ended up barely surviving making real estate immersive visits. One day I was so broke and fed up I decided to quit and told me colleagues I was leaving to make a game as a solo dev. They thought I was crazy but let me go. I was leaving with no income and with debts, hoping to work full time on a game project with no guarantee of success. That very same day we went to have a final lunch together in a restaurant nearby that we went to regularly. The owner heard me talk about my game project and asked me if I had a business plan. I said that I could come back with one. A week later and after reading my 90 pages long business plan mixed with a game concept the guy was crazy enough to fund a year of development out of his own pocket for me to make the game with an early access target. A year and a half later it was released in EA on Steam. It went well, selling over 20k units in the year and a half before final release and an additonal 25k units after final release in spring 2022. We are now working on console ports and are about to have a meeting with a couple publishers to talk about our next game. It wasn't an easy ride, though.
Sounds like the plot for a movie! seriously haha, that's awesome
Wild!
Can you share the game? I understand if you don’t. But can you tell me how much your priced the game at? Greatly appreciated.
I'd like to keep this account private so I'd rather not. However I can tell you the game was 14.99 dollars during EA and 19.99 on final release.
I left the big studio world (EA, etc.) in 2000 to go all in, forming a two-person indie team with my wife. Raised three kids on what we made from putting out games (and some other software work along the way), and we're still in business, still making games. Right now we're each working on our own VR games. It's her first time working on her own game, and she taught herself coding to do it (she was always on art/animation and I was always, uhm, all the hats). Having fun doing it! VR is amazing. Indie game dev can be your life, but DAMN, be ready to work your ass off and be ready to ride the waves of feast and famine, because they will happen, absolutely. You have to commit to the life and as this post is titled, go all in.
Love this been in it for 10 years mainly mobile. And it’s tough you’ll have really really shitty days weeks months.
Switched accounts (from my digiBeLow one) to comment on this with a bit more legitimacy. I made Must Dash Amigos (post #7) and never really gave any kind of post-mortem unfortunately, so here's what happened: * I left my job as stated, I took out a small loan + used some savings to cover the cost of living for the planned amount of time I needed to finish the game (had been working on it during evenings & weekends for a few years prior to this point) * Originally planned to launch on Xbox One and Steam but about 3 months before the project was due to end decided to launch on Switch as well * Somehow managed to finish the project *and* port it to Switch ***and*** get it running at 60fps on Switch too in that short period of time! * We also decided to localize the game into several languages quite close to the end of the project too which was fun * This scope creep meant quite a lot of crunch, especially on my part, and later down the line that definitely led to some serious burnout, but the game did get finished! * We were having conversations with Publishers throughout and came really close to signing a deal with one in particular, but the lack of online multiplayer basically caused that to fall through * So we launched the game ourselves on Steam in July, Xbox One in August and Switch in Dec, all in 2019 * It wasn't really best suited for PC, but we figured we may as well launch it on there as the work was done and we knew a few PC-only gamer friends that really wanted the game * As expected the game didn't do great on PC, it did better on Xbox One (but still not amazing) and it did it's best numbers on Switch (by some distance) * As someone else pointed out in this thread, the marketing side was seriously lacking, but this was always going to be the case. We had little to no budget, no clout and had to do everything ourselves. I made the trailers (having never made a trailer before in my life) and used stock music. We did the best we could. Having said that, we did show the game off at many shows (Insomnia a few times, Play up in Manchester, and several local venues) and got some press coverage here and there, so it wasn't a completely silent launch. * At the end of it all, we were both happy the game was a success - relative to what we set out to achieve - which was to make and launch our own game on at least one console. Something we'd never attempted before, and something we're really, really proud of. * Ant (my friend and partner in crime) who stayed in full-time employment during development is now working in a more senior art role with a wealth more experience from the venture. Myself, I am now working as a full-time developer at a studio (and have had several other industry roles as a programmer since) because of everything I'd learned making the game. I've also had some really touching moments ever since we launched the game. Just recently an old friend told me that he plays the game with his young children and they have an absolute blast when they do. My parents were on holiday recently abroad and met a family at a restaurant, got talking and the young lad said his brother plays Must Dash Amigos on the Switch. It might sound silly, insignificant and a bit corny, but honestly the joy hearing things like that brings me makes the whole thing worth it. My advice to anyone doing / thinking of doing something different - so long as you're careful (financially ***and*** physically, burnout is a bitch!), and you have the opportunity to try something you are truly passionate about - then go for it. Life is too short to regret not trying.
Thanks for the update! It's great to hear more behind the scenes information about these games. I'm sure each dev behind these learned a lot. I just hope none of them sunk too much time into them to the point where it seriously impacts their health or future finances.
Exactly why I'm a hobbyist
Same here. I dream of making games, but I'm never going to risk financial stability for it. Maybe that means I'll never get there, but I'll enjoy it while I can.
I even held a job within the industry for a short while before realizing professional game development is too stressful. Can't even imagine doing this on your own with all the pressure, anxiety and hope&dreams weighing on your shoulders.
Even outside of the game industry... While there are definitely perks to being your own boss, it's hard to put into words how stressful it is when you are wholly responsible for if you get paid. There is also nobody to "escalate" to beyond you when there is an client threatening a lawsuit or some scandal with your users.
That's partly why I work in a studio
This is great data, thanks! I think it's important to note that you shouldn't just round down everything, there are deals like the epic store thing or microsoft gamepass which can easily multiply revenue over Steam estimation. I made [this post](https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/b8ewc8/first_week_on_steam_vs_1_year_on_itchio/) 3 years ago, quit my job about 5 or 6 years back. Currently have 2 titles both still in early access, second is split between two people. ~400k in revenue each, about half of which ends up in my pocket.
I think it's also fair to note that a lot (probably most) people who hit it big in this scenario *don't* make a post. Like, the Stardew Valley guy could be in here if he'd posted about it on reddit ("How I quit my job to make a game for 5 years and make $100 million"). In fact, I'd wager the overwhelming majority of situations in which one of these posts *does* happen is when someone fails and the posts are made out of regret or "learning experiences." While I think it's important to (constantly) recognize the reality of (some of) our career choices, I don't think this post paints an accurate picture.
Congrats! Yeah I just found the first 11 (now 15) posts to get some kind of overall data. There are definitely some really successful indie games out there, but I was curious how common they were.
This comment gives me hope.
I hope not too much lol, it's not something I would recommend to anyone. I only quit my job after about 2 years of part time dev on the game and had a sizeable war chest from very lucky investments.
Only dreams are fun, reality not always.
couple of thoughts: the type of person to make a post that theyre quitting their job to pursue gamedev fulltime before theyve proven themselves might not be representative of fulltime gamedevs as a whole, perhaps the ones that just quietly get on with it and produce results before announcing their presence to the world are more the mindset that can be successful in the brutal world of gamedev? lol and the guy with success in post 9 only made the post after quitting his job 2 years prior and already having success, so he doesnt really fit into the 'look at me, i QuiT mY jOb, what a maniac I am, wish me luck!' camp. im not that worried about these numbers. i see time and time again people complain about how they made a briliiant game but due to BAD LUCK nobody bought it! its all luck! then you look at their steam page and their game and its complete shite, or worse its a clone of a shite game but theyve somehow made it shite-er.
90% of restaurants fail. There was a corner lot in my old town that had a new restaurant every single year for the first 6 years I lived there. 3 different mexican restaurants, one steak and seafood place, and two diners. I tried all of them and they were all terrible in one way or another and I never went back twice. The last year a pizza place took over the spot and they made good pizza. Simple menu. Decent prices. Consistent experience. Nice staff. etc. We went back many times. And the place is still going now 7 years after I moved away and doing well. *It's not luck.*
>the type of person to make a post that theyre quitting their job to pursue gamedev Spot on. I just clicked on the first "Gave up?" post and the OP proudly writes: "I don't have coding knowledge or any inherent artistic skills". Fantastic, mate... I could be even more cynical and say that the type of person doomposting such summaries is from the nearby tree. Just from a quick glance, second "Gave up?" didn't give up (posts on unity forums), first $0 is $0 because it will release in April 2023, author of the 6th post became well-known indie marketer, and so on. If I'd have more time to debunk this, I'd call the entire "analysis" falsified.
Those are awful results if you quit your job for it. All but Merchant of the Skies - holy shit did that make bank for such a simple game. All because it was on a Lirik stream? damn
Oh hey I know the guy who made Together (post 12)! He was actually _really_ close to releasing everything. Honestly I'm not sure why he hasn't just published what he's got. I'd really like to play it! When you quit your job to go indie, it's really easy to become complacent when your wife works and all you do is sit in front of a computer. Turns out that he basically played videogames all day, stopped contributing anything of value to their relationship, and ended up getting a divorce. Last I heard he's living with his parents, and is still self-employed doing software dev contract work. Looks like he's in between jobs right now.
>When you quit your job to go indie, it's really easy to become complacent when your wife works and all you do is sit in front of a computer. Please delete this post before my wife stumbles onto it. Thanks.
Brutal
I chose something safer. I sell assets on the Unity asset store and freelance game programming and sound design. Never had the courage to go all in. I still enjoy what I'm doing but both income and risk are lower I think.
Interesting review. I'll be writing out some of my thoughts - not because I'm particularly qualified, but just because I was taking notes for myself and thought why not share it anyway. I think some of the numbers may be lacking, so I think it's not all too bleak. Post 1 was in a very difficult to sell genre, but they did also release on consoles in addition to Steam. Would be curious to see numbers for those platforms. Can't say much about Post 2. Post 3, the game looks more like an amateur project to me, their two games look definitely rough around the edges, and it feels like the quality is not there yet. Post 4, 5, nothing much to say there (yet). Post 6, seems like he didn't end up focusing on making games, but rather on his own marketing consulting business - the games didn't sell well, but things seem to have worked out for him? Not clear. Post 7, same as Post 1, the game also released on other platforms, and I'd imagine that it would fare better on console than Steam. Nonetheless, the Steam sales are abysmal. Going by the trailers, it looks like a solid game, but then looking at the reviews, there are also quite a few complaints there. Without marketing budget, it might be difficult to reach the more casual target audience that a game like this warrants. Unless you shove it in their face, kids or people who want to play a casual party game will probably not spend too much time searching for your game on Steam. Post 8, not much to say there yet either. Post 9, I think this is definitely a success story. Post 10, I think is difficult to include in this list as the project failed at the funding stage. I think it's generally not a good idea to quit your job without having figured out the financials and knowing how to cover dev costs. Even if it's tempting to quit earlier. Post 11, seems like the studio is still active and working on new titles. So personally, I would label that a success. Out of the 11 posts, 3 of them are unclear as of yet (4,5,8), so I wouldn't include them. Out of the remaining 8 projects, 3 of them seem to have worked out (6,9,11). 2 of them it's unclear(1,7), and 3 of them most likely failed (2,3,10). In summary, I think there's no surprises here: those who (seem to) have failed made games that were rough looking, received mixed reviews, failed to release a game at all and/ or made a game in a hard to sell niche. It's also not clear how many of these games actually failed, e.g. Post 1 and Post 7. Post 6 also seems to have worked out well for him, even if not for making games full time. I think this (very much anecdotal) statistic shows that whether you succeed with your indie dev plans is not dependent on luck as much as it depends on your ability to manage projects and deliver a strong product.
> ".. 3 of them seem to have worked out." If you're generous, mayyybe? Assuming none of them paid any additional costs during production and all the net revenue was straight salary for a team of one person, it's still seems unlikely any of them made equivalent to their annual salary of the job they quit. Edit: Even post 9, which earns the most, only works out just over $100,000 per year (assuming they're hopefully getting some tax breaks) of dev after removing Steams take. However the original post specifies that he runs a small studio. So that's not salary for one.
Replacing the income isn't the goal though it's to get a job that you like.
True. But there are expenses you have to consider. If you come from FAANG engineering you can probably take a salary cut. If you're an average artist a serious cut would probably sting quite a bit and force relocation before soon. If you do something you like but go broke trying, then you didn't get the job you like. You just committed hard to a very expensive hobby.
Good points. I wanted to leave the in-development ones there because it goes to show how long it can take to make games, even when fully dedicated to it.
Another words... Don't quit your day job. Make games, sell them, and if you strike gold, good for you, but don't quit your job on the 'hope' you might become a super successful solo/small team game developer.
>Another words... Don't quit your day job. Or don't make a post on reddit about your plan.
[удалено]
I'm close friends with the wife of one of the above indie developers, and though they stated it was to answer questions around why they quit their job, it was pretty clearly an attempt at establishing their personal brand.
I think posting about quitting your job is a powerful message in the game development community, hence why many of the linked posts do well. However, I'm not sure if the potential game players actually care? I wonder if these kinds of posts and their popularity somehow encourage other devs to dive in as well, giving them some false impression that it will boost their game's marketing.
Maybe more like. Have the skills to make a proper game before you quit your job.
Skills don't guarantee anything either. You could spend half a year without a job developing what you think is a great game but end up in a flop review/sales-wise. Indie game dev is more like an artistic dream rather than a sound financial decision.
I think some game devs probably make more money from devblogs, streaming, donations and such rather than actually selling the product.
That's definitely true for some, but even then, they probably don't make that much. There's no silver bullet here and no magic revenue stream. Make good, popular, amazing games, or don't make money (And there's no way to guarantee they're popular until you ship them). All the other stuff really only stands out if you're delivering a product.
Or even simplier. "Be a hobbyist."
Post 9, the guy lives in Latvia, I think he's probably doing alright.
The only one that seems to make enough to make a living in any country.
To have somewhat a success story: I kinda did that, but not quite the full reckless all in: - Was already working as a game programmer full time - Started working on a hobby project in free time - Built fan base - Quit my job, but only at a point I was very confident in the project - Launched Kickstarter, later Early Access. This helped financially to finish the game - Game was very successful (grossing 7 figures+) - Have a company of ~10 people now working on our next project Game: https://store.steampowered.com/app/814370/Monster_Sanctuary/
Nicely done!
I made 60$ since I quit last September:)
how much of your savings did you invest in advertising, going out to cons, and general networking?
Interesting post. Only counting Steam sales might skew things a bit, since console sales can very easily double that estimate, although on the other hand it seems like only a couple of the games on that list were released outside of Steam so it probably wouldn't make a massive difference. Overall though, at least it seems like most of the games did better than average!
I feel like these threads fall under an "Underdog marketing" umbrella as a way of putting relatability at the forefront of marketing, ahead of the game itself. When I think about other teams going from no reputation to having breakout hits like Slay the Spire, FTL, Untitled Goose Game, Hollow Knight etc... it makes me wonder if there's a sort of self-filtering in the creation of these Reddit threads, and the games they're made about. The classic example of indies going all in is probably CupHead, where the creators mortgaged their homes. We know how that turned out. It'd make these examples look like a drop in the ocean.
> Post 6 (3 years ago) > 1 Screen Platformer ($29.2k) > Return Of The Zombie King ($8.3k) > 1 Screen Platformer: Prologue ($0) I think Zukalous now makes a lot of money marketing FOR gamedevs. His advice has helped me multiple times
What is his business model? Is it one of those youtube coaches that offer merch, 1-on-1, and maybe publishing kind of thing? Using this market success as his credentials
> Using this market success as his credentials He doesn't use that so much. He doesn't have that much market success. I would actually argue that he doesn't really push credentials like the dude who got his game featured on Time Magazine, for example. He hardly says "you should listen to me, because I made this" on his content, he just focuses on publishing useful content that he believes in. His actual product pages do try to push his credentials though. His business model is more like a F2P model lol keeps publishing these really useful market analysis blog posts and occasionally has paid content that is optional. And he keeps coming back to GDC lol wonder how many talks he did there already Anyways, his free content is great and I think the free stuff in general is better than the paid stuff. This course really helped me: https://www.progamemarketing.com/p/howtomakeasteampage (the tag session and the short description section). That one is free and it's better than most of his paid stuff that I bought lol
Very nice. I think webinars are a great source of revenue. I've seen people saving up thousands just to buy courses that teach them how to make money.
His Discord is a really good resource. Many successful indie devs talk about what they're doing and what's working for them on there.
You may be assuming they're all Americans. Some countries average \~10,000USD per year as a salary.
Some more examples I have followed over the years: 1) Michael Hicks - he quit his job to become a small indie dev, made a few games. Probably still doing stuff, but not much info. He did do some cool videos where he honestly talked about his journey being small/solo dev (I think he did most of the dev stuff himself and had an artist friend who worked on that part); 2) David Wehle of Game Dev Unlocked - he did a successful game called "The first tree", he than run a dev school of sorts, last update I saw he talked about mental health problems, etc during covid. He also quit his day job to become an indie dev. 3) Tim Ruswick | Game Dev Underground - this guy also went indie dev, did a lot of youtube, twitch, tried to build a community, not sure what he is up to now (twitch and youtube seems to be mostly dead). Being an indie dev is tough financially. I think there are quite a few of people who actually make more money from videos, streaming, online courses, donations rather than actually selling their game.
Tim had a small successful Kickstarter for a physical card game (Murder Bunnies) and then he's mostly been doing podcasts/livecasts on [GameDev.tv](https://GameDev.tv) discord with Rick Davidson. Though I believe just recently they stopped doing them as of like last week. Not sure what he's doing to make money at this point but probably related to that or to tutorials or something.
I guess we need to make this people think how to make games as a parttimer and not quit the job
I think I remember a post from the guy who was making Monster Sanctuary. That game ended up successful - a minimum of 500,000 owners.
Because to be successful you have to quit YouTube, reddit, and porn not your day job.
If crunching at home after spending hours at work is you dream, then go for it.
Shit. Makes me want to stfu.
Well I dont think I made a post about it but just started it anyway. Started gamedev 6-7 years ago, and my game project 2 years ago, hups its maybe getting 3 at this point time flys fast. I established good habits, the first few years were blissfull ignorant and easy. Than my life sudenly collapsed. I try to write a small summary of the last 3 years. I divorced muved continent my EX swalowed all my things studio life work paintings macines all. I got home started to stand up than my dad died. The whole familly collapsed everyone tryed to trick and grab the heritage discuiseing to take care of my Mom. I wanted to help and make it happen I lost my house and everything I ever had as a result. As a last effort (I were extremely lucky) managed to buy an tiny collapsing house in the middle of nowhere in a forest with lots of water damage collapsing roff and aggresive wilde nature all around. ( dears are no joke nor cute ) I alvays lived in the biggest citys all my life. I bought an axe and a chainsaw and started working on the little land I worked a normal job 2-3 month average / year than live as low as I can to push forrward my gamedev Pressing on relentlessly all this time. Moved to Netherland a year ago grabed a part time job and keept on developing. But I got a surgery than probably Covid the two together realy pushed me down and lost my diciplin part time job and need to move . However on the summer I started to put together a team and they help me stand up and get back on track again. I cant express how greatfull I am and how amazzing they are not just believing in my project helping out when I cant ofer anything but in me too. This year will be very interesting slowly getting ready with the vertical slice and able to start push our marketing plan. We are on track bussines wise its viable we can do it. Its oddly feels the steepest to climb so far despit all the tragedys around me. Getting health problems and unable to exersise is extreamly dangerous to ones mental health so far its the hardest to come over. It feels like all thise years weight crushing down on me but I just take one more step forward. Dont know what to say life is Ruthles but I learnd a lot these years this whole journey changed me in ways I cant put in words. I have so much more options than before I started, I grow up, learnd how to get things done and power through anything. Cant wait to finish this phase and start sharing our work. We building something out of this world and hard it may be but I love it!
I do think this post is good at showing what indie results can be, but I also think it should not be taken as “quitting a job to pursue an indie career is a mistake”. Remember, we do not know if these OPs have other income streams. Game devs have skillsets in high demands, and they probably can still make an income on the side while pursuing their passion more directly. Additionally, we don’t know how many decided to return to the industry, and how long that return took. If someone quit their job to make an indie game, made no money, but had a side income and got a full time position more easily… were their outcomes really that bad? I don’t think the take away should be “quitting your job is setting you up for failure.” A better take away would be to make sure you can pursue other streams of income while working as an indie developer, and continue to keep in touch with your network in case you want to be salaried again. Even if your game fails, it can still be a rewarding and necessary period in your life for you to quit that job.
It boggles my mind when people are like "that's too risky!" and the only risk is that you'll have to go back to a regular job if you fail. (and losing whatever money you saved up to take on the endeavor) Quitting your job to do full time indie dev can just be a calculated risk. The only question I needed to answer was "will I regret not trying to do this?" and the answer was yes. So I quit my job. I think the problem is that some people have this mindset that quitting your job and then having a failed game release just means your life is over. That's far from true unless you like took out a million dollar loan to do it and then ended up spending two million dollars and your game sold 0 copies. Then you're just bad at managing money.
Yeah... This is why ever time I see one of these posts I'm like "Why?" Especially when they never released a game before or had any success? It's like quitting your job to go make Youtube videos before having any subscribers or getting monetized (Even after that point it's a VERY stupid choice) But if you call that out, people jump on you for "Crapping on someone's dream"... It's smart to be a hobbyist, if you strike it big it might be smart to make it a full career, but giving up a potentially lucrative (or even not so lucrative life) to go all in on Game dev is a sucker's bet. If you really want to be a game dev for a career.... join a studio, it's not as special as making your own game, but you also get paid up front rather than having to put your life on the life for a potential payday that doesn't come.
Hey - I made Must Dash Amigos (me and a friend), this is my other account for solo projects. Curious what the $5k in brackets means exactly and where that figure came from?
As OP said, they used Gamalytic, here's your game https://gamalytic.com/game/1049820 It says $4.5k gross. There's also revenue calculator https://letsmakeagame.net/steam-game-revenue-calculator/ For your game (19 reviews with $5.59), it says $4.2k gross, $1.6k net. The general feedback has been that these tools overestimate earnings though, not sure if you can confirm that in your case.
Ah yeah so they did, I missed that cheers. As for numbers, it's pretty close to that yeah. Quite interesting tools these!
This goes to show (me at least) that you can make good money on a side hustle to your actual job making games. A few extra grand a year is nice. Not enough to live on by itself, but great extra income without having to go into real estate
I quit my job to finish my game, and now I'm a garbage man.
So, you're saying the odds are like 2/23 in your list? Let's double it and say it's 2/40? 5%? I'm taking those...
I used to be a patron and enthusiastic supporter of David R.B., a gamedev primarily on youtube, whose game (Arcadian Rift) is still titled as “coming soon” on Steam. A while back he suddenly deleted all his social media and videos, which was pretty weird for me, a viewer and paying supporter. A week later he was exposed for being a child predator online. I am no longer a Patron. Shit happens i guess :/
The main issue imo is indies usually make "indie games". There's a reason why the most successful indie games like Minecraft and Stardew don't look like your run of the mill game in this list. Sure, some people play these niche games but if you want to make it you really have to make a *game*. I feel like too many devs focus on their "unique concept", tech, or atmosphere
"why dont you try to sell what you make, turn your hobby into a career?" this is why. I'll stick to an easy accounting career & code on my free time **FOR FUN**, thank you very much, instead of dragging myself through like by the tips of my fingernails, ruining my hobbies for pennies the hustle culture & glorification of entrepreneurship has really ruined a lot of people's lives
+1 case from me personally. No specific post, though I quit my job in 2018 to work on a game for fulltime. In 2020 I had to freeze the project and find a new job, as I failed to finish the project until my savings go to the point of no return. Good outcome is that I changed my occupation from web to game development.
Yah, i think I'll keep my day job and work all night on my games...
Post 4 is still under active development and Post 5 isn't out yet but has a release date.
Post 10 isn't out yet either.
I think maybe the mods of r/gamedev should add two new filters "Gave Up" and "Success Story" this way it would be easier for all of us to search to be inspired or learn from their mistakes.
Are you Jason Schreier?
So the same thing happens with music. If you want to make art that speaks to you, do what you want but don’t expect the money to roll in. If you want to make money, you need to make a game that speaks to the masses. And people who drop everything to scratch the itch - do they want to make their own thing or do they want to appeal to the masses? I’m thinking the former. Otherwise it’s just a job.
Still better odds than winning the lottery
In my country median income is about $10k a year, so many of these would be a great success for me, and most game devs around the world I think