
Indie games don't make money - doppp
http://positech.co.uk/cliffsblog/2017/06/23/your-indie-game-will-flop-and-you-will-lose-money/
======
rocky1138
The way I get around this as an indie dev working on a VR game is that

0) I kept my day job. Coming home to work on the game isn't as hard as it
sounds because (see 1)

1) I am making my game for me first. I've always had this world I want to drop
myself into so I'm building it for me. If other people want to come along on
this journey, that's fantastic. If not, that's okay too.

2) It's a means for me to escape daily life, thus it is relaxing and "time
off" in my mind, not work. If I ever feel like it's work, I take a few minutes
to analyze why and usually come to the conclusion that I'm focusing on the
wrong thing: making the game for someone else, not myself.

3) I have no intentions of striking it rich, playing the indie lottery, or any
of those things. I fully understand (after first-hand experience working as a
professional game developer) that most games take years to make and when they
finally come out, no one plays them. I cry a little inside when I see people
quitting their job to become an indie developer and spend more than 90 days
working on a single project without getting it released.

4) I set the price of my game based on its value not compared to similar games
in the industry. I've had customers complain about this before, but the
reality is that I only want players who are truly into the idea to be a part
of it. If not, then don't buy it. I'm totally willing to walk away from any
sale.

If this all sounds selfish, you're right. It's completely selfish. But I think
it's the only realistic way to look at developing a game in today's world.
Just like this blog post says, you will lose money, time, and sleep if your
intentions are to burn the ships and strike it rich.

Instead, why not work on something for yourself and keep your day job?

~~~
metaphorm
are you single? people with families don't typically have enough time to do
what you're doing.

~~~
rocky1138
I have a fiancee and two cats. I have a clear dilineation between "working on
my game" time and "hanging out" time. I have a separate room I go into and
when I close my door, I am no longer available. Conversely, when I am hanging
out, I am not at all working. To do this requires clear communication and self
control.

~~~
mysterydip
Started that way, too (though one cat instead of two). Now married with a
toddler. If I get an hour or two to myself to code, it's a great day :)

~~~
ashark
Yup. With young kids and a spouse you're lucky if you get 15 hours of actual
solo free time a week, unless you're cutting into sleep. And they'll be
scattered throughout the week, then further broken into smaller parts by
various interruptions, some probably claimed by various family & friend events
more weeks than not unless you don't... you know, do stuff with people.

If you want to have side projects under those circumstances, I hope you like
working in chunks of a few minutes at a time, days-long gaps in between
sessions, with the constant threat of interruption looming and an ever-growing
pile of things-you-should-probably-be-doing-instead stressing you out.

~~~
ygjb
How do you manage to eke out 15 :)

------
candu
This is the sad reality behind much of content creation nowadays. Now that
everyone's a blogging streaming indie-gamemaking content-spewing machine, the
marginal expected value of new content - in a _lot_ of areas - is close to
zero. Once you factor in the cost of marketing to get noticed above the noise,
the financial value you personally realize is often negative.

Of course, people will keep trying, because a) it is fundamentally rewarding
in some non-monetary sense to make Real Things, and b) there are enough "I
quit my job and now I'm a bazillionaire!" stories out there to entice (largely
young, less established) people to play the lottery.

The real money is in owning the content markets (where you get your cut in
developer account subscriptions, transaction fees, 30% of sales, marketing
costs, etc.) or in providing tools, just as in the Gold Rush of yore.

~~~
eksemplar
I don't think things have really changed. The games market is saturated, but
the IoT is only just beginning, and the next "minecraft" (sorry I don't know a
lot of indie games) will probably be something AR or VR.

AR is posing to really take off. I mean, I work for the government and I'm not
very creative, so these upcoming things might seem lame to a lot of people,
but we can basically cover a 15 km radius with slow "internet" (LoraWAN) for
around $1000.

In this you can build all sorts of small devices. You can monitor street
temperatures and giving the data to the public via open data. You can monitor
if elderly people are alive by tracking whether or not an IoT lightbuilb turns
on. You can build tourism apps that emit small stories via Bluetooth.

I mean, the options are endless, and it's basically shaping up to be the Wild
West that indie games were 10 years ago.

~~~
sillysaurus3
AR isn't really going to become a thing. Not with current technology, anyway.
The problem is twofold: There's no way to get enough power to the device to do
anything interesting, and there's no way to make things darker. You can only
add light, not subtract it. That means your AR interface will be basically
unreadable in sunlight.

The power problem is the real killer, though. Oculus is only successful
because it's tethered to a high-end rig. When you don't have that, you're
basically tethering a mobile phone to your eyes. Not only do mobile phones die
within a few hours if you play 3D games on them continuously, but their
graphics aren't very impressive.

There's a third problem worth mentioning: When you're using AR, you're making
an overlay on the real world. The real world is instant. Your overlay has to
be at least 90fps to look seamless. That means you have to recognize a target
+ render the overlay within 11 milliseconds. That recognition step is a long
way from being that performant.

I predict Magic Leap will be shown to be an elaborate ruse, and they were able
to raise money mostly by tricking investors with tech demos that can't
possibly advance any further. It's easy to make this claim, but the
fundamental problems with the technology seem insurmountable on our current
tech tree. It's not quite the same thing as being negative toward a new
startup -- most startups have a chance of succeeding if they get users. But
you can't get users with AR without wishing for new advances in technology
that seem beyond startups' capabilities for the moment.

~~~
swolchok
> there's no way to make things darker

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid-
crystal_display#Twisted...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid-
crystal_display#Twisted_nematic_.28TN.29)

~~~
sillysaurus3
I thought so too, but unfortunately this doesn't work either.

The reason it won't work is the same reason scratches on your eyeglasses don't
appear sharp. Your focus is in the distance, so you won't see whatever dimming
has been applied Not unless you use it to darken e.g. an entire quadrant of
your lenses.

Interestingly, this problem applies to text rendering too. It seems unlikely
that you'll be able to project clearly readable text over anything when it's
an inch away from your eye.

~~~
jon_richards
Can you elaborate? Isn't the basis behind VR that you can show different
images to each eye to trick people into thinking they are looking at something
far away? Is there something about the cornea/lens shape that prevents this
from working with AR?

~~~
sillysaurus3
Yeah, so the reason VR works is that it controls the entire scene. The light
being projected towards your eyes is from a consistent focal plane -- the
light comes from a flat surface located exactly N inches away from your eyes.
That means you can focus sharply on it.

AR is a very different beast. In the real world, your focus is usually several
feet away, or sometimes across the room. Your focus also changes almost
instantly. Yet AR still needs to project light toward your eye from exactly N
inches away.

You can simulate this: Find some glasses and put some black tape over part of
the lens. You'll notice the tape doesn't appear sharp and crisp. It's a blur.

(Or just close one eye and put a finger close to your other, and look out in
the distance.)

I'm not sure AR has any hope of rendering text in a readable way. It'd be like
writing some letters on your finger, then putting it up to your eye while
looking out in the distance. Even if the letters glow, so that they're a light
source, you still can't read it at all.

~~~
jon_richards
I didn't think your explanation could be right, since VR headsets are _very_
close to your eyes. Try closing one eye and putting a finger close to the
other. You can't see it in focus even if you don't look out in the distance.

The bit I was missing is that VR headsets use lenses to adjust the angle of
the incoming image to simulate the image being farther away (this is
completely different from the depth perception created by sending different
images to each eye). This video is a great explanation: [https://vr-lens-
lab.com/lenses-for-virtual-reality-headsets/](https://vr-lens-lab.com/lenses-
for-virtual-reality-headsets/)

This does make AR much more difficult, since a lens that adjusts the simulated
image would also adjust the real image behind it, but I don't think it makes
it impossible. There may be a way to simulate a Fresnel lens just for the
simulated image or use miniature one-way mirrors to do so.

Edit: I think hololens actually accomplishes this, but its very complicated:
[http://www.imaginativeuniversal.com/blog/2015/10/18/how-
holo...](http://www.imaginativeuniversal.com/blog/2015/10/18/how-hololens-
displays-work/)

------
jharger
I always find it sad, and kind of ridiculous, when indie game developers quit
everything and live on no money for years trying to make the next big thing.

Making indie games should be about doing something because you love it. Keep a
day job (even part time), then design and build something cool in your spare
time. Don't worry about making money, worry about making something people want
to play, and it will be much more fulfilling.

The game industry, just like any industry, is all about making money. It's not
fun. It's not about self-expression... but doing it as a hobby is often both!
Sometimes people who do it as a hobby end up making money, and that's great,
but don't go in expecting that, because as the article states, it's very
unlikely to happen.

~~~
soverance
I did this - kept a day job as a systems administrator while building a video
game using Unreal Engine 4 (as a solo dev - no team). It took almost three
years to "complete"... and I shipped it on Steam back in Feb. 2017. (it's 75%
off right now during the summer sale!)

Making the game was a brutal experience. Little to no money because I was
taking so much time off work to make the game (I'd work maybe 4-6 hours at my
job, then go home to work on the game). Deteriorated health because I sat for
16+ hours PER DAY in front of the computer. Morale was extremely low because
few people wanted to help me (building a team is super hard) and more often
than not, people I talked to about it just assumed I wasn't even capable of
making a video game, much less a video game business.

I basically just trudged through it. Forced myself to complete it and ship it
publicly. I was rather happy with the end result - the game wasn't perfect,
but it was mine. Player reviews tell a slightly different story for a
countless number of reasons.

The day I the game went live I was so excited... but that emotion quickly
faded as I realized I wasn't going to even come close to my sales goals. To
date, I've sold less than 200 copies. Thousands less than I expected, and not
nearly enough sales to make another game. Literally can't even pay rent on my
tiny apartment for one month using those funds.

About 4 days after launch, I realized my traffic and sales had flat-lined at
zero. I came to the painful realization that I had just spent three years of
my life making huge sacrifices of my time and money to build a product that no
one knew existed and only I really cared about. All of my efforts merely in
vain. Despite numerous post-release product updates, it stayed that way for
months, until yesterday with the summer sale. I've sold a few more copies over
the last 24 hours, but again, I can totally forget about becoming a full-time
gamedev. I literally don't even have the funding or even strength to make
another game - as a solo developer who isn't a unicorn, it simply requires too
much investment for too little return.

Building my game was one of the most influential and exciting experiences of
my life. Trying to make a paying job of it was easily the most depressing path
I've ever walked. I even thought my experience shipping a game in a modern
engine would help me find employment as a gamedev... NOPE! I literally can't
even get a rejection email from most of the hundreds of places I've applied
to. Needless to say, I went back to SysAdmin full time because it's a stable,
paying career. Which is also depressing because it's not really what I'm
passionate about... I'm just good at it.

All the dreams of making a living building video games? Crushed. Forget about
it. If you're able to do this and you're still passionate about it, consider
yourself extremely lucky.

edit - the game is here:
[https://store.steampowered.com/app/428980/Ethereal_Legends/](https://store.steampowered.com/app/428980/Ethereal_Legends/)

~~~
xenadu02
Everyone wants to make games. The game dev shops are flooded daily with young
starry-eyed kids chasing a totally awesome career in game development!

The pay is garbage and the hours are beyond excessive. Unless you pick a
winning studio, stay for 10 years, and that studio has several blockbuster
hits your royalties are worthless.

Take your experience doing games and go for a career in regular software
development. Plenty of people need to integrate 3D engines into their products
and know nothing about it (eg: adding the ability to view a 3d model) and
you'll actually get paid for your work.

As others have pointed out, today's content-rich world only rewards the top 1%
and that incentivizes repeatedly trying with quick projects. Don't spend years
on one thing, slap something together and get it out there. If it isn't an
immediate hit move on to the next thing.

~~~
soverance
Yeah I'm definitely looking for other ways to leverage my 3D skills so that my
gamedev/UE4 knowledge doesn't all go to waste. I currently work as a sysadmin
for an advertising agency, and while I'm doing a lot of Azure and Active
Directory stuff for them right now, I'm thinking I might be able to branch
them into VR/AR advertisements in the future.

I definitely made the mistake and learned my lesson with building Ethereal
Legends - scope and speed are key elements. You have to keep it small and ship
quickly. Allowing the project to grow beyond my ability made for poor results
and long development cycles.

------
indieorindie
It's not too difficulty to make money as an indie. I do seven figures a year
year (profit) following a pretty regular plan, making games you've never heard
of. The market is huge and there are many like me.

In the end, many indies are bad at making games (coding, design) partly
because they're inexperienced, but almost all of them are bad at business
(marketing, advertising, hiring, finance, strategy).

It's probably important to separate indie studios from "indie games" the
genre, which is more about artistic or retro style games that target a more
traditional gaming audience. Common themes involve getting featured in the app
stores and in traditional gaming media outlets, 'superstar' developers, and
very specific genres and art styles. If you want to reliably succeed in this
genre you probably want to have a very public social media presence and try to
make friends who are on the app review boards or are editors of various
publications.

I've never had an app featured in any sort of major store and I don't do tons
of UA, I just build solid games and focus on organic growth and exposure. For
instance, the first decision I make when it comes to a new game is picking a
visual/marketing theme, naming, pre-positioning for keywords, etc. Then I
build a solid game that monetizes. Of course, I take into account how long the
game will take to build, how difficult it will be to maintain, cost of assets,
etc etc too. It helps to reuse game engines to reduce build time and
complexity. You know, the kinds of absolutely regular business decisions you
make in the course of running any business. It's actually a lot more boring
than you'd think making games would be!

Many "indie game" developers have extremely anti-business attitudes when you
talk to them so it's not a big surprise to see many fail. The ones who are
passionate about the business side of things tend to fare a lot better on
average.

~~~
nathan_f77
Hi, would you be willing to give some feedback and advice about a little game
I'm working on? I could really learn a lot from a seasoned game developer like
yourself.

~~~
hesdeadjim
If he isn't willing, I'd be happy to help too. I've been in the industry for
around eight years and have had some pretty big successes (and failures).

~~~
nathan_f77
Awesome, thankyou! This is the game:
[https://sudoblock.com](https://sudoblock.com). It's just a very simple puzzle
game (Sudoku variation), but I've had some good feedback and people seem to
enjoy playing it:

I'm interested in finding a good return-on-investment for a very small
marketing budget. I've thrown some money at FB ads, but I was paying $1 per
click. Most people won't install the game after clicking the ad, and an even
smaller fraction are going to actually pay for it.

I really need to fix the beta web version, all the animations and UI are still
pretty bad. The android version also has some bugs and crashes I need to fix.

The other problem is my app store listings, because they were very rushed. I
don't think my screenshots are very good, and I need to make a trailer video.

My last big marketing idea is to write up a blog post about the things I
learned with React Native, and post that on Reddit and Hacker News. I'm not
sure what I can do after that. I might create a boilerplate project, or even
open source the whole game, but that would be a last resort.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

~~~
hesdeadjim
I downloaded the iOS version and gave it a shot. I've never really enjoyed
Sudoku that much so from that point of view I am not a great tester. I did
grok the concept of the game pretty quickly, though in the tutorial I was
initially confused why it was telling me to drag the block to the puzzle but I
am not allowed to and must hit 'Next' instead.

Anyways, here's some of my thoughts/questions:

How many people have you had play and test the game? Of those people, how many
would fit your target market of Sudoku or Tetris players? What kind of
feedback have you been given? When you say people "seem to enjoy playing it",
how are you judging that? My warning sirens go off if I hear someone say "It's
cool" or something equivalently generic or brief.

What kind of analytics do you have in your game (e.g. Flurry)? Even though you
may not have a lot of users, what do your retention numbers look like? My last
company (Backflip Studios) put out a few puzzle games and what we found was
that the players that stick around are very dedicated and hardcore (and
typically skew older). If you aren't retaining even a few users like this, you
need to consider that your game is simply not appealing or you do not yet have
enough users to draw conclusions.

Your only monetization method besides ads is to remove them. We tried that
strategy as far back as the original Paper Toss, and even with millions of
daily active users we barely had income from it. That trend never changed over
the years or with new games. Ads can make you decent money, but only when you
have a lot of users.

Given your monetization strategy, you will absolutely hemorrhage money if you
try and buy users, especially from Facebook. There are other ad networks that
are more mobile focused that you might try buying users from if you are
willing to buy their crappier inventory.

I would also not rely on a blog post generating any meaningful traffic or
sales, though it certainly can't hurt to try -- it's also fun just to share
knowledge.

All that said, I will not bullshit you: The odds of this game generating you
any meaningful amount of income are very low. Mobile in general is a brutal
market and your game does not really stand out visually when viewed in the app
store. If your analytics for retention are in the double digits, by all means
keep trying to improve the game and market it. At some point however you may
need to consider it a learning experience and move on the next project.

~~~
nathan_f77
Thanks very much, that's incredibly helpful!

I will be redoing the tutorial to make it. That's a good idea about asking the
player to drag the first piece, instead of just showing an animation.

I've had around 1,000 people play the game. My favorite feedback so far from
was a guy who really enjoyed the game, so he shared it with his father and
sister, and now his whole family are playing. But yeah, I also got a lot of
"it's cool", which I don't pay too much attention to.

For analytics, I'm using Fabric Answers and Firebase Analytics. Here are some
of the stats from iOS: [https://imgur.com/a/8zz15](https://imgur.com/a/8zz15)

Those retention numbers look really bad, but I can't say I'm surprised. I'm
also pretty happy that I made $50 from IAPs, because I've never got this far
before.

Maybe my next project should be an RPG or "farming" game that you keep coming
back to every day.

I agree that my monetization strategy is not great, but I don't want to
advantage of people with purchases for "bags of coins" and stuff like that.
But maybe that's the only way to get ahead?

I can understand that your game with millions of DAU might not be able to
support a game studio with salaried employees, but if I extrapolate my own
numbers then millions of users would be bringing in tons of money for a solo
developer. That would be something like $60k USD, which I wouldn't complain
about!

------
Houshalter
This is pretty misleading. He takes the median indie game and shows it doesn't
make money. So what? There are a lot of shit indie games on steam. They have a
serious problem with people just uploading asset flips and other garbage that
isn't intended to be played by anyone. If you eliminate the complete trash
from the list, this game might be in the bottom 20% instead of 50%. And the
actual median indie developer probably makes quite a bit more than that.

In general the world is governed according to power laws. The top 20% of
anything gets 80% of the reward. So you should look at the top 20% of indie
developers at the very least. Its a lot easier to get into the top 20% than it
is to get into the top 1%.

The other consequence of power laws, is that it incentives taking more shots.
If you only ever produce one game, then statistically it will probably fail.
But if you make 5 games, the chance of one of them ending up in the top 20% is
much higher. Just like famous directors will get most of the attention they
get from one film they made out of dozens, or famous writers get most
attention from one book, etc. Even here on HN, most of my upvotes will come
from a handful of comments out of all the ones I've ever written.

~~~
ThrowawayR2
> _median indie game_

No, he takes the median of the _top selling_ indie games. That's a valid
measure.

~~~
Bartweiss
That's Steam's "Indie Games" category, sorted by "top selling". It's not a
list of top sellers.

The difference is that if you click to the bottom, you get games with 20
reviews all reading "crashes on load, money back". If your game doesn't crash
on 50% of startups, you're already not at the same 'median' as this article.

------
psyc
The point about how many people are making games now rings true to me. The
market must be utterly saturated. 25 years ago, I made a PC-only game with
QuickBasic, and uploaded it to AOL. It made $20K.

Now, with a vastly bigger market, unprecedented reach via Twitter, Reddit, and
Facebook, numerous crowdfunding options, numerous gigantic, low-friction game
stores, tools whose power I never could have imagined in the 90's, and 25
years of experience, I literally can't make one single dollar.

But I never feel as actualized as when I'm totally immersed in game dev. It's
immensely rewarding, just definitely not in money.

------
Bjorkbat
I would argue that a sure fire way to make sure your game is more likely to
succeed is actually making sure that your game is something that people
genuinely want to play.

Which kinda goes against the indie mantra of "make what you want to play", but
that mantra only holds 100% if you're doing this as a hobby. Otherwise, it's
"make games that you're interested in and have a solid chance of being bought
by asking potential customers what they think and see how they react to a
simple demo you put together".

Kickstarter is kinda nice in this regard, but most games from there fail
because the game mechanics aren't conveyed very well to potential buyers,
hence why you should really put together a demo for them to play before you
start to really seriously consider the idea.

I would also go even further and say that a solid formula is a game that uses
familiar and fun game mechanics, but then builds on top of that to make
something interesting. Stardew Valley is a great example. It's a Harvest Moon
clone but with some pretty interesting characters with unique personalities.
That's why it made an estimated revenue under $25 million on Steam
([http://www.pcgamer.com/stardew-valley-made-way-more-money-
th...](http://www.pcgamer.com/stardew-valley-made-way-more-money-than-call-of-
duty-on-steam-and-other-2016-sales-insights/))

At the risk of sounding harsh, Positech's games are pretty damn niche in terms
of ideas and in some cases mechanics (look at Democracy 3). They're very
original, it's just that being very original in indie game development doesn't
pay nearly as well as being fairly original.

~~~
mattnewport
The problem is that nobody has really come up with a reliable way to figure
out in advance what people want to play. Even the professional game
development companies with perhaps the best track record of delivering
consistent hits like Blizzard haven't hit on a reliable formula to figure out
what's going to be successful before they invest a ton of resources into
building it.

Not saying you shouldn't bother with market research but when some of the
biggest hits have resulted from people just building what they want to play
and when big companies with a string of previous successes had done their
market research and still released something that bombs I think it's fair to
say there's no simple formula to producing a hit.

~~~
meheleventyone
Most large companies have and have been in business for decades. The key very
much is driven by making what you can sell and understanding that well. Every
bet is not necessarily a success but there are enough that are not only to
sustain these companies but grow them.

Building what you want in the hope it's a crazy viral success is not a very
good or sustainable business model. Pretending that these behemoths that
employ well paid staff don't know what they are doing is just myopic. It's a
long standing myth that you cannot know reasonably well what sort of game will
succeed or work in such a way as to find it. But it's "selling out" to many,
me included and I wish more people could find success on their own terms.
That's just not the commercial reality though.

~~~
mattnewport
I worked at EA for years and have worked at other AAA studios, I've seen the
big companies from the inside and know pretty well how they work, what they do
well and what they don't.

Sure, EA continues to exist because it has more hits than misses (and is
helped in that regard by huge, reliable annual franchises like FIFA) but I've
seen plenty of projects with relatively low expectations become huge hits
(like the original need for speed underground) as well as titles with high
expectations crash and burn (I won't name names). The big companies do a good
enough job to be fairly consistently profitable but they by no means have a
foolproof formula for success. Show me a famous studio without titles that
didn't meet expectations.

------
nathan_f77
I feel like people who work on startups and indie games have a slightly more
sensible form of a gambling addiction.

Even if you don't make any money, you still get a lot of joy from your first
few players and sales, and just creating something useful or fun. You also get
a lot of experience and knowledge that you can put to use on other projects,
or even employment opportunities.

Sure, your game might flop (and mine probably will), but I learned a lot and
had a lot of fun. I think it was worthwhile. I just spent the last 3 months
developing a mobile game [1]. I tell people that I did it to learn React
Native, but it's actually because I wanted it to be successful and make some
money. So far I've earned ~$20 from ads, and ~$50 from the in-app purchase to
remove ads. It's not much, but I think it could be a promising start.

I do agree with the article though; my next app is not going to be a game.

[1] [https://sudoblock.com](https://sudoblock.com)

------
mundo
"An indie game is a lottery ticket that takes a year or two to scratch off."
\-- my brother, who is currently around month 20 of scratching

------
zzalpha
So, basically like every other artform.

Be it indie music, indie movies, or various physical artforms, unless you win
the lottery by hitting it big (of which a significant factor is pure luck),
you ain't gettin' rich.

Is this surprising to anyone?

~~~
debacle
Game development is likely much more meritocratic than painting. Quality is
objective, and varies greatly from game to game.

~~~
obstinate
Quality is objective? I don't think so, not unless you mean something
different by "quality" than most people.

~~~
verbatim
Quality in video games is certainly more objective than in painting. There are
a lot of aspects of a video game that are not fully subjective: does it have a
control scheme that feels good and generally works, does it run well, does it
have a reasonable difficulty level or on-ramp for learning to play it, etc.

In judging painting, you don't end up with a lot of complaints about things
like "I like the way it looked but it kept falling off of my wall", whereas if
you have an unstable game...

~~~
meheleventyone
If you find your self using the words "feels good" in a sentence you are very
much on the subjective side of things. Likewise terms like "generally works",
"runs well" and "reasonable difficulty" will all mean different things to
different people. Objective items might be things like uses 4xMSAA, is
presented in the first person and uses 'X' to jump. Even still once you
consider how these choices effect the game quality you are straight back to
subjectivity.

Painting can equally be criticised on technical merit, and as with games that
can still be very subjective even though many would like to pretend otherwise.

------
inDigiNeous
The games market is indeed an interesting one, in that sense that we have in
close memory the success of the first true mobile games, and the stories
behind those, but at the same time, the whole market and technology side and
everything else has developed in such a fast pace compared to what we remember
in our collective memory of the success stories, so many people still believe
they can repeat that success.

When in reality, companies like Supercell who are huge have been making games
for 10+ years before their first hit, pushing out hundreds of games as a
collective before finding a recipe that works in a way that let's you suck
money out of the market. It all can create this illusion that making
successful games can be possible from your home garage, when in reality it's
hugely likely in any short time span, maybe if you stick with for 10-15 years
you will find your niche and specialize in that enough to stand out.

I've worked at a mobile game company, where they did like 50 games a year,
which was crazy, and maybe like 2-3 of those made it even relatively
succesful. It's indeed a very risky market. Wouldn't jump it, unless I was
part of some team of super game makers who have the potential to really make
something beautiful people want to play.

Wouldn't recommend anyone to make games either, I mean, do you really have a
super unique idea nobody else has thought of or implemented already ? If you
do, go ahead, but yeah. Luckily most people do it for the passion of just
creating something, and not expecting money out of it, that I can understand
and even is something to celebrate.

------
hacker_9
_" This is a WINNER TAKES ALL market. You are either in the top 0.1% of indie
game developers, or you are unemployed, with an expensive hobby where you make
effectively free games."_

Game development is a fast moving business, and the goal posts are constantly
moving if you are trying to make money in it. Remember when the only games
phones had was 2d snake? Remember when the GameBoy was in black and white?
Remember when you had to write your own Game Engine to get anything done? If
you don't keep up with the change, you get left behind.

 _" This is nobodies ‘fault’. Steam didn’t cause it, Unity didn’t cause it.
games got easier to make, and more people got access to PCs, development kits,
computer skills and broadband."_

With the rise of general game engines, game dev truly has never been easier.
Thesedays I can pay roughly ~$70 and get a basic FPS game which I can then add
to. That is outrageous. But here Cliffski talks as if there is some upper
limit to games - but there isn't. If everyone is saving the same amount of
time by using more efficient tools, then your only option is to spend that
extra time on adding more content to your game than your competitors.

 _" almost NOBODY covered my latest game (in terms of gaming websites). Its
extremely, extremely tough right now."_

Cliffski creates very niche games, and it looks like his latest game is a car-
themed Factorio, without any of the enemies and just pure stats. In fact, all
of his games seem very political or manufacturing based. One trailer even
talked about taxes. This stuff just isn't going appeal to a mass market of
gamers who want to escape reality for a few hours.

I do agree that if anyone is thinking of becoming an indie dev though, then
they need to understand the market they are entering into. For example the VR
market at the moment is small, so creating games for that space will result in
a bigger splash and potentially more money.

The Linux gaming space is also expanding. Steam stats [1] say about roughly 1%
of all users are on Linux, doesn't sound like a lot until you see that in the
past 48 hours, Steam had about 13 million concurrent active users, which gives
you a potential market of 130, 000 linux users.

There is also the Switch, another new gaming platform which is open for
business to indies. Again you just have to keep up with where the market is
going.

[1]
[http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/](http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/)

------
hesdeadjim
Basing your entire argument off the middle point of the top sellers list is
pretty silly. It's a long tail even for "top sellers" where the top 50 sell
more than the rest combined.

Yes it's a tough market, but averages lie and if your game is actually quality
your odds of making at least a decent return (or break even) are much better
than most of the shovelware that inhabits the lesser traveled areas of Steam.

------
coldcode
Most things don't make money. That doesn't mean you won't. Why would anyone
play a frustrating game where you die every 2 seconds? With crappy graphics?
Or should I say flappy graphics. Of course for every one of those there are
1000 that earn nothing (most I ever made was $20). But building games is still
a worth task, just don't assume 50K a day income.

------
rm_-rf_slash
Same lesson can apply to most mobile apps now that all the ones that matter
have already been made.

Indie development is somewhere between a crapshoot and a sucker's market. The
costs are too high and the rewards are at best uncertain and at worst paltry
to nonexistent.

I think it's a good time to point out that the most successful people during
the California Gold Rush weren't prospectors - they were the ones who sold
food, lodgings, supplies, and other needs to the prospectors, who worked their
asses off just to make ends meet.

~~~
2017throw
Who made money on oil drilling rush?

------
Mz
_You are reading the thoughts of a guy who was coding since age 11, has 36
years coding experience, has shipped over a dozen games, several of which made
millions of dollars, got into indie dev VERY early, knows a lot of industry
people, and has a relatively high public profile. And still almost NOBODY
covered my latest game (in terms of gaming websites). Its extremely, extremely
tough right now._

I am a content producer and I hope to eventually make games, someday. Yes,
it's tough to monetize. But this sounds more like sour grapes than a
substantive piece about the realities of making indie games. The earlier
numbers are, at best, incredibly hand-wavy and he essentially admits to making
them up whole cloth:

 _I’d guess 90% of that belongs to maybe a handful, at best 4 people? (I have
ZERO idea, this is my guesswork)_

It is one thing to infer and have soft figures. It is another to make strong
assertions about the entire industry and back them up with numbers pulled out
of thin air that don't even qualify as "soft."

~~~
gedrap
> incredibly hand-wavy and he essentially admits to making them up whole cloth

I get what you are saying, and I agree to some extent. But I think the key in
this post was that the 'average' game (from the very middle of indie top
sellers list) makes next to no money. Checking it did not require making many
assumptions. And this point is valid.

~~~
Mz
Well, I am trying to fact check this article with more knowledgeable people
than myself from a perspective of "so, can you actually make meaningful money
making indie games" and the answers I am getting suggest yes, you can.

I am looking at this information as someone who wants to actually make a
living doing things online. I don't need to become a millionaire. I just want
a middle class income. I used to make $100/day at my corporate job (not
$100/hour like a lot of programmers) and I started at above minimum wage.
Plus, having that corporate job was incredibly expensive for me. So, I need
less than $100/day to compete with my old corporate job.

I am actually looking for hard numbers of "can you reasonably support yourself
doing things like this?" Maybe not with making games being the only thing, but
as part of the picture.

This article is a little bit like saying "Actors are not capable of supporting
themselves at all unless they are big Hollywood stars." Maybe that is true of
acting, I don't know, but it isn't actually true of indie games. It can be
done, though it no doubt is a tougher market than the one he entered however
many years ago.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
This isn't specifically targeted at indie apps but
[https://medium.com/@sm_app_intel/a-bunch-of-average-app-
reve...](https://medium.com/@sm_app_intel/a-bunch-of-average-app-revenue-data-
and-why-you-should-ignore-it-2bea283d37fc) gives a good overview. The main
message is that there's such an immense skew to the top earning apps that the
average earning can be above the 90th percentile earning; so if you want to
earn average app income you have to be in the top 10% of apps.

I was surprised when the article was written they were estimating $2M a day
income for the top earning game app (Clash Of Clans).

~~~
Mz
Thanks. Upon skim, this looks sort of like an app-specific re-hash of "How to
lie with statistics" (an excellent book, btw).

Personally, I am more interested in finding some sort of meaningful info on
how to make money on games or apps at all. Yes, I know it _can_ be done. I am
interested in figuring out _how_ it is done.

~~~
MortenK
Check out indiehackers.com there's a ton of case stories you might find
interesting.

~~~
Mz
thanks.

------
drawkbox
If you are making a game and it is good but doesn't sell, at a minimum you
have something in your resume/project list that you can control that helps
your own personal product. Then you can use that project to get contracts,
clients or other funding/income to help fund games or products.

Finishing and publishing a good game that you enjoy is never a waste of time.
Finishing anything, making products, and launching them on your own is a great
skill to have, very desired in the market, shipping many games is even better.

But I agree, go in with the assumption that the game may actually lose money
in terms of time put in to revenues. Direct revenues of the current title is
short-term thinking on something that can help long-term in other ways.

------
debacle
But they do. The question isn't whether _every_ indie game makes money, but
rather if the long tail of indie games is similar to the long tail of AAA
titles.

It might be. Even if it isn't, indie games have a lot going for them. The
teams are generally far smaller, the games are more unencumbered creatively,
and the community is generally very grateful.

You could probably make a similar article called "MMO games don't make money"
and make the same comparison against World of Warcraft vs the standard MMO.

------
codeulike
For an alternative view, here's a talk by Folmer Kelly. In the talk he
discusses the idea that mobile games either sink without trace or are huge
efforts that makes millions. He says there is a 'quiet middle' and that it is
possible to quietly make a living from games without aiming to be a superstar.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1rrWp-
BxcNs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1rrWp-BxcNs)

------
didibus
The truth today, is that the internet makes it very easy for anyone to compare
things against all others. Add to that the fact that certain games are clearly
better, and that most games of a similar genre and quality are pretty much
interchangeable.

This means that you'd need to make a game which is unique against all others,
but also clearly better and of higher quality. If you can't do that, you'll be
lost at sea.

------
jokoon
I only want to make a game because I think the idea and the technical
challenges makes it interesting, and also because I don't see such kind of
game around, and because I would like to play such game.

I would not dare trying to make a game that just look like other games, or if
it doesn't have features that makes it unique. What would be the point?

------
rasz
>This is a WINNER TAKES ALL market

No, this is good games win market. PUBG is actually a very FUN game to play,
and appeals to broad market unlike tax return filing emulators author of this
article likes to make.

------
gozur88
You're definitely not going to get rich making a "me too" game, which is what
you find on Steam, mostly. Take the example he worked out - an RPG with
zombies. No matter how technically competent you are there's no way to rise
above the crowd starting with that kind of concept.

------
santaclaus
Monument Valley netted a few million [1].

[1] [https://www.polygon.com/2015/1/15/7552899/monument-valley-
sa...](https://www.polygon.com/2015/1/15/7552899/monument-valley-sales-costs)

~~~
rspeer
That's pretty much the point. There are a handful of indie games that made
their creators a lot of money. You can probably name most of them. But they
are no longer representative outcomes from making an indie game.

------
ensiferum
's/games/anything/g'

------
brianpgordon
I don't understand the right axis of the chart. The price of the game
increased linearly with the number of owners?

~~~
jsnell
It's graphing two data sets on different scales. One is the cumulative number
of units sold over time, as a bar chart in blue, and as per the legend the
scale for that is on the left axis. The other is the price of the game over
time as a line graph, in orange, with the scale being on the right axis.

~~~
brianpgordon
Wow, that's awful. The orange line is completely constant. Why is the right
axis labeled with 16 different values?

------
lemmings19
Read the comments of that post. They're a painful confirmation of what the
author is saying.

------
Blackstone4
I imagine an indie game is way more work than building a B2B web app?

~~~
mipmap04
I don't think they're really comparable. With a B2B web app, you generally
then also have to run a business which is a whole other set of complexity that
indie games developers don't really have to worry about since once the game is
launched, your active work on the game drops considerably.

~~~
rspeer
Except now you launch the game halfway through its development.

This results in a lot of bad deals for consumers, but it's true that the fact
that people will buy games in an unfinished state makes a lot more games
possible, and makes taking risks with games possible.

------
otempomores
I shall become a model. I shall become a moviestar. I shall become a
gamedesigner.

I became a hostess. I became a pornstar. I became a regular programmer. Best
worst industry ever.

------
SurrealSoul
I believe games in general don't make money. Hype and 'interactions'
(streamers, youtubers, water-cooler talk) really make the cash, the game is
just a conduit for them. Of course it takes a decent game to recruit those two
concepts, but you can polish a turd enough to make it work ie: AAA games

~~~
bpicolo
AAA games are making vastly more money than people streaming AAA games.
Blizzard did 6.5+ billion and EA did 4+ billion last year

