
Revenue Updates for A Dark Room et. al - bemmu
http://amirrajan.net/app-dev/2015/11/13/adr-revenue-updates/
======
zubspace
So he has a net income of about 150k first year for a successful game. You
also need to factor in already spent development time, but on paper this
sounds ok. But the second year the net income dips down to 40k. Oops!

How long can you do this? Is this sustainable? You probably have to churn out
successful games year after year for the rest of your life. But this is a
gamble. What happens, if one game is a failure? One year of development just
went down the drain. Oops!

So, how can you survive as indie game developer? What I believe:

1) Either you do this for fun in your spare time. But this gets more difficult
the older you get, if you consider family and children. Finishing a polished
game that way is possible but tough, I guess. If you're doing this for fun,
maybe release the game for free.

2) You try to copy as much stuff from the previous game as possible and try to
go for a short release cycle. You go for the long tail, so the more games you
release the better! The result: 455 total games per day on the app-store
([http://www.pocketgamer.biz/metrics/app-
store/](http://www.pocketgamer.biz/metrics/app-store/)). Good luck competing
with them.

3) You go in full-time. Yeah right... My wife would declare me insane for
doing this.

The bad thing: regardless which path you take,it takes a lot of time and
dedication. And in most cases, there's no money and no reward waiting for you.
Most people do not even consider spending a buck for your endless evenings
spent in front of your monitor trying to make something entertaining.

Ain't this sad?

Previous discussion on reddit:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/3syzuc](https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/3syzuc)

~~~
emerongi
It was 65k from both of his games combined though.

You have to also consider that his games have been featured on the app store
multiple times - and he's not even making that much. It's a risky path, but it
can pay off if you work hard and are smart about it (e.g. I'd try to build
communities around my games that I could get to play my next games as well,
immediately getting them up from the bottom of the app store where nobody
goes).

------
mkesper
I find these statistics depressing when considering the wealth you can get out
of really much simpler games
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10254187](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10254187))

~~~
mikekchar
Bah. You can make even more money selling toothpaste. The guy is making a
living writing games that he wants to write. Everything after that is gravy,
IMHO.

