14 ms·

Indie games don't make money

155 points by doppp 9y ago

rm_-rf_slash 9y ago
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.
- matheweis 9y ago
  > I think it's a good time to point out that the most successful people ... were the ones who sold food, lodgings, supplies, and other needs to the prospectors Indeed, my most successful side project to date targeted developers & designers rather than end-users.
- 2017throw 9y ago
  Who made money on oil drilling rush?
  - salesguy222 9y ago
    It wasn't the dudes operating the wells who made meaningful money from the oil boom. Rather it was the fat cats who financed it.
- pbhjpbhj 9y ago
  >mobile apps now that all the ones that matter have already been made // Reminds me of the people in the late 1800s saying everything that had been discovered in physics had already been discovered. I suspect you'll find that the supporting suppliers in the gold rush made more than a very large percent of prospectors but that the top prospectors still managed to come out on top?
jharger 9y ago
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.
- hopfog 9y ago
  Absolutely true. I would take it one step further - don't even worry about making something people want to play. Make something YOU want to play. The best experience of my life has been making an MMORPG per that motto. It's now at a point where I get completely absorbed playing it, to the extent where I forget that I'm playing my own game. It's a really awesome feeling. I don't have any expectations on making money off it, or even have players at all. That other people seem to enjoy it as well is only a bonus.
  - owlninja 9y ago
    link?
    - hopfog 9y ago
      I actually had to take the server down a few days ago due to a bug crashing it every time someone logged on so you can't play it right now but here you go: http://canvaslegacy.com/ http://canvaslegacy.com/ The bug is fixed but I forgot to branch the repo when I started on the new patch so can't deploy anything right now (since I'm working in master). It's a browser game that requires no account so normally you would be able to open the link and start playing immediately. Some media in case anyone is interested: https://www.facebook.com/pg/canvaslegacy/photos/ https://www.facebook.com/pg/canvaslegacy/photos/
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
SurrealSoul 9y ago
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 9y ago
  AAA games are making vastly more money than people streaming AAA games. Blizzard did 6.5+ billion and EA did 4+ billion last year
psyc 9y ago
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.
zzalpha 9y ago
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 9y ago
  Game development is likely much more meritocratic than painting. Quality is objective, and varies greatly from game to game.
  - obstinate 9y ago
    Quality is objective? I don't think so, not unless you mean something different by "quality" than most people.
    - verbatim 9y ago
      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...
      - watwut 9y ago
        "Reasonable difficulty level" is not something objective. It depends greatly on who plays the game. Whether the game looks good is as subjective add judging painting, whether it sounds good as judging music. One can dislike game look and it can spoil his experience the same way painting style can.
      - the_af 9y ago
        There is objective quality in painting as well, such as the proper application of technique. And those things you mention about games seem fully subjective to me. A more objective property would be "fails to run" or "crashes often", which cannot happen to a painting.
hesdeadjim 9y ago
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.
hacker_9 9y ago
"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/
mundo 9y ago
"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
candu 9y ago
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.
- zzalpha 9y ago
  This is the sad reality behind much of content creation nowadays. Don't be fooled. It's always been this way. In fact, there was a time when content creators didn't get rich at all. If they were lucky they made a living, often due to patronage. Not to mention those who simply inherited or married into wealth. The millionaire artist is a very modern invention.
  - MagnumOpus 9y ago
    > The millionaire artist is a very modern invention. I actually wonder how many pre-20th century examples there really are... Artisan artists who made piecemeal works of art - like Rubens, say - could make a comfortable living, but it takes mass media to gain real wealth. I can only think of a handful of fiction writers who got seriously wealthy just from writing alone back then - Charles Dickens, Jules Verne, maybe a few others.
  - dkersten 9y ago
    The millionaire artist is a very modern invention. Michelangelo was very wealthy and paid well for his artworks.
    - zzalpha 9y ago
debacle 9y ago
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.
Blackstone4 9y ago
I imagine an indie game is way more work than building a B2B web app?
- mipmap04 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    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.
Bjorkbat 9y ago
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-than-call-of-duty-on-steam-and-other-2016-sales-insights/ http://www.pcgamer.com/stardew-valley-made-way-more-money-th...) 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 9y ago
  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 9y ago
Mz 9y ago
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 9y ago
  > 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 9y ago
    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.
ensiferum 9y ago
's/games/anything/g'
coldcode 9y ago
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.
indieorindie 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    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 9y ago
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
rocky1138 9y ago
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 9y ago
  are you single? people with families don't typically have enough time to do what you're doing.
  - rocky1138 9y ago
    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.
jokoon 9y ago
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 9y ago
>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.
inDigiNeous 9y ago
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.
Houshalter 9y ago
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 9y ago
  > median indie game No, he takes the median of the _top selling_ indie games. That's a valid measure.
  - wmf 9y ago
    Given that the list is 348 pages long, I assume that's actually all indie games sorted by sales. So the middle of the list should be the median game.
  - Bartweiss 9y ago
    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.
- Bartweiss 9y ago
santaclaus 9y ago
Monument Valley netted a few million [1]. [1] https://www.polygon.com/2015/1/15/7552899/monument-valley-sales-costs https://www.polygon.com/2015/1/15/7552899/monument-valley-sa...
- rspeer 9y ago
  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.
brianpgordon 9y ago
I don't understand the right axis of the chart. The price of the game increased linearly with the number of owners?
- jsnell 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    Wow, that's awful. The orange line is completely constant. Why is the right axis labeled with 16 different values?
codeulike 9y ago
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
drawkbox 9y ago
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.
otempomores 9y ago
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.
lemmings19 9y ago
Read the comments of that post. They're a painful confirmation of what the author is saying.
didibus 9y ago
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.
gozur88 9y ago
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.

155 points by doppp 9y ago

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.

matheweis 9y ago
> I think it's a good time to point out that the most successful people ... were the ones who sold food, lodgings, supplies, and other needs to the prospectors Indeed, my most successful side project to date targeted developers & designers rather than end-users.
2017throw 9y ago
Who made money on oil drilling rush?
- salesguy222 9y ago
  It wasn't the dudes operating the wells who made meaningful money from the oil boom. Rather it was the fat cats who financed it.
pbhjpbhj 9y ago
>mobile apps now that all the ones that matter have already been made // Reminds me of the people in the late 1800s saying everything that had been discovered in physics had already been discovered. I suspect you'll find that the supporting suppliers in the gold rush made more than a very large percent of prospectors but that the top prospectors still managed to come out on top?

jharger 9y ago

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.

hopfog 9y ago
Absolutely true. I would take it one step further - don't even worry about making something people want to play. Make something YOU want to play. The best experience of my life has been making an MMORPG per that motto. It's now at a point where I get completely absorbed playing it, to the extent where I forget that I'm playing my own game. It's a really awesome feeling. I don't have any expectations on making money off it, or even have players at all. That other people seem to enjoy it as well is only a bonus.
- owlninja 9y ago
  link?
  - hopfog 9y ago
    I actually had to take the server down a few days ago due to a bug crashing it every time someone logged on so you can't play it right now but here you go: http://canvaslegacy.com/ http://canvaslegacy.com/ The bug is fixed but I forgot to branch the repo when I started on the new patch so can't deploy anything right now (since I'm working in master). It's a browser game that requires no account so normally you would be able to open the link and start playing immediately. Some media in case anyone is interested: https://www.facebook.com/pg/canvaslegacy/photos/ https://www.facebook.com/pg/canvaslegacy/photos/

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

SurrealSoul 9y ago

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 9y ago
AAA games are making vastly more money than people streaming AAA games. Blizzard did 6.5+ billion and EA did 4+ billion last year

psyc 9y ago

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.

zzalpha 9y ago

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 9y ago
Game development is likely much more meritocratic than painting. Quality is objective, and varies greatly from game to game.
- obstinate 9y ago
  Quality is objective? I don't think so, not unless you mean something different by "quality" than most people.
  - verbatim 9y ago
    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...
    - watwut 9y ago
      "Reasonable difficulty level" is not something objective. It depends greatly on who plays the game. Whether the game looks good is as subjective add judging painting, whether it sounds good as judging music. One can dislike game look and it can spoil his experience the same way painting style can.
    - the_af 9y ago
      There is objective quality in painting as well, such as the proper application of technique. And those things you mention about games seem fully subjective to me. A more objective property would be "fails to run" or "crashes often", which cannot happen to a painting.

hesdeadjim 9y ago

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.

hacker_9 9y ago

"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/

mundo 9y ago

"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

candu 9y ago

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.

zzalpha 9y ago
This is the sad reality behind much of content creation nowadays. Don't be fooled. It's always been this way. In fact, there was a time when content creators didn't get rich at all. If they were lucky they made a living, often due to patronage. Not to mention those who simply inherited or married into wealth. The millionaire artist is a very modern invention.
- MagnumOpus 9y ago
  > The millionaire artist is a very modern invention. I actually wonder how many pre-20th century examples there really are... Artisan artists who made piecemeal works of art - like Rubens, say - could make a comfortable living, but it takes mass media to gain real wealth. I can only think of a handful of fiction writers who got seriously wealthy just from writing alone back then - Charles Dickens, Jules Verne, maybe a few others.
- dkersten 9y ago
  The millionaire artist is a very modern invention. Michelangelo was very wealthy and paid well for his artworks.
  - zzalpha 9y ago

debacle 9y ago

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.

Blackstone4 9y ago

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

mipmap04 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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.

Bjorkbat 9y ago

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-than-call-of-duty-on-steam-and-other-2016-sales-insights/ http://www.pcgamer.com/stardew-valley-made-way-more-money-th...) 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 9y ago
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 9y ago

Mz 9y ago

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 9y ago
> 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 9y ago
  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.

ensiferum 9y ago

's/games/anything/g'

coldcode 9y ago

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.

indieorindie 9y ago

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 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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 9y ago

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

rocky1138 9y ago

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 9y ago
are you single? people with families don't typically have enough time to do what you're doing.
- rocky1138 9y ago
  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.

jokoon 9y ago

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 9y ago

>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.

inDigiNeous 9y ago

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.

Houshalter 9y ago

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 9y ago
> median indie game No, he takes the median of the _top selling_ indie games. That's a valid measure.
- wmf 9y ago
  Given that the list is 348 pages long, I assume that's actually all indie games sorted by sales. So the middle of the list should be the median game.
- Bartweiss 9y ago
  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.
Bartweiss 9y ago

santaclaus 9y ago

Monument Valley netted a few million [1]. [1] https://www.polygon.com/2015/1/15/7552899/monument-valley-sales-costs https://www.polygon.com/2015/1/15/7552899/monument-valley-sa...

rspeer 9y ago
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.

brianpgordon 9y ago

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

jsnell 9y ago
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 9y ago
  Wow, that's awful. The orange line is completely constant. Why is the right axis labeled with 16 different values?

codeulike 9y ago

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

drawkbox 9y ago

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.

otempomores 9y ago

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.

lemmings19 9y ago

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

didibus 9y ago

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.

gozur88 9y ago

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.