How many of you makes unity games for a living?

While I fully agreed with your message, I'm dropping my 2 cents on this as language can be tricky depending of your culture or your nation. Sure the whole "indie" thing accounts for the whole (not so)"underground" culture in the English language but the term "independent" still gets its full business meaning in French ("indépendant") and in Dutch ("zelfstandig"). If you work as registered business (in sole proprietorship), you'll say "I'm an independent" (wether you're a plumber or a game dev) and as such you work for money. Otherwise you would be called an "artist" with all the connotations it implies (like the stereotype of the "misfit starving artist").

 

Hmm -- I never considered DAZ to be a real option -- like, I kind of look down on it. Am I just being prejudice?

 

For me independant means that people can make games wich big companies will not make.

 

I guess so As a marketplace you'll get way more exposure for your 3d models (the regular sales puts a good spotlight on the products) than on the Unity asset store. I saw recently an item like your "gargoyle" which was directly featured on the top of the store frontpage. The selling prices are surely not in the same range but as the assets there are only meant for rendering primarly.... (you can do some pricey "game licensing" but I doubt many DAZ users take this option). Also, DAZ has been updated a few months ago with a brand new render engine from Nvidia (the iRay) so all the PBR stuff from Unity5 can be adapted for more "realistic" renders in DAZ.

Bonus: you won't have to care about numbers of polys, textures size, optimization, etc: bigger is better

PS: as most of the stuff is generally divided between sci-fi, present times and fantasy so you can already cater to roughly 1/3rd of the market

 

i have created a game like "Block it"

 

As an accomplished artist as well I was prejudiced about using such but as a marketplace a good artist can make a buck in it. The talents we have are actually quite rare and in demand in the right venues.

 

I found back an interesting article in my bookmarks about the use of 3D renders for 2D artwork (the thread is going off-topic but well )
http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/Junx...of_a_Hidden_Object_Game_2D_background_art.php

 

Dragon Age 2 made millions of dollars.

 

It all depends on how you define a success / failure. The game itself seems to be the one many fans of the series dislike (note: not "like the least" out of the three, but actually dislike).

Does making millions of dollars but being dislike by fans equal a success? I'd argue it doesn't, especially since you won't know how you feel about the game until after you buy it. The publisher can still make millions of dollars even if the player base absolutely hates the game.

 

So it's nothing comparable to an indie's experience.

 

I know there are a bunch of full time devs out there, but I don't think you're likely to find them on the forums much. They're much too busy doing development, marketing, planning future games, supporting already released games, dealing with banks/investors/crowdfunding to have time to spend on a forum with hobbyists and such. Their customers aren't here. They might pop in to the scripting or asset store forums though.

The people here are definitely customers for asset store products! So you're likely to find some people making a living off of that here.

 

I just test games professionally. Everything else is a hobby.

 

Well that ain't true, we have hippocoder long standing dev, Oni, ZombieG who works for a massive AAA there's a metric ton of them. Although a fair few who used to post here and don't anymore, I met a lot of really cool awesome dev's through this forum!>

 

Well I defer to you then- I haven't been around as long. Hippocoder was the only one I could think of that I see with any regularity.

 

The Unity forums provides me a valuable means for procrastination. (though at work I call it "research")

 

This idea gets floated around the forums a lot, but it doesn't make sense to me. Would you also assume that those of us who make a living doing development never watch our favorite TV shows, go out to dinner, visit friends? We do tend to spend a crazy amount of time working, but like everyone else on the planet, we have downtime.