It possible to make money

Hi,

I've had my working hours cut down from 4 weeks a month to 3 weeks a month which means I'm obviously earning a lot less each month now. Now with the week I'm not in work, was wondering is it possible to create simple indie games a make some sort of extra income as well as keeping my job I do now albeit 3 weeks out of 4 now?

I've dabbled in games for a very long time, but only as a hobby. I was writing this game a while back but never finished it, would you think this if finished could make any money?

https://steg90.itch.io/hell-hole

and also one I have been doing (converting to unity at the moment):

https://steg90.itch.io/vast-space

Any advice is much appreciated.

 

Assets seem more lucrative. That's where I am headed with my next project. You seem to have experience with procedurally generated content, perhaps you could do something like that?

Otherwise you could develop any number or quality of small games. Make em' quickly, fun to play, and designed to generate some income without too much expense of the player. Something else you could do with two projects under your belt: freelance for other developers. The world is your oyster especially with in demand skills.

 

Many thanks, thinking the first game hell hole would be quicker to complete, the last game is pretty big. Also hell hole runs on mobiles too ;-) Wouldn't mind freelancing but where do you go about doing that?

Yeah, done some procedural stuff, hell hole is totally procedural and only uses one game object for the mesh so very quick and levels can be huge.

I've got over 20 years software development experience (10 C#, 14 C++, 11 Java, 3 JavaScript). At the moment I train developers in these languages - I've also just moved into doing Mulesoft

 

I would say it definitely is possible to make money from game dev related activities. However, I also think a lot of people confuse possible with easy.

It is possible to make money building wooden lawn ornaments and selling them. Or numerous other things. Difference is most of those other options don't have literally millions of people who hope to make money from doing them.

It is the reason this is quite likely one of the hardest ways to make money simply because so many people came in creating games and flooding the stores with games made in anywhere from a couple of weeks to many years.

Anyone has the chance to make some money (50 cents, $3, $30) but the vast majority will never make any meaningful amount of money.

Take a look at the mobile stores new releases, Steam new releases, Itch.io new releases etc to get an accurate view of just how huge the supply of games is currently. And realize most of the games you see at these places regardless of how solidly they are programmed or how good they look are largely ignored. Lost in the ocean of existing games and the flood of new games.

This is something I have seen people go wrong with. They see people selling games and mistakenly start thinking "they are probably selling 100 copies per day even if they are only selling 10 copies per day heck that is still worth it!" Well if you read up on people or simply talk with them the majority yes have games for sale but don't even sell 10 copies in a week or even in a month.

I think @Braineeee has the right idea. You'd perhaps have much better success focusing on assets but perhaps even that market is flooded now. One thing you might consider is using your programming experience perhaps setting up a coaching program, creating courses on Udemy or other places teaching programming. Creating very thorough very good tutorials and selling them. Play to your strengths basically.

 

There are plenty of websites for Freelancers, such as Freelancer.com among others

And I can't resist sharing this little secret. Forgot where I heard it, but the people who do the things that nobody else is are the ones who become very successful in life.

Bill Gates and Steve Jobs are/were both tech billionaires before any of us were even old enough to imagine creating an OS.

 

It's becoming harder by the month for indies to make money, and this should concern Unity as well. In general, top indies all over twitter are reporting that steam overall has resulted in less income. Couple this with store fragmentation like discord, epic etc and you will probably never reach the top 10 unless you're the 1% of indie or AAA.

1% of indie is still a large amount of small studios, just it's probably not going to be you.

One of the major benefits of less store choice, has always been: your customers are all in one place, buying it from one place, so your game gets charted and seen by yet more customers. It's why I've always rolled my eyes hard at indies striking out at itch or other stores because they mistakenly believe spreading all over will somehow result in more cash. That's only useful in the long tail, not for growth period.

In any case you are not going to make money that will likely pay the bills. You might make some nice money on the side though, if you realise that's what it should probably be and tune your dev times accordingly.

A full time indie in 2019 just starting will get mauled.

 

It seems like every week I come across a story either shared by a friend or on Twiter or wherever about an Indie company shutting down. Granted there are usually several people and they spent years working on their game that upon release was met with sales far below even the worst case scenarios they had planned for. And many of these were relying on publishers but even that couldn't sell enough copies to justify all of the expense of developing the game / provide enough cash to fund the next one.

Now personally I just started on January 1st and am currently only using itch. But I also view it as a long & expensive process over many different games and continual investment of money & time slowly gaining ground bit by bit to carve out some microscopic slice of market share. Like any other business I have built except this one yes I do think it is more challenging.

I don't have all of the answers for sure only can go by my own experience in the past, currently and what I hear when talking with other Indies or simply reading things they post, etc. I think to have a snowball's chance in hell of succeeding a person needs to accept it will be a long slow process and an expensive process. Just to get to a decent level of a business. And my ambitions seem quite low compared to most. Lol

 

To me, while it my sound cruel what I will write, with current market economy, seams better to sell assets, and make money of people, who try sell games. While this is normal business practice, you are probably make more from selling few assets, than having some random 1k download of mobile game, if the game is just meh/new (means not in top ranking).

I know is not always possible, but would you not be considering looking for different job? That seams like good opportunity for change, and self promotion. Means get job with better salary.

 

Many, many thanks for all the input and it is like what I would have thought too. Back in my day way back, I wrote games for Commodore 64 in 6510 which was so much fun and worked for gaming companies then for a couple of years before college and uni. The job I do now pays well even when doing 3 weeks out of 4, I just need something in the week I don't work and thought indie dev could have helped but that was more a dream as like what's been said, millions of people are doing it, some writing excellent games that are just overlooked.

The assets seems a better way possibly, but then need to do research on what assets to create, some I see are really amazing. As for writing courses say for Udemy, I've looked down that and if I'm honest not sure I've got the patience to put a course together and then there are so many courses on there relevant to what I'd have to write and also the crazy sales Udemy do every week courses beings sold for £9.95.

I just can't get away from game development because it is something I started my programming life with as a 12 year old writing games on the C64, it is in my blood lol, it is addictive.

Maybe I need to look at freelance work and leave the indie stuff just as a hobby and nothing more but before that maybe I should look at writing some assets, but which?!

Many thanks again for all the input, so much appreciated.

 

The massive problem with game development (and unity) is that game dev is highly romanticized. You tell someone you make games, they go: "What?! Show me!". The AAA industry had long been a difficult field "get in to" because it was difficult and requires specialized computer skills at a time when most people still most everything analog (read: before smartphones). The other part of that is that these companies took advantage of the workforce, simply because everyone knew they could get new employees because its such a desired profession.

I see it as a problem because for what was once an enjoyable hobby could become a career. Unity came along and then everyone could make games, and suddenly nobody could do it for a living at least in the developed world.

I hate to say it but I think game dev should never have been made so easy... its a lot like rock n roll in the 1980's, country music today, and photography before digital cameras.

This goes for anything but it was an expensive hobby to get in to, but if you could do it well you could make fortunes. As time went on we found companies growing and looking to increase their market share, by making it more accessible. Hence competition for professional work went way, way up.

If game dev had been easy to get into nobody would do it (hence nobody is making more than a few $$). If someone really valued getting into the industry they would.

 

Yep, game development seems to have become like anybody can do it with these gaming engines we have. I don't do 3d stuff with Unity for the fact that I can't do level design nor do 3d models and can't pay somebody to do them, also, there doesn't seem to be much coding in the 3d stuff now as the engine takes care of most of it. I use to use DirectX then Direct3D and wrote my own 3d engines, now that isn't required and cos of this, lots of people can create (note not write) a game using these gaming engines. I use to create BSPs, portals, quad trees, octrees, occlusion culling, frustum culling, LOD etc when I did 3d stuff, now not anymore.

Think will concentrate more on my guitar playing in the week I'm not working, then venture out and do some busking ;-)

 

I got mixed feeling about it.
One one had I agree, since I thought same thing quite long time ago. And not just because of Unity, but general Game Engines.
On other hand, even yes we have flood of relatively now cheap games to make, we have great opportunity, to shift and focus our skills on creating specialized assets for our game. For example algorithms, mechanics, or art.

However, in case of properly implementing algorithms, still requires decent technical skill, in one, or more areas.

There is another aspect, worth to mention, that since we have option to reach MIT / GPL etc., licences scripts and projects, we also can progress fast through projects. But yet, we could blame repositories like github, bitbucket etc.c, for distributing such. Making dev easier, while powering tech industry and academia.

If no alternative would be like Unity, Unreal, Gamemaker etc., sure something would emerge base on git repos, sooner or later.

Oh, I got "funny" thought.
Now I perceive game dev as pyramid scheme
Why? Look

On the bottom are game devs, which are most of us. Where most of us getting scraps, for our work. Or requires allot effort etc.
Now, in the middle are assets makers, selling whats good to make games.
And of course on top game engine makers. Getting all cherry on the pie.

I am no saying this is anyhow accurate, since probably could fit marketing, publishers and whats else.
But just leaving it here, as hypothesis.

 

I view it like it's pretty much the same as it was many years ago only it is kind of worse. Pretty much the same because despite all of YTers, websites and so forth covering Indie games they are more or less clogged up and won't be of any good to most people. Pretty much the same because although there are many game engines available there is no advantage in using them over anyone else who is using them. Pretty much the same because to build up a business you need to make a good enough game and then you need to market the heck out of it and like back then connections and money are very important.

Kind of worse because there are so many people doing it who seem to have no business experience or even business sense. They will spend ages making a game look awesome or otherwise just spending a huge time on it that is not practical from a business sense. Often they even quit a tenth to halfway through the project and then release what they have for free simply because after some years they realize they took on way more than they should have. When they do that it just further devalues the market imo.

And kind of worse because so many games are being made... not even talking about being released... but just being made AND posted about in forums, Twitter, etc there seems to be thousands of games in development whether for a weekend game jam or a 3 year project at all times and this makes it just that much harder to get a message about your game out.

Because in the Twittersphere or wherever even your Indie game is competing for attention with the 500+ games being made for a game jam that week plus all of the free games being made for the heck of it plus all of the other "real" Indie games. There is no separation of these things. And I think this is why Indies are finding it harder and harder to survive. And the easier game dev becomes and the more people are doing it (especially for free) the harder it becomes to do it for money.

So it takes it back to the way it was only marketing and otherwise having money to invest in your business is more important than ever before.

I could be wrong of course. Just saying that is how I view it.

 

Yeah although before people lay into Unity, remember it's optional and Unity is also used for movies and so forth, as well as developers big and small. One can hardly blame them for promoting.

I will say though that it's pretty much down to Unity that we can even have a chance. When people cried about the TOS, they forgot that having a partnership means that whatever you make, can be deployed to that platform without any BS.

I'm saying I'm pretty sure that Unity making the TOS as inclusive as it is, will bite us slightly in the end. We really need Unity to be on every platform natively, not something thrown at us by hungry third parties.

If Unity wasn't a partner of many of these places we take for granted, we'd see the tight margins shrink to basically 1 platform.

I started shopping around for an off the shelf engine back when android phones came out. I knew at that point that it would be entirely impossible to keep up, and in the end I'd be restricting myself severely not only in reach but also in what I could make.

 

I agree with the picture but I think game engine developers needs to be replaced with online game store's. I know that having an ungodly plethora of games to sell, from dirt cheap to AAA priced lets companies like Valve make bank...

 

Before Steam arrived on the scene it was ridiculously hard to become a successful indie, for a short while Steam was a great accessible and profitable platform. Now the flood gates are open we're back at scenario one and previous rules apply.

If you're good at what you do chances are you'll succeed and I'm not saying it based upon a pipe dream because all recent games worthy from the likes of Unreal Forums showing promise were promoted from their own merit. Now the conversion to sales is a little more skewed than one would believe (like PAMELA for e.g.) although in a marketing sense that's nothing new either.

If it's a product or niche people want, done to a professional standard chances are it'll sell. If not then you will be chucked out into the 99% like @hippocoder mentioned. A sense of self criticism and none attachment is needed to properly asses the situation, even then it's extremely difficult.

Although in any scenario I wish you the best of luck, the creative markets are tough and any success story is a good one.

Edit: "much coding in the 3d stuff now as the engine takes care of most of it." Sorry but if you think that's the case you've never built a proper 3D game.

 

Yep, that can fit pretty too.

Yep. And we could even argue, that steam is one of extra reason, why game went so cheap. While mainly PC platform targeted, still flood of greenlight, later early access shovel wear games. And yet, we have some trend, of porting mobiles games, to PC. All seams near to be disgusting.

But I can not blame them, for doing great clever business however.

 

Sure, if you make getting a publisher / funded your primary goal. If you dont get funded/publisher it will be very difficult in the current climate, as many others such as @hippocoder have articulated well above.

But make no mistake, there are many many publishers and if you make the funding / publisher your goal, making the game secondary, you will much more likely get the time cost quality triangle that allows you to make a profitable (even break even is okay if you were able to pay yourself and other developers from funding) game.

Most of the succesfully funded crowdfunding campaigns focused on the crowdfunding first and foremost, and tailored all their content to be moving towards that ultimate goal. So rather than make a killer demo, make a killer set of gameplay clips etc for your crowdfunding campaign.

Also, make sure not to do an all or nothing funding model, and continue crowdfunding on your own website afterwards. Be sure to plaster links to it all over your crowdfund campaign so that after it ends, people can still find it via google and be directed to a port that provides you with that sweet sweet dollar bill.

EDIT: P.S every publisher has their own preferences and feel, and just like you would tailor all your games marketing and atmosphere to match your target audience, the same must be done if seeking a publisher. Dont just choose any publisher at random last minute. You need to make a comprehensive list nice and early of the ones that are relevant to you so you can tailor your content and pitch to them.

Example:

Adult swim games would expect a very different pitch than say chucklefish. And likely you would need your game to match their style of published game, and your target audience to match their core audience.

 

Some great comments here and a lot to take in. Many thanks

 

My advice is to ignore if it's possible or not and try. The amount of time you spend and risk is absolutely 100% in your control. You could choose a small game like downwell for instance or the next far cry. I know which one I'd have a chance of completing.

 

Funny you should mention downwell, this is what hell hole is kinda like and yeah I'd stick to doing games like that as no chance of AAA's!

 

To piggy back off this bit of Hippo wisdom, I want to mention this:

The only (legal) way make money in this life is to have someone give it to you or find some way to steal it and hope you don't get caught. Either way you need something worth selling. Be it illicit drugs, capable skills, or a product.

So in life its a good idea to ask yourself: "Would I pay good money to have that?"

TL;DR: money doesn't come from nowhere, it comes from other people.

 

I print own

 

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

 

My Hell Hole project I started quite a long time back and never finished - do you guys think it looks ok are just be honest and say it's s**t! If it's worthy to finish I will complete it and try sell it I reckon or turn it into an asset...

 

Yeah it's not Steam doing it. It's just the first thought that pops in the head of inexperienced people / people with only a short-term view or people simply doing something for fun... "these other games similar to mine are selling for $10 I will sell my game for $7". And then half a year or whatever later the next batch of devs "other games similar to mine are selling for $7 I will sell mine for $5!" and so on.

A big part of it is also I think just the nature of an open market. You can have people even as a team making a very impressive game part-time over a year or more who already make a good living from their jobs. So when they finish their game they may throw it on the market for $1 or $2. Because to them ANY money at all that is made is a just extra. And of course you have others who would release it for completely free (even on Steam) because they just wanted to make a game.

It's also I think to some degree based on the global aspect. One person is happy to make a sale at $10 and another person is happy to make a sale at $2 for the same level of scale and quality of game.

So there are many factors but it is always the people themselves doing it by trying to outdo the competition. First line of thinking is usually "I will make mine cheaper!". and that is basically what we have seen happen over the years. Prices falling falling. Overall earnings continually dropping.

Only in the past year or so have some developers started to push back on the price wars because they know eventually they wouldn't be able to even do it as a business anymore. So they have stuck with prices of $15, $20 or even more. Of course it would be best if every person making games viewed it this way.

Just another two cents or half a cent there. Lol

 

I agree about prices. Gamer entitlement isn't helping anything.

There is an argument for making your product affordable. There is a counter argument: don't make it so cheap as it is essentially free. If it costs less than a bottle of soda at a vending machine (at my university its $2-3$ USD right now) you're doing something wrong.

Newbie salesman in any profession think pricing something they have high will gain money, but if its too high for the consumer then they won't buy it and you will "burn" customers. The fact is making something reasonably priced will help sales. Pricing something too cheaply will make it all pointless.

There's a point when you have to suck it up, stick to your guns and say "this price is non-negotiable", and not care about what the public thinks of it or how few purchase it. Selling your work for .50c a pop is degrading. You can't even buy a Taco Bell .89c taco for that much. You can't even buy a stamp for that!

They say in sales "price your product by asking the customer how much they'd pay for it while asking higher and higher; when they get upset, that's the price point you want to set it at"

We're at a race to the bottom with all of these games. Someone has to take a stand. When others see your success it will start to rise. If someone clones your game, good for them. So long as the average price comes up.

After all some of us want this to be a living.

When these gamers figure out that demands and toxic behavior will only get them poor game choices and a vast selection of cheap but crap games then maybe we'll see them change.
... you can already see it. Last year essentially no new franchises or IPs were launched by major game publishers.

 

Yeah this does seem to be a thing for sure. I don't know where all of these people came from in the past several years. I've come across them on Twitter. I check every account that follows me to see their interests. And based on that I choose to follow them back or not.

If I see a "wall" of political posts complaining about the President or a AAA game or just whatever I mean such angry hateful attitudes I skip those. I think I have only had one or two like that but I also click around from person to person on there and inevitably there it is. Lol Anyway can't really do anything about those it seems.

There are developers in last year maybe two that have stuck to their higher game prices. Heck it was such an unusual approach one or two even got coverage for doing it (which is always nice).

It's all a very interesting thing. I sometimes think all of these popular game engines should have came with a mandatory training years ago.. WITH GREAT POWER COMES GREAT RESPONSIBILITY... and warned people of well basically exactly what they have done. Lol

One positive thing is Steam said they will be doing a major discoverability update this year because they recognize that huge problem. But yes you are right it won't have as much impact as it can if developers themselves don't change their approach. But maybe that will happen at some point. I would think most people would much prefer a world where Indie games was a solid thing to do and not busting their arse for a bottle of soda. Lol

 

This is like the fifth Steam discovery update. What implies this one will be any different?

 

an entirely new recommendation engine to pair Steam users with games that are likely to be of interest to them. The post notes specifically that the new engine will be powered by machine learning, but that the company is also building more broadcasting and curating features to aid with discoverability as well since “algorithms are only a part of our discoverability solution.”

https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news..._on_Steam_with_machine_learning_this_year.php

Other than that I think sooner or later they will hit on something that makes a difference. As much as can be made anyway. I think ultimately only so much can be done but anything they can do to improve it would be a good thing.

 

I actually get it.

Steam is too big to do any good. If they don't do anything, they're lazy and just sitting in the good (which they built BTW), and they aren't innovative enough.
If they are trying out things slowly (because you can't change a system like this overnight just on a hunch), then they're stupid why they don't go back to the manual things, which basically is the Sorcerer's Stone.

So only if they had a hat on.

 

Again, this is the same sort of crap they said each time, and each time it did nothing.

 

Have you ever had something you worked on multiple times? It might take them 10 times or maybe ongoing forever more likely considering the number of games is constantly increasing. I think that is likely the challenge they have. Hardest thing is a moving target.

Those other updates made a difference for some people. I remember people posting here some said their recommendations were very targeted to them. But yes it is odd how for others it seems to be way off. Maybe this new approach of Machine Learning (clearly inspired by one of their engineers reading an @Arowx thread here) will work for everyone.

 

Yeah but you know what?

I'm not a multibillion dollar company that has literally all the customer data that Valve does.

 

I have to correct myself. They don't need a hat, apparently. They need a wizard hat. Amusing thread BTW, good to see people have expectation and have zero clue how software engineering and innovation works.

 

OOOOOO aren't you a special one?

 

Billions doesn't mean they can solve it first try (2nd try... 5th try....) just means they can afford to try more expensive solutions and / or keep hitting the problem a lot longer than many others could. Ultimately they are simply people like everyone else. They might be very experienced & highly skilled but they are still just people and because of that they will create bugs or otherwise make mistakes. And the problem seems to not be an easy one to solve.

 

Which is why I don't think they're capable of doing it. They are attempting literally everything but what would actually help:

Hiring people.

 

You know how machine learning end up, when loose on its own, without supervision?
I am sure you know real life anecdotes, about facebook and M$ chat bots.

Results are either surprising, or undesirable.
But didn't result any good, for human chat participants.

Now, if you add to Steam ML marketing, and sales factor, I still expect see same titles repeatedly, in feeds.

 

I'm skeptical that discovery can be solved through algorithms. I think it can only be solved through aligned incentives. Meaning Steam could give people incentives to try out and discover lesser known games.

They could do something like vote on the indie game of the day where games released on that day are voted on...if a game in the contest ends up reaching a certain revenue amount that month then the dev agrees to give some steam credits via percentage of revenue to those who voted for his game.

Obviously details would need to be experimented with but there is a lot they could do outside of "algorithms".

 

Agree and they do too. They said algorithms are only part of their discoverability solution.

I don't think it can ever be fully solved simply because there are just so many games already there and many more being added continually. What I mean is say there are 300 games that are truly the kind of games a person likes. That is probably manageable for a person. But at some point there will be 500 games and 1,000 games and so on.

I've been thinking their curator piece of the solution is probably on the right track just implemented poorly when some will review games that don't even fall in their range of interest (they will actually say that sometimes... "I don't normally play games like this but I received it as part of a Humble Bundle" and then tear into it for basically being the kind of game they normally don't play). Gamers themselves do this too.

But anyway... I think maybe communities is the way to go. For some people the community would be the big flashy sort of AAA-like games. Broken down into genres of course. In that community there would be many people all bringing news of the games of that kind they find. They could review the games there by true fans of that game genre, etc. And there would be a community for folks like me who enjoy games of a modest production quality and generally a small game experience. Again split into genres.

We have this kind of stuff but it is so fragmented. A little forum over "here". A group over "there" etc. But I mean to have a large number of such communities right on Steam for basically anything & everything would be ideal. Maybe as part of the sign-up process every person joins up to 3 or 5 or so of these communities.

What this does it make discoverability super easy and targeted. Of course they would need to be moderated to keep the trolls out.

Anyway I don't personally use Steam much these days. I just bought another game last night that was linked to Steam page but I searched itch and found it and paid $1 more to get it there. Which thinking about is odd since the percentage is much lower to itch than to Steam unless a dev intentionally increases it.

 

My friend Timur Artemyev is developing a hoverboard. For several years no one knew about him. Now he is known as a good businessman. He started his business with social networks, he hired good marketers to promote websites. Therefore, if you suddenly decide to finish your game, then start promoting it through social networks.

 

The mythical man-month. Not sure throwing more people at the problem will help solve it any faster.

I think this requires a change in the way of thinking for a small developer who wants to push sales up for their product. When we are talking "discoverability" in the Steam store or any other digital "shopping mall" full of products, we're talking a specific business type...in this case an "impulse buy" business. You rely on foot traffic and folks happening upon your storefront as they happen to walk by. Maybe this works when your products are on display on a major street corner, or front and center in a strip mall. It won't work when your products are hidden in a dark alley behind other massive buildings. It just will not happen. So as a small developer you need to think of yourself as a business with product. You then need to classify how you're going to sell your product. Obviously if the "impulse buy" type of business is getting no sales for you, you need a new approach. The other option is to set yourself up as a "destination buy" business. In this scenario you funnel consumers to your service or product. You find channels to reach them and guide them to your business. The customers seek you out and make it a point to come to your place of business to obtain whatever unique product or service you have to offer.

Everything I've said here is physical world stuff, but it directly translates to the digital world. In fact I'd argue in the digital world you have far more opportunity to expose the destination of your business and your products. I feel like this is where most small indie developers will fall flat. They just don't spend enough time doing their own marketing and creating a brand online. It's a tremendous amount of time that needs to be spent doing this, at least half your development time should be set aside for marketing purposes. You don't have to spend money to do marketing if you're smart about it and think outside of the box. You can drive your brand by offering free content to folks online...YouTube tutorials that teach some skill, offering free downloads of artwork/music on your website, offering to assist other people and bartering "payment" for that with subscriptions, etc. There are a host of ways to get eyeballs on your brand, creating recognition of your products and who you are. Heck even if you don't give people a tangible object, give them a good story about what you're doing, why you're doing it. You most likely will see very little return on any of this right away, heck even for months...but after a while it will build momentum.

 

You don't throw people at the algorithm problem, you throw them at the moderation problem. Moderation teams are a known factor that is proven to work. Also, before anyone comes at this post with "BUT THERE'S SO MANY GAMES!" please consider that moderation and support teams handle far larger loads in other businesses all the time.

 

Well regardless I think that's a moot point anyways considering it's not currently solved and might not be for some time. That requires adaptation by developers most likely, which I offered solutions to in that same post. I've seen it work over and over and studied business management for quite some time. It will just require a change in thinking and adapting to the current market situations.

 

Sweet, sweet doom mongering <3

 

2019, much like 2018, much like 2017, much like 2016, much like 2015, much like 2014, much like 2013, much like 2012, much like 2011, much like 2010, is the year of the indiepocalypse.

 

My 0.2 cents:
You need to take a step back and carefully / realistically think:
Is my game a really polished, unique game that has been marketed so everyone know about it, and people are eager to want/play, and contains no bugs
You can make a game but it needs to be marketed, polished and get a community.
Do research on what people like to play, make your cool version of a genre, or just make a niche game that people might like to play for a change..
Don't give up, keep on improving if need be, listen to feedback etc.
Work on your next big idea!

 

I've been a game dev since 1993. Its always been rough guys. Thats just the reality. Wanting to make a living as a game dev is the same as musicians wanting to make a living playing music or artists making a living painting. Some get lucky enough to do that. The vast majority of us have to work a real job and do this as a hobby. You have to have realistic expectations.