Why don't most indie developer share game revenue data?

Nobody seems to be mentioning that keeping salary info on the low is beneficial for those who are competitive and good negotiators. It's much easier to get a raise when the company knows they won't have to do it for everyone, and you can do a good job of convincing your boss that it's worthwhile.
Whether this is a good thing is beside the point, but it's not only the company that can benefit from people keeping info to themselves. Information is power.

 

I dont think this is true for everyone or every company. Use me as an example, I had much higher salary throughout my employee career than most programmers/architects here in Sweden (a bit lower salaries than in the US). Even when times were bad I got a pretty decent raise while some got none, we even gave a few people the boot (2008 financial crisis, though I think it was more a reason to get away with some bad apples than the company was in actual crisis).

 

Thats absolute nonsense and a generalisation. I am an indiedev, I also work with many many indiedevs as my clients (some very established and funded, some at the startup phase) and easily 50% have done market research. I have also paid for market research for my current as of yet unannounced and funded project.

What you are saying is a complete myth and bad practise. Its sensible to research the target market, its not an indie vs AA vs AAA issue, its just sensible for any business in any industry. Saying a blanket statement like "indie devs dont pay for market reseach" is obviously going to be incorrect. Just because you have not come across it, dont suddenly think that is evidence of it not existing. Thats just not a sensible way to deduce things.

 

You are right if we use the exact definition of an indie dev, but CDPR is also indie, we cant use them as examples. What most people understand from indie devs nowadays is devs who dont even have the time/money budget to finish their game, are working part time on the game with a day job.
But you are right, so i will change "Indie devs" to "Poor devs".

 

While I think any smart dev is going to do some type of market research (paid or otherwise) to see if their product is still wanted, the idea that people don't give out their data when someone personally asks for it because they think it should be paid for seems very far fetched to me.

If someone asked me how much I made for something or other the only real considerations would be:
- Did they ask nicely
- Am I proud of the figure
- Do I think it's in good taste to put it out there or serves some purpose
- Will it cause me any trouble to have it out there

I don't consider the knowledge of my income, by itself, to be worth any substantial amount of money to anyone. It's not even data that can be directly used for any useful purpose except in extreme circumstances (in which case the figure is probably not needed anyway to figure out I'm sitting on a goldmine).

I also consider focusing on other people's income to be pseudo-activity. I suppose it's useful to know if a game is successful or not, and the kind of revenue one can expect from different kinds of successes. But beyond that, the question of whether a game will succeed or not has a lot more to do with how well it delivers the goods to the players, and far less to do with how closely it resembles another game that already succeeded. I suppose that probably accounts for part of why devs don't respond to such emails - they know that the person's interest in the figure is misguided and it is only useful for self-amusement.

When I go on Steam, my goal is usually simply to remind myself of the universal truth that good games sell and bad games fail, see what mistakes of implementation I need to avoid (by playing games and reading reviews), and satisfy myself that my game will leave at least 98% of my competition for dead.