I did search on google on how many indie game developers make money. It said 90% of games fail, with them only getting their investment back.
How would this fit me, if my investment was only my time? I can do the sound track, FX, and also the artwork. I also good enough with Godot.
If my only investment was time, how would the profits look? Is it worth the time?
If I dont loose money its not a fail. Starting my poker game with 100 bucks and leaving with 100 bucks…
Some people develop their games for like 3 years and more and are far from releasing. But when they release they might make top dollar with the right marketing or a lucky shot. I say if you have time and have fun doing games: Do it.
If you are only mediocre at graphics like me: You dont make money. Only if you hire artist to create the assets for you. Graphics nowadays make or brake a game. Gameplay comes second. At least thats my impression. Or your art is that bad, that everybody loves it.
You have time? You can make games? Go make games. Money comes when done and sells are on.
megamodels, you keep asking these pointless abstract questions that have no answer.
Neither you nor I know the first thing about “profit”. As if that’s the goal.
I’ll repeat this over and over again: game development is a LIFESTYLE, not a means of profit. You develop video games because you like the process of developing video games, not the result.
Do you like actually developing games or thinking about developing games? There’s a BIG difference, and the latter is VERY addicting.
(Edit: I want to add my own example of doing vs thinking. I wanted to pursue illustration in order to create concept for my project, Monkanics.
However, actually doing illustration work wasn’t my cup of tea and put too much work on my metaphorical plate. So I dropped it in favor of my strengths: Design, programming, and leadership)
To break this analysis paralysis cycle, in my opinion, is to work every day. Even for 5 minutes a day. I’ve actually been devlogging daily for 50 days in a row (Proof on my Twitter/X), and am moving over to daily YouTube livestreaming in a couple days.
I still don’t have a game out there, but I DO have the flow, mindset, and lifestyle required to eventually achieve my goals. That’s how I’m satisfied with my daily work, not the fantasy of a complete game that doesn’t exist.
Minimum wage around here is 15-ish dollars. If you work a thousand hours (and ignore taxes for a bit), you’ll make 15000 dollars at the nearest McJob provider.
Budget the time you have available for your indie game project. At four hours a week, you can complete a thousand hour project in about five years. Ignoring taxes and platform costs for a bit, is your game good enough to rake in at least 15000 dollars?
If not, then clearly the optimal gamedev strategy is to never open an editor and instead serve milkshakes and fries part-time during the weekend.
Discourgement and being told to give up and don’t even try, is not what I asked any of you for. I know there is lots of competition for you, and you want me to give up and quit without even starting.
Something you need to learn here about those type of business, when the competition goes away, so does the revenue from that job. The less people making games, the less people who are going to play them. This means you too will be out of business.
The more people that make the games, the more people who will play those games. It’s the same with any industry. Barrel making, wine making, painting. If the competition stops, so does people interest. The more competition there is, the better that industry will be.
I just reread everyone’s replies, and none of us said anything about competition.
The reason money is a BAD reason to start game development is because it’ll take years and years and years to even see a nickel, and a few decades to see a dollar.
If aren’t intrinsically motivated by the love of the process, you’ll never make it to the point where you make money with your games. The process is 99.9999% of what you’ll be doing.
Just get a part-time job at a grocery store to feed yourself. The bakery department is always the easiest, go for that one.
the reason it takes someone years and years, is not because it takes this long to get good enough at it. It’s because their education source is very poor. If your learning from free sources such as youtube, without spending money for that quality education you could be having, it’s going to take you years and years. But if you get a good quality education and get your fundamentals this way, you will not take this much time.
A good teacher will give you *all the fundementals you need to get going. Rather than leaving you with want. Free learners don’t get the *all and full thing. They are always missing that edge, making them dull.
Are you speaking from experience? Because I’ve been hiring programmers for 25 years and I can tell you that is not my experience. Motivation is more important than where/how you were educated in being a successful software developer. The people who do well in software development have a passion for it. They enjoy it. They read about it. They do projects on the side.
I can’t tell you the number of college educated people with computer science degrees I have encountered who didn’t have a clue coming out of school. They got the degree to make money, and then got beaten out by people who got the same degree but also had a website they’d made, or a game, or app they made. Because practical application is much more important.
What one pays for one’s education is irrelevant. Certainly having a mentor is helpful in accelerating learning, but just having a teacher doesn’t ensure you have a knowledgeable mentor to teach you.
This quote is just ridiculous and triggered me in a wrong way.
Have you seen this forum? Have you seen anyone discouraging anyone? Or maybe have you seen people being super patient and helpful trying to find a solution to the easiest and hardest questions there are?
This is the most wholesome community I have encountered on the Internet in a long time, I’m super proud to be a part of it, and these kinds of comments are taken completely out of the blue.
@Demetrius_Dixon put it right - it’s the journey that we love about gamedev. If it brings some money in the pocket at the end of the month - great. If not - don’t care.
If you come to the gamedev industry with the assumption of making money - you will probably fail in your quest and you’re better off doing something else that makes steady income.
But if you enjoy gamedev, then the money part becomes a secondary issue.
Very few make it full time as a solo gamedev and even fewer succeed in it. Most solo gamedevs do it as side projects, at the same time working full time in a completely different industry, with a sliver of hope that your side game project sometime becomes successful.
You can also try finding a job at a bigger studio - then you’re working in the gamedev industry and get steady income. But that has its downsides too - now it’s not for fun anymore, you have targets, KPIs, managers and deadlines to worry about. I met a bunch of people that work for bigger studios and you can clearly see it took the fun out of gamedev for them, most of them wouldn’t even want to consider doing their own project, even though they are fully capable of it, because it’s not fun for them anymore.
As to your original question:
This was answered already as well, but it very well depends on your definition of success and self-worth. In the end, it’s a simple math: your_income / time_spent. If the result of this equation sounds good to you - great. But realistically speaking having in mind all the things mentioned before - it probably will not sound great. And if it does - you’re most likely over- or underestimating something.
Do what you like to do, not everything has to be profitable. But in case of gamedev, we’re also talking about developing yourself. I learnt a lot through gamedev that I would get anywhere else, and the best part of it is that I enjoyed (almost) every second of it! How cool is that 
Just try it out for some time and see if it’s for you. Wish you all the best!
I used to work for a very big game studio. You are right about all those things. I left though because I literally doubled my salary by just doing the same job for a company that wasn’t as videogame company.
I like Godot for many reasons, but one of the big ones for me is that it makes game development a lot more fun than Unity or Unreal ever did. It’s much more accessible.
I am actually working on making games using Godot my full time job. But I’m not sure it will ever compete with the income I make outside of games at this point. Still, if I can support myself and enjoy what I’m doing - I’m ok with that.
Okay so, this is a very important point when developing a game, and that’s expectations.
Others have briefly covered it in this thread, the game is as successful as you want to make it. By that I don’t mean “try harder and it’ll sell millions”. What I mean by that is each developer chooses what they consider success.
For example, whilst three developers may be monetarily driven, they may also have different goals. One may simply hope to make back their initial investments, one may hope to make enough money to cover hiring more artists for their next project and one may hope to cover a full salary.
Other developers may be driven by releasing their first game, getting something out there after years of dreaming about it. Some may view success as having 10 people purchase their game, having somebody else, a stranger, view their project as worth their time.
As a personal example, my initial expectation when releasing my game (Stu the fisherman) was that it would make enough money to help with the down payment on a house. This did not happen. Yet I still consider my game a success. Why? Because I thought about my expectations realistically and found that my goal when starting the project wasn’t to make money, it was to release a game.
So based on my expectation for my project it was successful.
Don’t let figures stop you from developing and releasing your projects. Create your own parameters for success.
I wanted to add my own goals to this, since this statement is absolutely correct.
My goal with my project, Monkanics, is to:
These goals are VERY ambitious, and I’m aware of the reality of live-service + indie game development and the low chances of success.
However, to me, achieving these goals isn’t through one big event. It’s through daily activity that builds on top of itself incrementally. This is because Monkanics is a multiplayer shooter with no definitive ending.
That’s why I made daily written devlogs for 50 days straight, and then moved over to streaming my dev sessions daily. Even when no one watches, I’m still satisfied with my own progress and dedication.
Even with my daily progress, I still haven’t scratched the surface of my personal growth and Monkanics’ development. But since I always show up, it becomes an inevitability rather than a pipe dream.
This is why I keep calling game development a lifestyle, because it IS one for me. My definition of success is living the life of the Monkanics Dev..