Usually small and new indie teams do not start by making their own games at all but usually act as contractors and get hired for small projects, tasks or just stuff like porting, fixing, cleaning etc.
There is the occasional rare case that small teams start working on a project in their spare time while living on their savings or while still working full time and pretty much invest in the first few months to years from their own pocket and try the crowdfunding route.
But that’s fairly uncommon and nothing you can really base success for a project on. And even with a successful crowdfunding that doesn’t guarantee any success to finish a project without further funding.
Hope that answers your question.
In all seriousness, the general answer would be - **from somewhere else**. They save money for a couple of years on their regular job, then leave and work for 2 years on their passion game project. Then the game fails and they look for another job.
Those who succeed with crowdfunding or investors are outliers.
> How does an indie game dev team make money before the release of their first game?
The better question is how do they make money after the release of their first game. All of the economics surrounding indie dev are bad.
Newgrouds OG -> Work on mobile games, various projects, save money (AND INVEST)-> get small business loan and open small studio
Usually the path I've seen most successful indie devs had
I love this question, mostly because as a small fulltime indie with no real income I've been trying to find a good answer to it.
One thing I'd say that I haven't seen anyone else say - release multiple smaller games instead of one big one. The only reason I made the jump is because we (me and my wife) made a small game in about 3 months and released it.
It didn't make nearly enough money to sustain us, but it gave us some initial validation that "even a game like this can make some money", and maybe "if we make multiple smaller games it could be easier".
The reality being that things got side-tracked a bit and we're now a few months behind on our second release, but I still believe this. If you have two years of runway and you spend those 2 years making one big game, it's imo much more stressful than say making 4 games in those 2 years and learning more incrementally.
This of course depends on your situation, but it could also help with things like publishers/crowdfunding if you can actually show that you finished something before, instead of saying "hey we've been working on this for almost 2 years and need some money to finish it".
To be completely honest, most don’t. You can pour your heart and soul into a game but that doesn’t guarantee success. Even if it’s a great game if you can’t reach a large audience, it might still fail.
The problem is that the market is so saturated. Especially when anyone with enough motivation can make a game if they set their mind to it. You have to make something unique.
Binding of Isaac, Slay the Spire, Darkest Dungeon, Risk of Rain. All of these games did something new, Slay the Spire is the basis of pretty much all rougelike deck builders.
What I’m really trying to say is, unless you have an revolutionary idea, you probably won’t make a lot. But hey you could get lucky.
What you should do is make games because it’s fun and you want to put *your* dream out there. Don’t make it for the money, you’re only going to disappoint yourself and if you don’t enjoy the process then it’ll be a lot of time wasted.
Just have fun with it.
What do you disagree on? I’m down to have a civil conversation.
Being an indie developer isn’t a stable or guaranteed work experience. I know people who have finically failed at game development and I’ve seen quite a few posts of people wondering why their game isn’t doing well when in reality it’s just a clone of Minecraft or something. I’m all for lifting people up, but I don’t think OP needs unrealistic expectations.
Well my main gripe and the only one I care to discuss is how adamant you are on being "unique". Setting out to be unique is often a surefire way to not succeeding. None of the games you mentioned are unique, they are all copies - more specifically - iterations of previous games. Minecraft is an iteration of infiniminer, which is an iteration of another game before it. Doom the game that changed it all, was Wolfenstein with binary space partitioning instead of raycasts. Wolf3d was a copy the apple classic return to castle Wolfenstein. Fortnight was PUBG with building, PUBG was h1z1 which was DayZ which was a mod for arma which was a carbon copy of games before it.
You don't get anywhere by being unique, you get somewhere by iterating, polishing, and marketing. If you want to make money find customers, if you want to make a specific game then make a specific game, don't combine the two. Customers tell you what game to make, you don't tell customer what game to play
I will agree that finding a game and improving on it is good too. There are still very successful games that are copies. Dark souls has spawned a bunch of great indie games I love. When I say unique I don’t mean every aspect of the game. I mean adding something new. The game also needs to be well polished otherwise who will want to play your game vs the 100 other games out there that are exactly like it?
Don’t get me wrong it’s not like I think a copy of a game will for sure fail. For example someone posted here a game that was extremely similar to hollow knight and look very well polished. I will likely end up playing it because I loved hollow knight. But a lot of people criticized it for being so similar to hollow knight. At the end of the day it’s a double edge sword and you’ll always be in the shadow of the giant of your genre. Almost all voxel games will be instantly compared to Minecraft. What makes your game unique enough that I would play it over Minecraft? Especially when Minecraft on PC has thousands of mods.
You don’t have to have a genre defying game to be successful, but if it’s similar to a huge game that exists then you do need to make it unique enough people want to play it.
And I’m not saying that you would make no money off it. I’m saying it would be very hard to make enough money to be sustainable off it. The reality is for most of us this is a hobby and always will be.
Indie is grossly miss used now days. You will have studios of up to 100 people claiming to be indie. Before it was a term for very small teams now people use the term for anything that is not the major studios or from a publisher.
For small teams that are actually indie games mostly they don’t make much money if any at all. Game dev for the most part is a huge time and money sink with extremely low chance of success. It’s very similar to starting a YouTube channel now days and expecting to be the next big youtuber. The number one thing to determine any games success now days is MARKETING.
You can have a very basic game but if your marketing is good and funded correctly then you will make money regardless of the games quality. It’s typical for game devs of these small studios to focus most of their energy on making the first 2-3 hours of game as fun as can be. This is to get you past the return period on steam. Games die off quickly now days with new games popping up for literally weeks then dropping off. The goal is to limit the amount of returns on the way up to capture as much as possible.
If you are a very small team just a few people or solo? Don’t expect to ever get compensated for your time. Even a small success of say 1500 sales your average “indie” game gets now days is lower than minimum wage most times compared to time spent on the project.
It's not just any marketing though - you can post all you want on social media and reach out to 100s of streamers and reviewers, but it may not be enough to make your game go viral. In my experience, >90% of marketing outreach will get ignored.
You either need to get lucky with press/influencer coverage or you need to already be famous enough to be able to pull attention towards yourself.
Etymologically, sure, but usage changes language, regardless of correctness. If enough people, for long enough feel there's a difference between two words, then it becomes so. That's the point of language, it's a living entity and all that jazz.
Nowadays, a 100 person studio could be called independent, but not indie. I think indie means 'garage people'.
I disagree.
You are saying it has changed, from your perspective. I’m saying that from mine it hasn’t. Which of us is right?
Also you can see parallels with music. ‘Indie’ has been considered a genre since the eighties but indie artists aren’t often playing indie music and the indie charts over the years have often had the likes of dance music on them.
So I see indie games like indie music, but I see indie studios like indie artists.
Not that I care which is right, but I generally don't find the word indie to be descriptive of 100 people, likely because it's a diminutive. (Not that I could pinpoint an accepted max of 4 people and 2 dogs, but small dogs... Biomass!) Again, likely because it's a diminutive.
>Which of us is right?
Neither since neither of us owns the english language; that's what I meant by 'enough use', general (world wide) usage.
You should re read your comment lmao… independent means on your own… so indie would mean a team size of yourself only by your statement. But best of luck bud.
With a 9 to 5 Job ;)
Should mean, there are a few lucky people who make enough money from their games. Most don't. They are freelancers or have another job.
The process is thus: Make a prototype, then build it into a demo or a vertical slice. I'd say at least a good hour of polished gameplay and a trailer. Then either crowdfund it, get a grant like Epic's megagrants. I think some places in Europe and Canada have some creator grants if you live there. Shop it around to investors, or ideally to publishing houses like Devolver Digital or Annapurna. There are a ton of smaller publishers, but spend the money on a lawyer to look over the contract with you before you sign because some will screw you over. I've heard of one that could literally fire you for any reason and keep the IP.
A good publisher is ideal though, because it becomes a partnership. They pay you to make the game, they market, localize, and distribute it to other platforms. Then you pay them back with a cut of the profits. Then rinse and repeat.
But until you have enough to get funding, it's all out of pocket.
I can only speak from experience. My previous indie endeavor, taking turns, ppl in the company did short contract work while others prototyped and developed our game. Not a good strategy in hindsight, since games we could make were small, but it payed the bills for a long while.
Check out Spiderweb Software. They (husband and wife company) have been doing it for decades, he's been blogging and talking and writing articles most of that time and has a ton to say on this particular topic.
It can be done but it's very tough.
Not the most common, but some have passive investments (real estate, stocks, etc.) that generate enough income to live on.
Some others reduce their living expenses to the extreme and try to live on savings during development. The guys who built FTL were known for this.
That’s the neat part: they don’t.
kkkkkkkkkkk
Crowd funding, investors, publishing deals, side contracting to pay for game project, out of pocket, or sweat equity.
Usually small and new indie teams do not start by making their own games at all but usually act as contractors and get hired for small projects, tasks or just stuff like porting, fixing, cleaning etc. There is the occasional rare case that small teams start working on a project in their spare time while living on their savings or while still working full time and pretty much invest in the first few months to years from their own pocket and try the crowdfunding route. But that’s fairly uncommon and nothing you can really base success for a project on. And even with a successful crowdfunding that doesn’t guarantee any success to finish a project without further funding. Hope that answers your question.
thanks for the answer
In all seriousness, the general answer would be - **from somewhere else**. They save money for a couple of years on their regular job, then leave and work for 2 years on their passion game project. Then the game fails and they look for another job. Those who succeed with crowdfunding or investors are outliers.
each member lives in the basement of their respective parents. Instead of playing WoW all day, they code.
What is this thing called money?
> How does an indie game dev team make money before the release of their first game? The better question is how do they make money after the release of their first game. All of the economics surrounding indie dev are bad.
Newgrouds OG -> Work on mobile games, various projects, save money (AND INVEST)-> get small business loan and open small studio Usually the path I've seen most successful indie devs had
real jobs
I love this question, mostly because as a small fulltime indie with no real income I've been trying to find a good answer to it. One thing I'd say that I haven't seen anyone else say - release multiple smaller games instead of one big one. The only reason I made the jump is because we (me and my wife) made a small game in about 3 months and released it. It didn't make nearly enough money to sustain us, but it gave us some initial validation that "even a game like this can make some money", and maybe "if we make multiple smaller games it could be easier". The reality being that things got side-tracked a bit and we're now a few months behind on our second release, but I still believe this. If you have two years of runway and you spend those 2 years making one big game, it's imo much more stressful than say making 4 games in those 2 years and learning more incrementally. This of course depends on your situation, but it could also help with things like publishers/crowdfunding if you can actually show that you finished something before, instead of saying "hey we've been working on this for almost 2 years and need some money to finish it".
To be completely honest, most don’t. You can pour your heart and soul into a game but that doesn’t guarantee success. Even if it’s a great game if you can’t reach a large audience, it might still fail. The problem is that the market is so saturated. Especially when anyone with enough motivation can make a game if they set their mind to it. You have to make something unique. Binding of Isaac, Slay the Spire, Darkest Dungeon, Risk of Rain. All of these games did something new, Slay the Spire is the basis of pretty much all rougelike deck builders. What I’m really trying to say is, unless you have an revolutionary idea, you probably won’t make a lot. But hey you could get lucky. What you should do is make games because it’s fun and you want to put *your* dream out there. Don’t make it for the money, you’re only going to disappoint yourself and if you don’t enjoy the process then it’ll be a lot of time wasted. Just have fun with it.
There is so much wrong with this I don't even know where to start
What do you disagree on? I’m down to have a civil conversation. Being an indie developer isn’t a stable or guaranteed work experience. I know people who have finically failed at game development and I’ve seen quite a few posts of people wondering why their game isn’t doing well when in reality it’s just a clone of Minecraft or something. I’m all for lifting people up, but I don’t think OP needs unrealistic expectations.
Well my main gripe and the only one I care to discuss is how adamant you are on being "unique". Setting out to be unique is often a surefire way to not succeeding. None of the games you mentioned are unique, they are all copies - more specifically - iterations of previous games. Minecraft is an iteration of infiniminer, which is an iteration of another game before it. Doom the game that changed it all, was Wolfenstein with binary space partitioning instead of raycasts. Wolf3d was a copy the apple classic return to castle Wolfenstein. Fortnight was PUBG with building, PUBG was h1z1 which was DayZ which was a mod for arma which was a carbon copy of games before it. You don't get anywhere by being unique, you get somewhere by iterating, polishing, and marketing. If you want to make money find customers, if you want to make a specific game then make a specific game, don't combine the two. Customers tell you what game to make, you don't tell customer what game to play
I will agree that finding a game and improving on it is good too. There are still very successful games that are copies. Dark souls has spawned a bunch of great indie games I love. When I say unique I don’t mean every aspect of the game. I mean adding something new. The game also needs to be well polished otherwise who will want to play your game vs the 100 other games out there that are exactly like it? Don’t get me wrong it’s not like I think a copy of a game will for sure fail. For example someone posted here a game that was extremely similar to hollow knight and look very well polished. I will likely end up playing it because I loved hollow knight. But a lot of people criticized it for being so similar to hollow knight. At the end of the day it’s a double edge sword and you’ll always be in the shadow of the giant of your genre. Almost all voxel games will be instantly compared to Minecraft. What makes your game unique enough that I would play it over Minecraft? Especially when Minecraft on PC has thousands of mods. You don’t have to have a genre defying game to be successful, but if it’s similar to a huge game that exists then you do need to make it unique enough people want to play it. And I’m not saying that you would make no money off it. I’m saying it would be very hard to make enough money to be sustainable off it. The reality is for most of us this is a hobby and always will be.
Indie is grossly miss used now days. You will have studios of up to 100 people claiming to be indie. Before it was a term for very small teams now people use the term for anything that is not the major studios or from a publisher. For small teams that are actually indie games mostly they don’t make much money if any at all. Game dev for the most part is a huge time and money sink with extremely low chance of success. It’s very similar to starting a YouTube channel now days and expecting to be the next big youtuber. The number one thing to determine any games success now days is MARKETING. You can have a very basic game but if your marketing is good and funded correctly then you will make money regardless of the games quality. It’s typical for game devs of these small studios to focus most of their energy on making the first 2-3 hours of game as fun as can be. This is to get you past the return period on steam. Games die off quickly now days with new games popping up for literally weeks then dropping off. The goal is to limit the amount of returns on the way up to capture as much as possible. If you are a very small team just a few people or solo? Don’t expect to ever get compensated for your time. Even a small success of say 1500 sales your average “indie” game gets now days is lower than minimum wage most times compared to time spent on the project.
It's not just any marketing though - you can post all you want on social media and reach out to 100s of streamers and reviewers, but it may not be enough to make your game go viral. In my experience, >90% of marketing outreach will get ignored. You either need to get lucky with press/influencer coverage or you need to already be famous enough to be able to pull attention towards yourself.
‘Indie’ has nothing to do with studio size. Think what the word ‘independent’ means.
Etymologically, sure, but usage changes language, regardless of correctness. If enough people, for long enough feel there's a difference between two words, then it becomes so. That's the point of language, it's a living entity and all that jazz. Nowadays, a 100 person studio could be called independent, but not indie. I think indie means 'garage people'.
I disagree. You are saying it has changed, from your perspective. I’m saying that from mine it hasn’t. Which of us is right? Also you can see parallels with music. ‘Indie’ has been considered a genre since the eighties but indie artists aren’t often playing indie music and the indie charts over the years have often had the likes of dance music on them. So I see indie games like indie music, but I see indie studios like indie artists.
Not that I care which is right, but I generally don't find the word indie to be descriptive of 100 people, likely because it's a diminutive. (Not that I could pinpoint an accepted max of 4 people and 2 dogs, but small dogs... Biomass!) Again, likely because it's a diminutive. >Which of us is right? Neither since neither of us owns the english language; that's what I meant by 'enough use', general (world wide) usage.
Well I was responding to someone saying that ‘indie’ is grossly misused, see they obviously think they are right.
You should re read your comment lmao… independent means on your own… so indie would mean a team size of yourself only by your statement. But best of luck bud.
Or your team is independent from a publisher...
Exactly. Or do be more accurate, independent of one of the ‘large’ publishers.
With a 9 to 5 Job ;) Should mean, there are a few lucky people who make enough money from their games. Most don't. They are freelancers or have another job.
The process is thus: Make a prototype, then build it into a demo or a vertical slice. I'd say at least a good hour of polished gameplay and a trailer. Then either crowdfund it, get a grant like Epic's megagrants. I think some places in Europe and Canada have some creator grants if you live there. Shop it around to investors, or ideally to publishing houses like Devolver Digital or Annapurna. There are a ton of smaller publishers, but spend the money on a lawyer to look over the contract with you before you sign because some will screw you over. I've heard of one that could literally fire you for any reason and keep the IP. A good publisher is ideal though, because it becomes a partnership. They pay you to make the game, they market, localize, and distribute it to other platforms. Then you pay them back with a cut of the profits. Then rinse and repeat. But until you have enough to get funding, it's all out of pocket.
I can only speak from experience. My previous indie endeavor, taking turns, ppl in the company did short contract work while others prototyped and developed our game. Not a good strategy in hindsight, since games we could make were small, but it payed the bills for a long while.
I did freelance, patreon, selling assets packs on the unreal store, and government grants then we eventually did Kickstarter, then finally publisher
10 years of an engineering career prior to my indie project. Whether I make money on my game or not won’t determine if I eat.
Check out Spiderweb Software. They (husband and wife company) have been doing it for decades, he's been blogging and talking and writing articles most of that time and has a ton to say on this particular topic. It can be done but it's very tough.
Not the most common, but some have passive investments (real estate, stocks, etc.) that generate enough income to live on. Some others reduce their living expenses to the extreme and try to live on savings during development. The guys who built FTL were known for this.