How you plan to make it as an Indie developer?

I would like to get into making games for a living but at the moment that isnt all that realistic because i dont have the skills. So at the moment i am going to get a job somewhere else in IT (I just left high school so i am doing a course). And then in my spare time make games and if i make anything good i will try to publish it. The thing i like about this is if i dont make any money it dosnt matter because i will have another job. And then if i become good enough i will start doing it as a full time job.


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Original post by Ironside
The plan is to release a few good titles to build a recognized and trusted brand, and then begin developing the titles I''ve always dreamed of making.

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I''m gonna do exactly that. I may need to take some sort of web development job in the meantime though


[ MSVC Fixes | STL | SDL | Game AI | Sockets | C++ Faq Lite | Boost ]

The "slow build" approach is a good one. The important thing to do is create several products that can each generate revenue. And by keeping the idea that you are *slowly* building your new company, you can enjoy *any* revenue that comes in.

The first year you only make a few hundred extra dollars? Well, that''s good for a couple of software packages that you had put off buying because of the $399 price tag (or whatever).

Pull in a few thousand in a single year, and you''ve just bought yourself a near-top-of-the-line PC or laptop. Or more software. Or both. Or maybe you decide you don''t need those, and you take a vacation with the money.

Whatever you do with the extra money, it''s essentially "free". After all, you still have your full-time job, and you were doing this hobby-thing anyway.

However, there are downsides:

1. Once once hobby starts generating revenue, it has a tendency to kill off any other hobbies you might have. The reason is simple: Those hobbies don''t produce a pay-off, so you focus on the one that does. If you''re not careful, you''ll find yourself working 2 jobs, your day job and your hobby-job.

2. If you decide you finally make enough to live off of, and you quit your day job, all of that "free" stuff goes away. You no longer have a guaranteed income, no benefits like health care, and on top of those your taxes just went up.

It''s a lot of fun, and it''s great being able to live off income that *you* generated directly. But in the self-employed world, you really do "eat what you kill." Some days you get to eat filet mignon, some days you get microwave hotdogs. And Fridays are very special days...because it means there''s only 2 more working days until Monday...

Best of luck!


DavidRM
Samu Games

I want to have my first puzzle game completed and generating revenue inside of 12 months and I want to exit my 9-5 job in the following year.

If my game(s) are not generating enough income on their own to support my family then I will work contract work to fill in the gaps.

I think that if a person is motivated / driven they can take their hobby full time in much less time then 5 years of growing a business on weekends.

Is it risky? heck yeah, I’ve got a bank that wants $1500 every month to pay the mortgage. It just depends on how risk averse you are. Are you willing to take the plunge? I am. (oh and my wife backs me too, which is absolutely critical)


Edited by - ironside on March 2, 2002 3:55:47 PM

I really hope you all know what you''re doing. Only because there are some success stories it doesn''t mean it is easy. I know nothing about you, but if I were you, I wouldn''t even think about doing this without already earning a couple of thousand dollars a month with my games.

Well I live in an area where there is a good amount of contract work to be had. I don’t think it''s is that it is as difficult as it is perceived to be to make $1-5k a month selling your own software(games). Of course plans do change, and one must evaluate and re-focus their goals. Perhaps I should make my goal to generate a revenue stream of 3k a month so that I can exit my current position, rather then setting a deadline for the exit as a goal.

I am a firm believer however, that nothing great can ever be ever achieved without risking something. The true challenge is assessing which risks are worth taking and which will end in disaster.

Good luck to you, I hope you succeed. Its going to be hard, really hard, but not everyone can sit still watching their life pass them by as they do their crap 9-5 job.

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Black Edge Games
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Exactly, i refuse to have that type of exsistance. My job is actually more intense then 9-5 because we are shipping a product. In fact all of last year I worked 50+ hr weeks and only took 3 sick days and used none of my vacation time. I''m no stranger to hard work, if I stayed in my current occupation I could probably move up the organizational ladder and be set pretty much for the rest of my life, doing a job that doesn''t paticularly interest me but getting paid well do to it.

I would much rather be paid less and do something I really enjoy, where i''m not being told what to do and how to do it by some moronic managment team with no clue about how long it actually takes to get things done.

In my case I jumped into my biz full-time immediately after graduating college and started working with retail publishers, but that didn''t work out at all. I realized if I wanted to make it, I couldn''t rely on publishers who didn''t keep their word (and to whom a signed contract meant very little if they could afford more expensive lawyers). So I made the decision to stop working with retail publishers entirely and go completely indie. That was one of the best decisions I ever made.

At the time I had only released a few Windows 3.1 shareware games that were bringing in a combined total of about $300 per month. I then took six months to create Dweep, and after releasing it I put a solid two months'' full-time effort just into marketing it, but I actually spent very little money on marketing (perhaps $200-300). Six months after its release it was making about $3000 per month, which is what I needed to cover all my living expenses and business expenses, and that''s when the game was only $9.95. Boosted by two expansion packs and then the $24.95 Dweep Gold, the game won three awards, and sales kept going up from there.

In order to cover my living expenses while sales were low, I did consulting and C++ tutoring on the side. The fact that I hated that work so much really motivated me to get the sales up. Some would-be indies get trapped in jobs that are a 7 on a scale of 1 to 10. If the job was a 2 or 3, they''d be more motivated to go indie full-time. It''s those "not so bad" jobs that are the real traps.

I think one thing that holds many indies back is the illusion that a regular job is more secure than running a business. Just the opposite is true. For instance, I cannot be fired. I have multiple streams of income that come from so many different sources that it would take something on the order of a global disaster to seriously hurt me financially. The recession is actually great for me because it means I can buy more advertising for less money and acquire new customers more cheaply, increasing my market share. And because of the skills, knowledge, and network I''ve acquired along the way, you could take away everything I''ve built, take away all my money and all my intellectual property, and I''ll be right back where I am today within 1-2 years. That''s real security -- not working for someone else.

I know a lot of people who''ve taken their indie businesses full-time, and many have not done so well financially. However, I don''t know any that have regretted taking the leap, even if they''re not making as much money as they expected. I think my situation is unusual though because I''ve only been an employee six months out of my entire life, and that was about 10 years ago.

When you work hard to grow a business, perhaps the greatest unexpected benefit is what you learn about yourself along the way and all the massive doses of personal growth you endure. You often have to stretch yourself quite a bit in order to fulfill the business'' true potential. If you procrastinate, your business suffers. If you don''t set clear goals, your business suffers. If anything goes wrong, you are responsible.

Many people fear this level of responsibility, but in reality, there''s no escaping it. Those who don''t set goals for themselves are doomed to spend their lives achieving the goals of others. There''s no feeling quite like holding the reins of you own life.

Anyone who goes indie full-time will make a lot of mistakes along the way -- guaranteed. I''ve certainly made some grand ones. But in the end, a collection of mistakes is called experience. Good judgment is the result of experience, and experience is the result of bad judgment. There''s really no way to fail if you simply persist.


Steve Pavlina
Dexterity Software
www.dexterity.com

My overall plan goes a little like this:

1) Finish college - this will be happening in the next 3 months
2) Drop out of fulltime education for a year and get a job. Doesn''t have to be programming, but has to have something to do with computers.
3) Do a four year sandwich course at university, the third year of which provides a job placement in the relevant industry.
4) During steps 1,2,3 I develop my skills and a few games to help establish myself and to help recruit a solid team.
5) Hope a publisher picks me and my team up otherwise I''ll have to fall back on my job from part 2 or see if I can get recruited fulltime by my job placement form part 3

I have about 9 ideas floating around in my head, 2 of which are remakes (more or less) of classic games and 1 of which has a semi-complete design doc. Each project has an increase in complexity and is aimed to teach me something new.

Good luck to all of us.

- DarkIce

Hmm.. since it''s about indie game dev I bet I can get a bunch of nasty words on publishers
Is it true ?? Is indie is the only way to make it if you want to start a game development ??
I''m working on something right now.. and I think my job is quite fair.. well.. sellable.. and I can afford to have someone (publishers) rip me off and then just let the bad karma handle that nasty dude..
Can someone give a hint both on being an indie and working 2gether with publisher..

Well as I understand it, you have two options if you don't want to work with retail publishers.

1. You can market your product yourself. This is typically done through shareware marketing where you develop a demo and full version of your game. Then you need to go out and push your game everywhere, shareware industry sites, download sites, your own web site. Get ranked on various search engines; get the world out so that you get tons of new users coming to your product every day. The benefit of this, you keep all the profits from your sales. The downside, you have to spend allot of time marketing, doing technical support, and customer service for your customers. You end up spending a majority of your time working with your customers as opposed to developing new products.

2. If you think of yourself more as a developer then a marketer, you can work with a publishing company and let them handle all the marketing work for you. This usually results in them offering you a royalty percentage of the profits or the revenue. (Though contracts may vary) I am aware of very few shareware/online publishers that are trustworthy. I am aware of a good number who aren’t though. Steve Pavlina's company Dexterity has moved into the shareware publishing market and has had great success publishing Fitznik for a small game development company in NewZeland. Dexterity has some great publishing options and they offer good service and one of the biggest royalties your going to find. It's a win-win situation.
However, in my experience Dexterity only publishes top quality products, so don’t expect them to publish the Tetris clone you knocked out over the weekend The down side to having someone else publish your game is that you don't get to keep all the profits. On the other hand if you publish through Dexterity, they manage all the technical support, customer service, getting customers to download the product, and negotiating licensing agreements with other publishers. Freeing you up to do what you love, making games, while still making a good solid income.

In my case I haven't decided how i'm going to distribute my game. I think I may try to self publish, but if it starts taking up too much of my dev time i'll likely persue an exclusive publishing agreement with a company like Dexterity.

Edited by - ironside on March 3, 2002 7:21:51 PM

hmm.. ic ic..
well.. as long as I''m trying to figure this one out, it seems that making money from your game is as hard as maikng the game itself
I think Dexterity is pretty good, judging from their website..
but my game is an action pack game and definitely more than 10 MB. Can somebody give another good publisher who''s looking for an action/shooter game ?

My take on all this (back to the original thread...) is similar to everyone else''s... although I''m hoping my time line is a little bit shorter. I want to release my first game and generate at least a *little* money off of it to prove it can be done... once I do that I can quit my day job because I know I can increase my game output by 4 or 5 times if I don''t have to spend so much time at someone else''s office.

Well, Steve and David were always my personal heros, but now they are even more.

> It''s those "not so bad" jobs that are the real traps.

How painfully true. Your every posts worth gold, do not stop it.


--
bernie
www.bkgames.com

I used to want to be a full time game developer but no longer. Instead, I''d like to keep my full time day job which I love, and write games on the side for extra profit.

Currently I do between 20-30 hours a week of side work to keep the bills down, but I would love to spend this time writing games instead. I still try to put in 5-10 hours on my games a week, but we all know that amounts to little progress.

I keep plugging away hoping for one of my games to be a success. My first game (Halloween Havok) was a great learning experience and managed over 100,000 downloads since last October. But it didn''t make me any money. At any rate, I''ll keep trying. I''m having fun and that''s what counts.

borngamer

And there''s nothing wrong with that
People come in all shapes and sizes, some like the success and recognition they receive at their job, they feed off it and it motivates them. Others get frustrated at corporate politics and the management overhead that is prevalent in larger companies.

Some prefer security; others are stimulated by taking risks.
There''s nothing wrong with having game dev be a hobby. I wasn''t trying to look down on anyone who doesn''t want to take their hobby full time.

I would defiantly recommend not attempting to take your hobby full time if your not 100% sure that''s what you want. For me I want to cut my own slice of pie. I want to see what I can accomplish on my own, carve out my little corner of the industry, and build something special (great?). I want to impact people’s lives personally with the products I create. I want to know my customers and cater to them. The only place I know of where I can do this is starting my own game dev business.

I''ve sank a year and £30,000 - yes, you read right - on learning and developing a technology demo with an old friend of mine - and a vast amount of effort. We''ve got a game design, fully complete; a reasonable business plan; a ton of graphics and a hefty chunk of code...

... and absolutely no interest whatsoever from venture capitalists to fund the development of the game proper, which will take about 2 years and require about £2,000,000.

Bugger.


I''ve just posted in here asking if there''s a friendly publisher about with a spare million or two...



Cas

Why does everyone overlook OEM partnerships?

For those who don''t know what this is, it''s the lil'' game packs that come with video cards and stuff. They generate a nice bit of revenue, can help you establish yourself (incase you ever want to go the full retail route), and have the "hidden" bonus of lower development costs...

How do you get lower development costs out of an OEM deal? Well, let''s say your game is going to dbe distrobuted with a video card. This means you only have to test your game with that video card, and if you''re really good, the OEM partner may provide the development hardware.

Nurgle