Also for other types of ventures it's easier to get bootstrap funding. And you can get to cash flow or fail faster. Etc.

It sort of reminds me of the music industry. I used to DJ in a college radio station, and remember the boxes upon boxes of dreck we used to get from record labels. For every successful pop-band, rapper, alt-rock, or electronic-music act you can think of there are dozens of dullard derivative wannabe copycats who utterly lack the imagination to put out something novel and stimulating.

I think the same dynamic applies to computer games. The good news is that the truly innovative stuff will never die, regardless of how many AAAA games flop. People want to do this stuff. It's OK if most fail, it's OK if most can't make a living out of it.

Most people who jump into indie development are gamers themselves, and as gamers their product ideas are not always possible even with years of full time solo development. Realistically what one person with 2 years savings can make is very very small.

So it is a pipe dream. After spending some years in corporate hating it, thinking about your game designs every night, you have the capital, you have the motivation, you jump, and you sink. It's very sad.

This kind of depends on your expectations. I knew a guy who spent more than a year recording a single song. He poured hundred of hours into this, and he did the entire thing: vocals, every instrument, the mixing, everything. It was a labor of love for him, and the result sounded as good as anything on Spotify, at least to my untrained ear.

On the other hand, you have people pumping out soundtracks for their podcast every couple of weeks, using nothing more than GarageBand and a bunch of samples. A lot of these are good enough for people to purchase, too.

Same thing with game dev. You can spend years of your life, and/or thousands of dollars, tweaking Unity and developing game assets. On the other hand, Dong Nguyen developed Flappy Birds in three days.

> Most people who jump into indie development are gamers themselves, and as gamers their product ideas are not always possible even with years of full time solo development.

Business sense trumps passion here. You're right, it's totally unrealistic to expect one guy sitting in his apartment to pump out the next Breath of the Wild. But you could produce a reasonable Candy Crush type game in a few days, and polish it in a few weeks, probably even working nights and weekends.

Most people who make games aren't trying to make connect3-like games, but rather something more fun/interesting. There isn't much point competing with medium to large studios that churn out games like candy crush anyway.

Stardew Valley, a 2D pixel art farming rpg-lite, was made over the course of ~4 years, by a solo developer who learned how to program in the process.

Undertale, a 2d pixel rpg-like, took ~2.7 years to make according to Toby Fox, the sole developer afaik.

Terraria 1.0, a 2d pixel art mining/building/fighting game, was made by a small team over ~4-5 months. After ~7 months, 1.1. After another ~9 months, 1.2. (They were big content updates).

Starbound, a 2d pixel art mining/building/fighting game, took ~1.5-2 years and launched in beta, with a small team.

Cuphead took 7 years with two brothers and a part time animator iirc, because they were absolute madmen and wanted to make a game with 60fps watercolor animation. Did they end up making a lot of money? probably, but that was quite the gamble.

Making games is tough when you consider it can require programming, storywriting, composing music, designing art, etc. And that's not including the business/marketing side. It -is- true that a lot of beginner indie devs spend way too much time polishing their games and end up not publishing them, but that doesn't mean compelling games are necessarily easy to make.

It seems to me that the parent comment blithely assumes most indie devs are trying to make games solely to earn income. A lot of indie devs are trying to make games they wish existed or just seem like a cool/fun idea that other people might be interested in, too. SWORDY is one such indie game that doesn't seem like it was thought up purely to earn cash, Gang Beasts* is another, and so on.

* Gang Beasts is actually made by Doublefine Studios but it sure feels like an indie game.

I don't think that's true. There are a lot of games out there that are small single-person side projects and are interesting and fun. You don't need to quit your job to make a marketable game unless you're targeting a market with much higher expectations than you're likely to be able to deliver.

It's like if you've got a garage band, but instead of playing at house parties and dive bars you mortgage your house for a bunch of expensive lightshow kit and a tour bus or something.

I keep talking to indie game devs about Lean, basically telling them to identify the core hook in their game and develop a minimal version of this that they can test on an audience with, and then grow from there. I point to Minecraft, that did exactly this.

They never get it. They always think the game has to be complete and perfect before anyone will like it. They never playtest until they're waaaaay down the line with the game, and then usually get defensive if the testers don't like it or understand it.

It's exactly the same as startup. Build an MVP, get it in front of people, adapt it using their feedback, and you have a better chance of building something that people want. Time for the games industry to start doing the same.

The economics are just really, really bad. It's not just all the competition driving prices down so low that people will literally consider the price of a coffee to be too much to pay for several hours of entertainment. It's not just that a musician can hold down a day job and do what they love on evenings and weekends. It's also that the the potential payoff on your invested time is really, really crappy. To become a musician, you have to practice a lot when you're a kid, but, once you're there, the time it takes to produce new work is really quite low, especially considering how much replayability it has, especially if you're mostly playing standards and other traditional stuff. And, if people like it, they'll come see you perform it repeatedly.

Indie games, no matter how much I liked that game, I'm gonna play it once, and then, if you want me to be your audience again, you've got to basically go back to square one and start over.

This is true, and describes one of the huge failings of the music industry. But there's more. At the same time the record labels are pumping out this dreck, there are plenty of truly fantastic artists that just aren't getting lucky. Even those that make it to what they believe is the holy grail - a record contract - aren't getting a real break because they're hard to find in the rest of the crap.

I'm a developer in real life, but a serious photography amateur as a hobby. I happen to have fallen into a lot of music stuff, being the official photographer for an annual musical in my town, and some other stuff. I've developed relationships with a bunch of musicians through this. A few that are clearly a cut above the rest have gotten signed (and I think the labels have shown pretty good judgment at this level). But even of these, I haven't seen anybody break through into real success.

One band whose album actually charted recently called it quits because they couldn't sustain it with the day jobs necessary to survive. Another guy quit his job to pursue music full time. But what supports him (and his family) is primarily sales of his paintings, plus a little income from merch and "house concerts".

I think that the awfulness of the industry is part of the problem. But it's also that we've got an embarrassment of riches. The ability to make music - and to record it professionally - is within the reach of nearly anyone who has that dream. So it's become too competitive, and the available choices for consumers is too large to cut through the noise effectively. This is where the failures of the industry hit, I think - their business model is geared toward finding the next giant star, rather than serving an incredibly diverse range of tastes, helping each of us find what we'd individually prefer.

I think this right here is the key. Game development takes forever, especially if you're starting from scratch. Shovel Knight took 2 years to make, and that was a seasoned team with lots of professional game dev experience between them.

Compare that to another typical business venture that people with limited experience might to go out on a limb with, like opening a bar/restaurant. You can go from concept to having butts in seats in way less time than that. You'll have an idea about how well you're doing early, and it's also something you'll be able to iterate on to improve and keep working at for little additional cost.

If your game goes out the door and is a dud, though, you're kind of fucked. If it has "good bones" you can put in some extra work and get it to good, like "No Man's Sky" or "Warframe" managed to do. But if it's just fundamentally not very fun, then you're back to square one. You can't even sell your codebase and recoup some of the sunk-cost the way you could sell your space and decor.

Hollywood used to come up with tons of original IP. One of the problems is that we just don't really have many "B movies" anymore. It's either AAA or not worth bothering with. They used to front a decent amount of cash towards experimental stuff in the hopes that one of the bets would take off. Nowadays you'll be lucky to pull that off unless you have an EXTREMELY bankable name, like Chris Nolan, who has enough of a following to get some money down.

So it is with gaming. Not much in the way of "B games" out of the major studios. They seem to put all their eggs in a few baskets and hope for the best.

FWIW though, after reading "Blood, Sweat, and Pixels" I'm starting to feel like where the real innovation needs to happen is in the toolkits around making the games. Seems like tons of work goes into just setting things up to where you can start doing work that's recognizably related to a final product.