Indie game empires common?

[loop101]

A friend of mine was telling me about a guy that makes indie games. The gamemaker makes little PC games that earn (through direct sales) $1k-$10k per year. He's been doing it for 5 years. His combined annual earnings are now in the non-trivial realm. I can't mention the gamemaker, but I was wondering if this is a common business form. It seems to meet all the Fastlane criteria.

 

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[MooreMillions]

Not sure, but this is the first I have ever heard of it.

 

[MHP368]

Someone is , go lookup the cut steam takes and then find some games in the 10 to 20 dollar range and slap them into steamspy.

Dozens of games ive never heard of with 5 figure downloads in 6 months to a year.

Steam users bjy stuff during the steam sales , play it once and forget about it no problem. Its a saturated market sure but looking at user reviews too , appqrently a developer pulling 100k from a game after steams cut for a stinker is not uncommon

Makes one wonder what an outsourced game dev team would run , maybe hire someone stateside to keep tabs on things , 10 grand? 20?

 

[Dramolion]

The "common" business model in gaming is to make a big hit game and make all or most of it's revenue in the first year, during which new competing games with better graphics take over their sales.
This is a high-risk business model, which is why some developers rather make games for publishers, who back them financially, and thus are no longer "indie," this happens almost exclusively in the high price segment of the market.

 

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[loop101]

Here is an interview with the guy who makes the "Clutter" games. The first one made $50k, so he made another one which also made $50k, for a total of $100k his second year. So he made a third Clutter game. Now he as 7 games. He doesn't work for a distributor, but he has 12 distributors that work for him.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZcQ47gblnc