The Dangerous Truth About Indie Game Success 

Work for it like if it's your future, but be aware it probably won't. If you success SURPRISE and if not at least it won't be a huge disappointment. That's how I see it. And Good Luck in your project!

And you upload funny stuff, you can give yourself more credit brother ;-) Learn from the RU-vids that say, expect difficult times, that is the moment that you will learn more. Keep taking those small steps. I just started my first Construct tuturial, let's keep motivating eachother kay? Let's Goooo......!!!

Started out the same way and I can tell you that's it's worth believing in it! My first commercial game failed but I learned so much from making it that making new games became easier and faster and eventually I started getting clients. I am working on other people's ideas obviously but I do what I love full-time and my spare time goes to my own projects. Good luck to you on the path and stay persistent, I'm sure it's gonna work out :)

I think true passion can make most things work out. It’s not originality or size per say, it’s passion

@@tobyk5091 'Follow your heart, not your fears' (don't let them stop you) I think that if you can see something in the future as if it were already there, you should probably persue it. Unfortunally our brain 'tests' us and throws stuff in our way. Believe it or not, but I got a free game that I decided I did not want cause I knew it would destract me like crazy... oupss, 30 hours later, and 2 games later, I kinda stopped learning how to program games.. Yup, life gets in the way, distractions I mean, very fast... But we have alot of future ahead of us, guess we can always get back on track... ;-)

Spot on! Those of us who fall into the 'Artist' category, will find it very hard, if not impossible, to ever finish a game. But there's got to be a point where we'll have to call it done, then set it free and move on to the next one.

Guess I really need to move on from my current project. Spent too much time on it and you've made me realize what I already know. It won't be a financial success. There is more to some of our pitfalls than just this. Another pitfall I see is that we are refining our craft, we are trying to learn how to make our vision become reality. Or as closely as we can. With creativity comes a dream/vision, I like glimpse. And that dream is sweet and it's the best emotion we've ever felt, and we are pursuing an attempt of giving others the opportunity to feel that emotion. I believe this is something only games can do at this point. And it's a chance for us to really understand each other's emotions. This is how I look at it. Appreciate your introspection.

@@_nickthered If working on your game makes you happy. Just do that! Don't worry about it!

@@i.r.weasel7042 I am at the point where I am not motivated to continue work on it. It didn't not turn out to my original vision everywhere and now to change it into that vision would take significant effort. And to Tims point spending more time on it isn't garaunteed to make it better. So I may spend years more on it and it just won't ever measure up to what I had intended. I think I started the project with a certain skill set, learned a lot about myself along the almost 4 years. Made a lot of good code too. I'll return later, right now I need to develop other skills. Ones this game cannot teach me.

​@@_nickthered Artists leave work unfinished all the time. Learn what you can learn, and move on I guess.

or any other industry lmao

This is 1,000,000,000% true.

I agree that you have to dream big, but you have to start with smaller and simpler things, if you start directly making your dreams game it's almost guarantee you will fail

@@rdb223 In my own experience it's mostly the lack of ability to live in the moment. And that's very hard to do.. If you live in the moment a lot you will be able to focus purely on the task ahead of you and if you cant do that almost every dream is too big :/

@@MAKIUSO yes, or they blame themselfs all the time.. both get you deeper in the whole :(

@@rdb223 sounds like it :) our brains are so wired to distraction it's really extremely hard for almost everyone I know to focus on thing at the time. But if you want to accomplish great things it's the only way to do it.

You need to set realistic goals at the beginning and beware of scope creep. Scope creep can add years of development for little or no gain. For any project - not just games.

this

Said everything!

Tnx guys. Indies are the future! WE make the future for ourselves.

I think his problem is too much ambition and not enough experience. He thinks his games are going to earn him $100k or more per release... but his games aren't really at that level. He's setting himself up for disappointment time and time again. He could probably make some decent free mobile apps with ads and see more returns than he's going to get trying to make PC Steam releases

It can be done for money if you want to live out of that: have a family, a work, a stable life. But money should not be the only reason to do that. That’s the difference.

@@andreypopov3400 there's better ways to make money, they say you should never quit your day job until you've already got a stable product. Even then, it's a very tough market.

@@rdb223 True!

Bitcoin is or at least was a way to get rich quick. The one exception to the rule which most people like to dismiss. Without all those naysayers I'd be a millionaire today.

I repeated this loop a dozen times fyi

I noticed most people in the comment disagree with the statement but we still love tim tho just weird how his advices REALLY have reached a character ark point. A tragic one. Almost like he gave up on his acomplishments....

@@fotusknight5923 Game dev is a road with up an downs and everyone has a different road. Tim acomplished a lot and I think he is not totally aware of the magnitude of it and he should be proud. People are following him or believing in him and hearing him talk like this is almost like a turn down or uninspiring.

@@fotusknight5923 I think he might be finally coming to terms with the fact that his games just haven't been that good or had enough mass appeal to sell well. He had a lot of ambition but really no experience with making something people really want to buy.

@@Konitama bingo

Focus and find the good half of the people. Sometimes hard cause the other half makes so much more noice... ;-) There is a ton of good people around brother!

@@JakeSimmer of course there are plenty of good people, but there are also about equal number on indifferent people and both of them don't make much noise.

@@dreamingacacia I rewatched the vid and now I get your point. 'I wanna believe' that I will become a great person and leave all this mental shit behind... But I'm all ready so so far but still kinda think im nothing and will be awesome some day... Interesting stuff. ( I wanna believe that I can make a pipe or a whistle with a nice shell that I found on the beach LOL ) Have a great weekend mate!!

I think that your brother was just searching in a place full of not-so-much-indie-devs. If an indie developer laughs at the idea of sharing the revenue after the game releases - he’s probably employed and can’t take any risks of not getting anything, which is understandable. The real reason why indie’s don’t team up a lot (which is a controversial topic itself, I know myself about a dozen of small-developer teams) lies within a realm of trust. I myself am making games alone (not counting my wife that help me with art sometimes) because I don’t have the people I can trust to stay at the project until the end. And it matters a lot, specifically when working with a programmer. If at some point your programming “teammate” will think of leaving the project - you are left with nothing. No other programmer will want to learn “his crappy code”, so you’d better know how to program yourself, and be good about it. And this occurs on all of the fields of your game: if your artist leaves, you are doomed to find someone who can try to mimic his style. I read postmortem-reports of developers almost everyday. And the most occurring problem for the projects to shut down is “somebody suddenly left” or “we had an inconsistency in our group vision and got into a fight based on how this game should work or look”. It happens all the time! If you’re doing it all alone - you know that you’re the only one who can leave the project; otherwise - you can just finish it yourself. Sometimes it’s not worth the risk to work with someone else. And it’s always the risk, even if you signed a very good contract.

people are better off with their 'crap' then working on someone's dream project for free lol.

@@deusxyz or you should say: "People are better off with their crap than working on someone's CRAP"

Sorry but I've been in the indie dev scene for like two decades now and revenue share pretty much never works out. People flake, people need actual money so they end up leaving the project to take on a paying job... If people aren't being paid up front for their work, and they are working remotely, generally they are going to get tired of the project and lose interest pretty quickly. I've seen hundreds if not thousands of "help me make my game and you get a cut!" and I don't think I've ever seen one of those games get finished.

@@Konitama there are exceptions to that rule, I know a few Russian dev-teams that actually did it ("The Executioner" team for example). But you are right, they are exceptions. 95% of share-based projects fail. BTW: for my game - KingSim - I've managed to ask music composers to help me with the game for the cut of sales of music soundtrack DLC. They did, the game successfully launched and I've paid them their cut, everyone is happy with the result. Maybe the reason for that is that it doesn't take months to compose a soundtrack (especially if several composers are involved), so no almost no risk was involved for them.

Exactly

That's the hard part. 99% can't even get to a livable income