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Comment by stephc_int13 | Hacker News Reader

The biggest risk for an indie game dev is not the chosen theme or genre or style, but the team, the funding and even more importantly the motivation of all the parties involved.

Talent is mostly sustained hard work, usually over years, decades or even a life.

And there is also luck. People always underestimate luck.

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Choosing the "wrong" genre is definitely a thing tho. Take an example: Pyre, from the developers who made Transistor and Hades.

Transistor was quite a big success among indies[1]. Hades was the indie game of the year[2]. Then why Pyre, the game between these two big boys, flopped[3]?

In my opinion it's mostly the genre. "Fantasy" + "Sport" didn't work so well, cause the main audience of sport games are mostly also fans of real-life sport teams.

[1]: https://steamdb.info/app/237930 says 1.08M ~ 2.66M owners.

[2]: https://steamdb.info/app/1145360 says 4.63M ~ 12.73M.

[3]: https://steamdb.info/app/462770 says 251.3k ~ 628.2k. It's not bad, but considering its astonishing quality and the track record of the devs, I'll say it's an disppointing number.

I don’t know why your comment was downvoted but as someone working on a game with some commercial success this is 100% accurate. From my experience game dev requires a large amount of effort from a few motivated people to succeed. Having money to physically sustain those people is a big factor in ensuring they have the time to succeed in completing the project.

Back in the early-mid 2010s there were alot of kickstarters that were funding alot of pretty ambitious projects with millions. But out of possibly hundreds of attempts, I can really only name a handful. Some are still in development today way past the average length of a dev cycle like Star Citizen.

So I do think the motivation is the most important part, after all alot of the most well and content rich indie games like Cave Story or Rogue Fortress were made with much less than some of those kickstarters.

That being said, motivation is often a function of one's own specialities. It's rare to find people with both the artistic and programming rigour to realize a vision. But a look at the Skyrim or Minecraft modding communities are good example of the sheer amount of content and creativity that is unleashed once a good platform is produced. Unity & Unreal has made steps, but their learning curves are still too steep I think before one can really get their hands in working.

To elaborate on luck which many people don't get: this is what's being mitigated with marketing / advertising and existing fanbase. Usually indies don't have the budget for the former, and don't have the latter, hence they are more reliant on luck than anything.

Among us is a nice example.

Among Us had a big existing fanbase; the creator was the creator of the Henry Stickmin flash games and had somewhat recently released all Henry Stickmin games with an extra, "Completing the Mission."

I think you're massively overvaluing the Henry Stickmin flash game fanbase.

Maybe, but I don't play video games, and I had heard of Henry Stickmin. The only reason I was interested in Among Us is because I knew it was the Henry Stickmin creator.

The funny thing about Among us is it didn't really blow up until 2 years after it was released. Talk about a lucky break!

This is not unusual -- it may take you years to get traction but you just need to keep with it and keep evolving until you do. But this means that making a game is more of a side-project than a full-time job (unless you're independently wealthy!)

I was quite shocked when a potential lead revealed to me that one of their recent games barely made $1k in sales and they were deep in the red. I feel the market is REALLY tough for indies at the moment. For every remotely successful indie title one can imagine there are probably 100 complete flops.

You need to build an audience for the game, but that often takes far more time than the runway available. If you're lucky, the zeitgeist will notice you before you go broke. But most aren't lucky.

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