I'm someone who personally doesn't really like the idea of selling my creations. To me, it feels like I'm charging people money for something I want them to enjoy anyway, so the money in-between feels like a gate that neither me nor the viewers want to use.

I'm not saying selling your work is a bad thing, not at all, artists deserve whatever payment they get for their amazing creations and I 100% support that, but this is just a personal thing. But of course, if I want to fulfill my childhood dream of being an indie game developer, I'll have to make some kind of money off of it for it to be a viable career.

So this is the best thing I thought of, based on a combination of suggestions from people close to me, as well as personal ideas.

I'll make a killer demo, put my all into it, not make it the best thing ever but something I'm personally happy with. I launch a kickstarter asking for an equivalent to like 2 cents an hour worth of money, purely for the sake of proving to myself that "hey I made money off of my game okay now that that's out of the way." I wouldn't mind if not a single person drops a dime for it, but it'd be there anyway.

Lastly, after completing the entire game, I put the entire thing for free right here on Newgrounds for everyone to enjoy. Here's where "I have to sell it somehow to call it a job" part comes in; I release a version of the game on steam that has the full game (which is playable for free on Newgrounds) as well as some bonus content, purely for those who insist on supporting me, and want to play with extra content for the game. Even this version of the game would probably be like $10 at the most.

Is this a viable business option for someone such as myself? Admittedly it's definitely not like I'm rolling in dough to afford not selling a game, but it's really all about my personal pride as a person who wants to create things and share them to the world to enjoy for free.

This is the part that concerns me in this approach, where "all" for some people means all their life savings and income in order to obtain an imaginary source of cashflow. Your $0.02 per hour also kinda defeats the purpose of calling it a business option when I assume that's not viable for wherever you live. And there's no guarantee more than like 5 people see your game on Steam.

What could work is a Patreon or something, but you'd have to establish an audience before getting much from there. I'd probably spend a good bit of time making free games as a hobby before attempting to live off of it, in an industry where 80-90% of indies make like $20 total.

I think Epic Battle Fantasy 5 might have actually made a decent amount of money. But that was freaking EBF5.

K.O.L.M. attempted something similar to what you have in mind, and it was an awesome game. And its kickstarter failed.

FNF ran a kickstarter and they got some insane amount pledged, like over a million bucks.

IDK whether or not stuff like Shoot Trip Die or Pichyune Dreams or any other games here that have Steam wishlist links in the Author Comments that are going on now/recently have actually made anything or gotten enough wishlists to make people think they're promising or not.

And lord only knows how many projects never became known. If you have a handful of success stores out of millions of attempts then those are the odds you'll need to beat.

Overall I agree with MSGhero -- if you want to try taking that route then probably best to not quit your day job, only make games if it's something you'd be willing to do purely for fun, and consider it a bonus if you make more than a cup of coffee from it. It's not impossible to make money from it, but it's a serious longshot.

That's a fair point. I've considered making free games to help build an audience, but considering the way I make games, there wouldn't be much of a difference between my free games and my eventual paid games, unless of course, the patreon thing was an option.

Honestly thinking of the economics and business of it all has always been a bit of a downer foe me. In all honestly I'd like to just make games for free entirely and not have to worry about some kind of income, but thanks for the advice though, I'll take it into consideration.

It's why I went into software development instead of game development as a career. It pays much better and allows for a more stable lifestyle that affords the option of working on games on the side.

I agree with all the others in this thread, its not viable, really ever tbh. Idk if this will help at all, but you seem to have a similar mindset to me, so I'll tell you what my plan is.

So I, like many indie devs, have a big huge project in mind that I'd eventually like to make, and hopefully make some money to sustain myself doin game dev for a long time. It's the classic indie dev dream, but its not real (without immense luck, at least)

The least we can do is compromise, and try to build up to it slowly. If you want to do a kickstarter, you can't just throw one into the online abyss and expect it to get funded. You NEED some kind of audience first, and in general, a larger audience will open you up to more opportunities.

What I've been trying to do is build up that audience by making art and small free web games. I've just been making as many as I can, releasing them and seeing who likes em. It hasn't been financially viable at all, but it has slowly but surely been working to build up an audience. Perhaps someday, if I keep up a good enough pace, my audience will be large enough to properly fund something like a kickstarter, or just sell enough of a game to get the ball rolling. Even if that doesn't work, I'll at least have a very fleshed out portfolio of work that I could show to an employer and make money that way.

Point is, I think you're thinking too far ahead. You need to start small, and right now, quantity is more important than quality. Perhaps set a goal for yourself, like trying to make x number of games during 2023, and complete it before trying to do something bigger. For reference, my goal is to create 8 total games for ng before even attempting to do anything that might make me money. Not sure if this helps, but hope you got somethin out of it. :)

This is pretty sound advice. I've actually been sitting on this thread for a bit and started coming up with similar ideas actually. For me, I don't really wanna make a game that I don't put a large amount of work in, which is a little hard to maintain, but I figure that if I make short, high quality free games on NG or something, that'll help build things up.

yeah, make high effort stuff of course!! by quantity over quality i dont mean just make trash, you should still attempt to make games as good as you possibly can. I mean more that you shouldn't dedicate a super long amount of time to a single project until you're properly prepared for it. Actually finishing projects is a skill that needs to be practiced just like programming or drawing.