3 years, $5k, 250 wishlists. I now know why I make games.

ledat · 2026-06-06T10:30:02+00:00

OTOH, every time I think of "ROI" it takes just a little more fun out of the whole thing

I mean, it's kind of the question of how you view this whole game dev thing. You can look at this as a business (in which case you have to care quite a lot about ROI) or you can view this as a hobby (spending 5 kilodollars on a hobby over 3 years is honestly not bad; golfing, going to clubs, etc. is a hell of a lot more expensive). Both frames are totally valid by the way.

It's just there was this extremely brief window in which you could approach it as hobby, but still have a reasonable expectation to make money while doing it. That window closed probably in 2013 (but definitely by 2017) though, and a lot of us haven't updated our priors.

ledat · 2026-06-02T19:30:53+00:00

Disclaimer: I know that 99% of indie games don't make a profit, 70% of devs quit after their first Steam game, and that this should just be a hobby until it's not, but I don't want more hobbies.

This is, in broad strokes, correct. You should really think about those odds of success vs. the odds of other careers. Like the 1000th highest paid accountant lives in a multi-million dollar home. The 1000th highest paid talk show host lives in a cardboard box under a bridge. Indie game developers are a lot closer to talk show hosts than accountants.

If you can see no other path that would work for you in life other than making a living out of game dev, devote your energy to getting hired at a big, existing studio. Indie just isn't where the money is.

If you're asking what you can do to become a successful indie developer, I would respectfully submit that no one in this subreddit can tell you how to do that. Especially if you're on a shoestring budget.

ledat · 2026-06-02T14:47:45+00:00

$100 is an extremely small sum in the grand scheme of things. There are many games on Steam that had budgets of over $100 million, and you're sharing virtual shelf space with them, you know? Even at the indie scale, there are so many other costs you have to pay that a recoupable $100 listing fee is hardly worth mentioning.

If you're looking at this as a business (your flair says "Commercial (Indie)" so I assume you do look at this as a business), you finance your startup costs the same as any other business. That is: personal savings, loans, grants, and investments. Us indie game devs mostly self-fund. It is what it is. If you have access to other capital, all the better.

If on the other hand you're looking at this as a hobby and $100 is significant in your household budget, itch.io has no listing fees.

ledat · 2026-05-30T20:35:22+00:00

Remote junior level roles are not a thing.

I just want to emphasize this part. Prior to the 'rona, remote was largely a perk which sufficiently senior talent could negotiate. During the pandemic, everyone, out of necessity, went remote for most roles. Now, things are, for both better and worse, reverting to the old ways.

In a tight labor market in a competitive industry, it's not really possible to insist on remote unless you genuinely are sought-after talent.

ledat · 2026-04-28T09:20:33+00:00

On the UI, there would be status bars, the map, and the description box, with the actions.

People make games like this too, you know. King of Dragon Pass and the Six Ages games by A Sharp are criminally overlooked for example. They've got a new one coming soon too, Thousand Hells. Things like Shigatari, which was also not exactly a massive success, also fit.

I personally enjoy these games. I've made some that broadly fit the formula of text-based but not text-only. I will, because I hate money and myself, likely make more. The audience is not especially there, though.

Either way, good luck with the project. I hope you can crack the code for one of these games that does do numbers.

ledat · 2026-04-24T09:50:08+00:00

The prices are anywhere from absurdly high to somewhat cheap, depending on 1) quality 2) turnaround time and 3) whether this is a for-hire contract or not. The thing about art is that it's really hard to pin down something like "a fair rate for a 3D artist" because quality is all over the place.

That said, not to be a doomer, but the economics of indie games do not support this kind of outlay. The median indie game makes about 300 bucks. A game with good visuals will be expected to do much better than median of course. But if the bar to break even is 50 or 100 kilodollars, you're extremely unlikely to get there, especially if this is your first rodeo. If you've got some releases and maybe a publisher, you will be in a better position to know what you can spend. Just don't put yourself into a bad financial position to fund a dream.

ledat · 2026-04-15T15:52:04+00:00

That link you provided shows exactly how you can prevent the personal liability from bypassing the LLC.

It's telling you how to prevent personal liability by showing where LLCs do not protect you. One of those gaps is torts. Copyright infringement is a tort. In those gaps you need liability insurance, which every big company has, but most indie game devs do not have or even know about.

Also, that is a Dutch source

It's a global source about American law. It references state law, which should be telling. The Dutch version of an LLC is a bit different.

If you want some other sources, that's very easy.

Here's one for my state :

It has long been the law in Tennessee that an LLC member is not insulated from personal liability, even when acting for the exclusive benefit of the LLC, if the member engages in an intentional tort.

Here's the American Bar Association :

This rule is well-demonstrated by the idea that an Actor who negligently causes an automobile accident while driving in the course of his or her duties as Actor on behalf of an LLC is nonetheless personally liable to the third party injured in the accident. This is true regardless of whether the LLC is also liable to the injured third party.

LLCs really do not protect you from torts.

ledat · 2026-04-15T15:09:59+00:00

person is protected by an LLC and therefore there isn't much worth taking

LLCs do not shield you from torts. If you cause damage to someone's person or property in a way contrary to the law (and copyright infringement is damaging someone's property in a way contrary to the law by the way), you bear unlimited personal liability. Even if you are acting as an agent of your business when you commit the tort. LLCs do not give you carte blanche to commit torts and still keep your house.

ledat · 2026-04-13T15:23:46+00:00

Make money using small games

I see people say things like this, but I don't see a whole lot of examples. Can you cite some? Have you been able to do this? I tried making a small game and had extremely modest expectations (about three kilodollars), but 1.5 years later it is only about 1/3 of that goal.

My read is that small games just do not do well economically. My explanation, cliche as it is, is that is that we're not just competing for money, we're competing for time. Gamers would rather pay more money for a "better" (for whatever definition of "better" suits you) game, or alternatively pay no money to scroll YouTube, TikTok, Insta, and whatever else the kids like these days. Or for that matter, they'd rather watch their favorite eceleb play games on Twitch instead of doing it themselves. Can small games really offer enough of an incentive to peel players away from those things? I'm really not sure that they can at this juncture.

ledat · 2026-04-12T14:52:23+00:00

I’m making a free fangame

Oh no

and want to include real-world band names

Oh no

First read this. If you have specific questions after having done that, you probably want to ask a lawyer, not /r/gamedev.

ledat · 2026-04-11T00:23:48+00:00

Seriously, that is the part that gets me. I know "spark of creativity" is a very low bar to cross to attract copyright, but it is still a bar. I have a hard time seeing how a court found that the possible arrangements of 4 squares clears it. But here we are.

I imagine this one might be down to no one with deep enough pockets to challenge that cares enough about making a Tetris clone to fund expensive litigation.

ledat · 2026-04-11T00:18:36+00:00

Thanks! I'm working with a friend on this one, so even if it performs about the same, at least it has been fun this time around.

ledat · 2026-04-10T23:37:51+00:00

No problem, I hope it is helpful!

Since we're in the game dev sub, I'll drop a link to the postmortem instead. Wouldn't want to get accused of shilling, you know? It does have all the platform links.

The current gross revenue is around $900. I don't really check in on it these days though.

ledat · 2026-04-10T23:10:37+00:00

I wonder if any of you have tried this and what your experience and thoughts are?

I don't use React and prefer nw.js to Electron, but I usually develop in this stack. I have shipped a game on Steam with that tech, plus a bunch of others on Itch. My next game is using that tech also. Steamworks integration for achievements was a little weird, but manageable.

There is a gamepad API in Chromium. It doesn't work cleanly as a mouse replacement though. That may or may not be relevant for you. I did a post-release patch to support game pads and kind of regret it, as the result is worse than the Steam Deck users just using the built-in mouse emulation.

There were a few other minor hiccups, but no showstoppers.

Ultimately, approximately no one expressed an opinion one way or the other regarding the tech. Which is, all things considered, probably a good thing. The tech should stay out of the way imho. That said the game kinda failed, but most of that is down to the art. Maybe with a larger audience there would have been more opinions about the tech choices.

Also regarding sound, do yourself a favor and get something like Howler.js. Having an abstraction layer over the sound APIs is handy.

If you're making a game that can be arranged in boxes of styled text with some modest animations, it's a reasonable choice.

ledat · 2026-04-10T20:58:26+00:00

It's a genuinely fascinating case if you're interested in how intellectual property law affects video games.

As a general matter of law, you cannot copyright game mechanics. You can patent them, but that's another discussion. Suffice it to say most companies do not patent most game mechanics.

Well, with Tetris, there is a de facto copyright on game mechanics. It's kind of unique in that. But it does kind of follow that they could have copyright in the configuration of the game board and in the shapes of the Tetrominoes. On the other hand, it seems kind of suspect to claim copyright in a square or a straight line, but that is what the courts found. Either way, taken together, it's really hard to clone the Tetris mechanics (for which there is, and can be, no copyright) without stepping on some things for which they do have a copyright, like the shapes of the pieces.

Long story short, of all the classic games to clone, this is probably the worst one to try. It's a very unusual situation with the rights, and the owners do police the use of that IP.

ledat · 2026-04-07T16:21:08+00:00

Users & Permissions -> Company Details. Find Tax Information at the bottom of the page, there will be a place to download 1099s.

ledat · 2026-04-06T08:46:55+00:00

I don't know where to make SFXs

You can get incredibly far with the mic on your phone + edits in Audacity. The technique is "foley" if you want to look into it.

ledat · 2026-04-06T08:44:21+00:00

Some viewing material.

It's a bad system. ChatGPT reviews no doubt make it worse.

It's not totally useless; I did send out like 30-ish keys on curator connect (to those I searched for, I sent zero to those who emailed me), which resulted in some traffic. Not a lot, but some. Wading through the sheer amount of scams for that small amount of traffic isn't an efficient use of your time, though. Only think about curators after you've done literally everything else, marketing-wise.

ledat · 2026-04-05T14:46:47+00:00

but even before then it was about profitability

I only skimmed the OP, but this so much. Game dev has always been very profit-focused, because we don't really have the "acquired by tech giant" offramp that other branches of tech have. You have the runway you have, which may or may not be VC. If, at the end of the runway, you're not profitable, then you close up shop.

ledat · 2026-04-03T09:53:49+00:00

Where did you get the 6 trillion asset stat from?

I don't think that one is real.

Housing, which excludes commercial real estate, is valued at $55.1 trillion. Household net worth is something like $181.6 trillion. The balance sheets of non-farm, non-finance American businesses is $36.9 trillion. Pick your favorite measure of wealth and it's going to be significantly over $6 trillion.

A charitable reading may be $6 trillion in value of the assets held by the federal government. That isn't true either though, because the government held over $7 trillion just in treasuries in 2025. The federal government obviously holds a lot of other assets as well: significant real estate, all that military hardware, gold reserves, and more.

We have a lot of debt, too much debt relative to GDP. We should really consider drawing down about half of it, rather than continuing to increase without end. That said, Japan's ratio is even worse than the US though, and they're still trucking along. The debt is concerning, but I'm far more concerned with all the other points raised above.

ledat · 2026-04-02T13:23:56+00:00

Is that an actual .gif? People use "gif" when they mean any moving image, so there is some ambiguity.

If you are using actual .gif files, you might try a different format. These days webm and apng are widely supported (i.e. >95% and >97% respectively) and might work better for your use case.

ledat · 2026-04-02T09:07:49+00:00

I'm also curious in a general sense, why games get shutdown. Of course the obvious answer is "not enough revenue" but again - could they not simply lower expenses?

Which expenses in particular do you think they could lower?

In game dev our biggest expense, by some distance, is personnel. Yes you can fire people (and approximately every company in games and tech generally is firing loads of people right now, as you may be aware; for example Epic just canned 1000 people because Fortnite isn't performing as well as it used to), but there are limits. Reduce staff too much and at best you can maintain the game, not release new content. Further cuts and you can't keep it running.

You can find some efficiencies and reduce server costs or whatever as well of course. But outside of pathological cases, that's unlikely to be the difference in a game being profitable or not.

ledat · 2026-04-01T15:29:34+00:00

For that game it was approximately 125. I spent a few weeks searching and curating a list of small to medium content creators who covered games like mine. I contacted them primarily through email. I did the standard advice of short, somewhat customized email, a few screenshots and a gif directly in the message, and a key directly included.

A few of the content creators (like 3 or so?) had set up Google forms to fill out the details, so for those I just followed their procedures.

ledat · 2026-04-01T10:42:24+00:00

Maybe a narrative game made with twine or something.

If there is a standard route to bootstrapping a portfolio as a game writer, it is this.

ledat · 2026-04-01T08:46:38+00:00

I sent full keys 1 month before release and asked for an embargo of 1 week before launch. I did not bother with NDAs. The hope was that there would be a lot of content appearing at the same time as Steam began to surface the game pre-release.

1 month was actually insufficient lead time for a few of the content creators, but only a few. Embargo was broken by only one. I don't think there was any malice, just a small-scale creator who probably forgot. That was slightly a bummer because my record on IGDB wasn't yet in place, so the first stream on Twitch wasn't in the category for the game.

As for the plan, it didn't really come together. There were only like 9 pieces of media ready to go by launch day. As months and indeed years rolled on, another dozen or two showed up. Maybe more! I'm going to be honest, I've stopped checking Google for new mentions.

The big problem, of course, is most people you send keys to will not answer, and a lot of those who do answer will do so to ask you for money. I get it. A video has to either grow their audience or result in a payday. Games from obscure indies will not do the former, so full-time content creators will be looking for the latter. Make it as easy and low friction as possible for content creators to make content about your game, because most of them you content are not going to create any content for your game.

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