Only slightly related to your tangent, but I've been wondering about the economics of funding a solo indie game project. From what I've seen on Twitter, most of these seem like passion projects as well, but the creators are very much looking for a source of income.

At the risk of wandering even more off topic, it's pretty dispiriting when you see the leaders of the pixel art community with 20k+ followers begging to do a commission for for 25 bucks.

That's not my definition of success.