Comment by Mz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Mz | Hacker News Reader

You are reading the thoughts of a guy who was coding since age 11, has 36 years coding experience, has shipped over a dozen games, several of which made millions of dollars, got into indie dev VERY early, knows a lot of industry people, and has a relatively high public profile. And still almost NOBODY covered my latest game (in terms of gaming websites). Its extremely, extremely tough right now.

I am a content producer and I hope to eventually make games, someday. Yes, it's tough to monetize. But this sounds more like sour grapes than a substantive piece about the realities of making indie games. The earlier numbers are, at best, incredibly hand-wavy and he essentially admits to making them up whole cloth:

I’d guess 90% of that belongs to maybe a handful, at best 4 people? (I have ZERO idea, this is my guesswork)

It is one thing to infer and have soft figures. It is another to make strong assertions about the entire industry and back them up with numbers pulled out of thin air that don't even qualify as "soft."

> incredibly hand-wavy and he essentially admits to making them up whole cloth

I get what you are saying, and I agree to some extent. But I think the key in this post was that the 'average' game (from the very middle of indie top sellers list) makes next to no money. Checking it did not require making many assumptions. And this point is valid.

Well, I am trying to fact check this article with more knowledgeable people than myself from a perspective of "so, can you actually make meaningful money making indie games" and the answers I am getting suggest yes, you can.

I am looking at this information as someone who wants to actually make a living doing things online. I don't need to become a millionaire. I just want a middle class income. I used to make $100/day at my corporate job (not $100/hour like a lot of programmers) and I started at above minimum wage. Plus, having that corporate job was incredibly expensive for me. So, I need less than $100/day to compete with my old corporate job.

I am actually looking for hard numbers of "can you reasonably support yourself doing things like this?" Maybe not with making games being the only thing, but as part of the picture.

This article is a little bit like saying "Actors are not capable of supporting themselves at all unless they are big Hollywood stars." Maybe that is true of acting, I don't know, but it isn't actually true of indie games. It can be done, though it no doubt is a tougher market than the one he entered however many years ago.

This isn't specifically targeted at indie apps but https://medium.com/@sm_app_intel/a-bunch-of-average-app-reve... gives a good overview. The main message is that there's such an immense skew to the top earning apps that the average earning can be above the 90th percentile earning; so if you want to earn average app income you have to be in the top 10% of apps.

I was surprised when the article was written they were estimating $2M a day income for the top earning game app (Clash Of Clans).

Thanks. Upon skim, this looks sort of like an app-specific re-hash of "How to lie with statistics" (an excellent book, btw).

Personally, I am more interested in finding some sort of meaningful info on how to make money on games or apps at all. Yes, I know it can be done. I am interested in figuring out how it is done.

Check out indiehackers.com there's a ton of case stories you might find interesting.

thanks.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com