In my universe, I make that (net even, not gross) in half a year with essentially zero responsibility for marketing, taxes, customer support, etc. - nobody can realistically steal my work and cut into my wages with it - far less stress - and I keep making that over and over again every 6 months without having to do anything really that new or different.

In comparison, a game that grossed $100k, which I have to pay self-employment taxes on, and perhaps app store fees out of that too, sounds awfully mediocre, at best.

Hehe same here but, the poster mentioned 2010 and total revenue. If it’s $100.000 in 1 year, then sure! That would probably have potential for growth as well. This didn’t read like that :)

A revenue of 100.000 spread over 2 years wouldn’t be enough to support me and my family. Living in a Western Europe country. I’d prefer freelancing (or a job) for income in that scenario, over making ends meet with a software product and battling off copycats and whatnot. It should grow month over month and if it stalls for a year+ at low revenue, that’s most likely bad and I’d kill it, considering it a mediocre success! Hope that makes sense :)

If the work and stress is spread out over two or three years. It's likely that the time spent could easily be outweighed by many other jobs/projects,

$100k in revenue is a lot less than $100k in gross salary (let alone net) - probably more like $65k/year which is less than you can earn as a developer as an employee or freelancer (depending on where you are of course, but even here in Berlin you'd earn more than that and in US tech hubs you could earn 3x what you'd earn for the same job in Berlin).

If they are really senior & in a US tech hubs total comp from a FAANG could be almost 10x that.

It depends on how it comes out once you divide by the time & resources you invested in the making of the game.