For Stardew Valley, that's 30m copies after 4 and a half years of unpaid, 10 hour a day, 7 days a week work.
Nobody sees the extensive graveyard of massive time sink projects that got no traction and went nowhere. Even if they would have been big had they caught on.
Of course everybody sees that, and many can't stop thinking about those things when working on their own project, trying to fight the demons that say "This is a huge waste of time" and so on.
But what is the point of bringing that up when someone explicitly asks for examples of small teams with big success?
The point here is to explain how much of a risk these small teams are making.
So that is the relevance of the example. It shows how much more difficult and risky these successes are, by pointing out that even if someone puts in a lot of work, it is actually more impressive because of the large risk.
This is relevant because the sub thread/topic was this:
"Now that's hard. I have beyond massive respect for anyone that's even attempted it, let alone been successful doing it."
Therefore, bringing up failures or the fact that there is large risk, supports this point that someone else brought up, which is that it is both hard and deserving of "massive respect".
So that is why someone would bring it up and why it is definitely relevant and correct to bring it up, in response to this point.
OTOH there are lots of little indie games… I mean, how are we going to count attempts, right? As an obviously not to be included extreme case, lots of games come out with a map editor, in some sense playing around with a map editor is “making a game.” But we wouldn’t want to include all the custom Warcraft 3 maps that were made as failed businesses, haha.
There wasn't a "minimum viable product" launched in year 1 followed by finishing the product in year 4.
I've literally seen a post here where someone scolded a failed game developer for finishing their financial failure of a game before launch. The comment was something along the lines of:
"Read a business book. You shouldn't have spent a lot of time making your game. Instead you should have released a minimum viable product after doing market research."
Otherwise it's a hobby, and enjoying your hobby 10 hours a day, 7 days a week is an envious life, if you can afford it. (Barone specifically could not; he had to have a part-time job as an usher in a theater; that was work.)
It is trivial to come up with activities that can consume a lot of time, but don't provide financial rewards.
Game dev is an arduous and draining process that both requires the patience to go through periods of dreary work where no progress seems to be made and yet the creative spirit to devise art, concepts, mechanics, rules, etc. If I had the time, I could easily see myself spending multiple years on a project like that without the need to see any financial reward. I wouldn't see it as work, I would see it as Work with a capital W. A hobby that requires a lot of personal effort but something I do because purely for the joy of doing it.
It's only work if you tolerate it for the reward on the payday.
All of these can be hard work, All of these can be taxing, all of these can be intrinsically fun and rewarding.
I wish people would stop conflating work with just employment.
[1] https://community.playstarbound.com/threads/game-development...
Iterating on all the things that make the game fun is hard, and making all the ”content” in a game like Stardew Valley is very time consuming.
But a 2D engine that should only support exactly what the features need from Stardew Valley? Doesn't seem insurmountable, although I wouldn't exactly take that approach myself.
It’s not if you just write the code you need for your game.
99% of people getting stuck on it have no real desire to make an actual game.
Iterating on the game content itself: _Insane_ amounts of effort, in my experience.