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Why making money off of an indie game is so damn hard
70% of commercial indie games are considered failures — they don’t generate enough revenue.
On top of that, based on the same source, only 30% of all games are considered financially successful — but of that slice, only 7% of those games will generate enough revenue to fund a second project.
Another source by Andrew Johnston — a fellow writer for SUPERJUMP — dug out some interesting data: while the total indie game market surpasses 1 billion US dollars, the entire gaming market as a whole sits at 137.9 billion as of 2018. That means indie games, despite comprising the majority of games out there, feasted on less than 1% of the total revenue share.
First of all, it’s no surprise that indie games are largely developed on the merit of passion and love for gaming. Otherwise, the financial opportunities — or lack thereof — are seldom enough to incentivize developers to invest their energy into games.
So why is making money so damn hard, and what makes indie teams motivated despite the challenging road?
Money is hard to come by, because…
A competitive AAA market
With Microsoft’s $69 billion dollar deal of acquiring Activision Blizzard on the horizon, many weren’t surprised to see the business transaction run into several hurdles. Namely, an anti-competitive basis was brought forth by the FTC (Federal Trade Commission). Several in the organization claimed that the deal was a clear threat to competition in cloud gaming, the console market, and game subscription services.
While the attempt to pause the transaction didn’t go through, let’s understand how this impacts indie game developers.
While this may not impact indie developers directly, the deal itself poses a broader idea that some of the world’s major AAA (Triple A, a way to describe large-hit game titles) games would be controlled in a worldwide oligopoly; Sony, Microsoft, Activision Blizzard, Nintendo, EA, Epic Games, and Ubisoft are some of the largest players in today’s market. Their game development teams have millions, if not billions, of cash reserves ready to compete for the next hit title in a variety of game genres. Additionally, no one…
