The MILLIONAIRES of Solo Indie Game Development

Simply put, the internet will choose someone at random.
Often someone deserving, but no the most deserving by a long shot.
Sometimes even people that turn out to be arrogant pricks that genuinely think they are special.
The projects tend to not be unique ideas whatsoever, and are more whoever wins the viral lottery to be noticed.
Kinda like telling the joke louder but not coming up with it. Except this time around your voice volume is determined by a dice roll.
It's a frustrating and very unfair dream to chase, full of survivor bias stories and sugary tales about how effort pays. It doesn't have to.
While most people who succeed put in the effort and you miss 100% of the shots you don't take, you can slave on your project forever and never get rewarded.
Only for someone else to make the exact same idea as a prototype but with a higher luck roll and essentially crushing your spirit.

Im also making a game which comes inside an app

Even 1 year later, this video really motivated me to get back to working on my game 🥹, thank you.

Remember there was also Transport Tycoon before Rollercoaster Tycoon. I think it was built on the same core code. It already did a lot of what RCT did 5 years earlier.

Cavestory was originally freeware, and is still freely available from his website and such. Granted he's still successful as he has quite his job to become a full time game developer from the success of all the cavestory re-releases.

I never played Rollercoster Tycoon but I always imagined it was made by a big team of people like other big name computer games of the time. This video gave me a new respect for Rollercoster Tycoon, very impressive.

so basically if you are doing indie Game-Dev "alone" [1-3 people] basically have a week[for simple, and game-jams] to 4-8 years[for complex [has more than code] and 3D {if you got the guts for it}] as your timeline, have it run on 4-8gb of ram and CPU integrated graphics{4gb graphics card for 3D}, and it seems 2D Metroidvania is the money-maker of the indie genre.
Hope you have a great day & Safe Travels!

Man...
FNAF???

You forgot Flappy Bird and Tetris among others.

nice vid

Kenshi

toby had help from other programmers too, all you have to check are the credits

Subscribed in 0.839 sec here as this is the content i have been wishing for since last year

This is pretty insightful! Some parts matches my own research as well.

Side note, I was researching revenue for mobile games as well and those seems to be a lot more profitable - assuming you are trying to make some money from your games.

eric barone and the creator of flappy bird push me to become a game developer.

its not "solo" but Terraria up until a much later point only had 2 developers and managed to sold millions of copies

I'm for sure gonna be like those people.

But where's that character in the thumbnail from?

Thomas Happ and Ska Studios deserve shoutouts too!

Its always the pixel art games

Shoutout to Kenshi...!!

No Lucas Pope, Zeng XIancheng, Derek Yu, Johanthan Blow.

Truly inspiring

I kind of hope that Interstate Drifter takes off someday.. But I am also a bit scared of success..

Spend years making a game, sell $1,000,000 worth, Steam takes $300,000 just because they can.

Other Massive Indie Games: Deep Rock Galactic, Slay The Spire, Terraria

I hope I get on this list one day 🥲

By the way Stardew would take significantly less time to develop if Eric didnt make mistakes that he later admitted on, first one was developing his own engine which took massive amount of time, second was "rebooting" game multiple times for bad reasons like "I dont like hair styles, so Iam gona redraw all characters"

Geometry Dash: *Standing in the rain*

One thing i noticed, all games have some type of pixel art.

Im a game dev too, good luck to all of us!

Just remember, most novels aren't huge financial successes either; but if George R. R. Martin or James S. A. Corey played by that rule we'd be down by a few treasured series.

actually growtopia is kind of an indie game too, its made by 2 guys; Hamumu and Seth

Stardew valley is one of my favorite game it chill or maybe not if you want speed runnnn

i can guarantee that notch did not code up minecraft in a weekend lol

It seems I have to make soyboy block game if I want to be successful as a solo indie

So, does the graph in the beginning mean that I'm guaranteed to make 1K off my first indie game??? :O

Ummm, not sure about the whole revenue part, but..... Tetris?

Terraria?

stardew valley,

30 millions, minus 30% of taxes, then maybe 100k of marketing campaign and more
about 15 to 20 millions dollars * Still huge!

Here's a quick swedish lesson. Persson is pronounced kinda liked Pershing, at least that Sh sound on the Sson for Persson.

Minecraft is actually the most sold game in the world. A simple but brilliant and fun concept with literally endless replayability.

fnaf?

Yea great vid and all! 🤩 But you should for sure be sent to jail for the way you pronounce "Persson"...😵

realitycheck: you can count the sucess story´s with two hand´s lets be real. It´s like playing soccer in the lowest rank possible and dreaming of becoming ronaldo.

One thing in common in all of these games:
- Low graphic requirements

I have full respect and love for so many solo devs working on their projects
I've tried to do the same; it gets so taxing to do every single part alone (especially when you're not good in one of the areas needed for your games)

u missed the story of FNAF, that became a huge franchise.
But yeah for the next video.