These are all exceptions to the brutal world of indie game development.
Mostly, these developers don't make anything. They spend months and years in almost solitude making something no one will play. Games take a huge time investment to make before anyone is at all interested.
It's the starving artist profession of the nerd world.
Yeah, the Indiepocalypse.
The thing is, a lot of indie games... simply are not fun to play. And that's ok, it's hard to make a game which is fun to play. It's fine. [0]
You can treat indie games as a hobby, just have fun, call it 'starving art', whatever, but don't be shocked that people are not paying money.
On other hand, treat it like a business, with a solid product, market research, plenty of feedback from the outside (echo chamber is no good for a product that you are working on for years), marketing plan and some marketing budget. Even then, you have a chance of failure, where failure is that the revenue does not cover the costs. However, the odds are more in your favor.
These two extremely distinct segments (hobby v business) are both under the 'indie' label, however, their chances at succeeding are extremely different.
[0] I won't even talk about the platformers (there are dozens, if not hundreds, of them released every week) and they all are largely the same.
These metrics driven developers risk more cash up front and take less creative risks. Like a Hollywood movies, they pick a genre that is already successful and twist it a little. They likely even spend more on marketing than on production.
Still, even those games (like hollywood movies) remain hit driven so you'd better have a big budget backer to smooth out the edges.
It's actually 10 people, if the Wikipedia page is accurate. Prison Architect is developed by Introversion Software. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introversion_Software
> I'm seeing several projects that make a lot of money for a little effort - DayZ comes to mind, an early access game that costs $35 and has sold millions of copies already, but still feels like a rather bad mod, with little development effort going into it (seemingly).
I would agree with you. DayZ spawned a lot of survival genre indie/kickstarted games that are all more or less broken. Even DayZ itself has taken years to add features that were present in the free mod. This might be judgmental but I think the kind of people who primarily buy these games just don't care, because I don't think they're naive enough to believe in the "everything will get better once it's out of alpha/beta" thing that gets thrown around a lot (rarely true).
Even Minecraft is pretty poor in terms of development. Performance has gotten better lately but for the longest time it used to run awfully regardless of the hardware you ran it on. Not only that but there wasn't (and I'm not sure there still is) a proper modding framework so most people just use patched jars and hack the game itself. In Minecraft's case it is understandable though, as it was basically a hobby coding project that exploded in popularity. The only thing that would have saved it from that fate is a complete rewrite, which to my understanding is exactly what Microsoft is doing with it right now since they bought it (C++ rewrite).
> I'm still on the fence about Star Citizen; the demos they've shown so far are promising, but I'm going to wait until there's an actual game.
This is just my opinion, but in my eyes it's vaporware. Too much money, too many promises, and not a lot to go by. I'm sure it might come out in some shape or form but it will never justify the hype and many will be left disappointed. /opinion
Really interests me. I believe it is the next version of EvE so been keeping my eye on it for ages. However I do think they are going to have massive issues bring it all together. At present they have lots of modules that are pretty standalone. Yes it is very pretty but I not sure if they can make it work as a single Shard MMO
I am rather behind on news but last I heard someone left and the FPS part was delayed.
There are concerns from ExDevs highlighting the game on kickstarter might never be released http://news.softpedia.com/news/star-citizen-development-supp...
I think they will turn it in to a single player game with some light MMO features, or they will have to mass shard it, at which point i lose interest.
The fact that just last week they release another ship worth $300, and the above news pieces indicates they are down to 8mil out of the 82million pleged might show how they are running out of money.
Note above minecraft: Notch used minecraft to learn. The code in it was never great, and you are completely right that it generally ran like shit but it is getting better, and the development are stream lining the code but they cannot re-write it because some of the things that make minecraft good was the odd behavoir that a recode would most likely lose.
Yeah I actually went back and edited my post to say about the same thing as you did. It used to frustrate me but honestly you can't blame Markus, and Mojang has done an amazing job at making it run pretty well nowadays.
They also predate the post Steam indie boom: they have a longish history of creating interesting, innovative games that weren’t always that commercially successful going back to around the year 2000.
So they may have hit a smallish jackpot, but they’ve worked long & hard for it if so.
They solded more than 850k copies, but the revenue per employee is indeed much less than Prison Architect.
Here's a talk at AWS Invent 2015 about the network architecture
I'm still on the fence about Star Citizen; the demos they've shown so far are promising, but I'm going to wait until there's an actual game.
In contrast, there's Elite: Dangerous, which had a successful kickstarter at about 1.5 million, was built and released, and is still under active development, with few bugs to speak of (atm, experiences from retail version over half a year after first release)