I was just wondering if anyone here has made an independent game that made any amount of money. Links to your game and how much you made would be cool. Im just curious to see what types of projects have sold and the figures of sales.

There are some sales statistics from indie games here:

http://www.gameproducer.net/category/sales-statistics/

>> I was just wondering if anyone here has made an independent game that made any amount of money.

Yes. Several people have, in fact.

>> Links to your game

If you own a Pocket PC 2003 or WM5 device, and have a kid around age 3-5, you might enjoy silly scribbles. Two others are forthcoming.

>> and how much you made would be cool.

I have made a profit from individuals and an organization. I will not disclose sales figures.

>> Im just curious to see what types of projects have sold and the figures of sales.

See link by the AP. Some groups are willing to give them out in aggregate but specific numbers are usually not given.

Disclosing certain sales numbers and the reasons behind them can be a legal issue in many places, and it generally isn't done for a variety of reasons.

Maybe this is my own ignorance showing on running small development companies but aren’t the licenses and fees you have to pay to use programs like Visual Studio (programming), Photoshop(assets), Office (documentation) or any programming libraries(shortening development time) cause the cost to make these small games skyrocket?

That has always been the biggest thing that has kept me away from this type of development. Having these programs for personal use is fairly cheap but once you get in the realm of commercial use the prices get ridiculous. I suppose one solution would be to not use any of those programs and only use the open source free ware type of development software.

Is that the case? Are all of these independent small games made using free development software only? No Visual Studio, Photoshop, Office, or any other licensed software? These programs have become so standard it honestly seems very strange to use anything else (but I guess that’s how they get yah)

Quote: Original post by Joystickgenie
Visual Studio

The 2005 Express Editions are freely available. Furthermore there are regularly ways to legally obtain free or discounted copies of Visual Studio software, and the standard edition isn't that expensive anyway. There's also absolutely nothing wrong with a lot of the free alternatives out there if you don't mind not having all the bells and whistles. In many cases you don't need any of the features that aren't available in the Express Editions or alternative products out there.

Quote: Photoshop

The GIMP is an excellent freely available alternative, and if you prefer the photoshop interface you can even get GIMPShop instead. You could also use the less powerful but freely available and very nice Paint.NET or a cheaper alternative such as Paint Shop Pro.

Quote: Office

There's absolutely no reason MS Office would be required for the creation of a game, and if you do feel the need for the applications provided as part of office you can always use an alternative such as OpenOffice. If you're just doing standard documentation something like WordPad (free with Windows) or one of the many free text editors out there will usually do you just fine.



Again though, you're probably over-estimating the price of some of these items though. Many indies make use of free or cheaper alternatives to the bigger products, but where one of the bigger products is what's required for the job (or is simply far superior to the alternative) it's often well worth making the larger investment. Remember that these products are priced as they are because they generally are actually worth it to the right individuals.

Kazgoroth addressed the first paragraph very well, but I want to comment on the other two.

>> That has always been the biggest thing that has kept me away from this type of development. Having these programs for personal use is fairly cheap but once you get in the realm of commercial use the prices get ridiculous. Is that the case?

No, it is not the case. With the exception of the academic versions, you may create commercial products with them. You can get the Microsoft products for free (express editions) or very cheap (regular versions), and you can use those commercially. And as Kazgoroth mentioned, there are other F/OSS products you can use

Sealed boxed copies of Visual Studio 2005 Standard are $80.21+shipping on eBay, and Professional version is available at $187.16+shipping. That is the same VS2005 PRO that we use in our studio to produce AAA games. Yours for just $200.

(Of course, Visual Studio isn't the ONLY tool, but it is the IDE we programmers use. The company even uses the VS2003PRO and VS2005PRO IDE with plugins for XBox, Wii and PlayStation development, not just our PC products.)

>> Are all of these independent small games made using free development software only? No Visual Studio, Photoshop, Office, or any other licensed software?

I do my own homebrew development in addition to my professional work. At home I use Visual Studio Pro, GIMP, Excel (which came OEM with my machine), Blender, Audacity, Finale ($$$ music app) and so on.

Quote: Original post by Joystickgenie
Maybe this is my own ignorance showing on running small development companies but aren’t the licenses and fees you have to pay to use programs like Visual Studio (programming), Photoshop(assets), Office (documentation) or any programming libraries(shortening development time) cause the cost to make these small games skyrocket?

No, as pointed out above the costs of software are quite low. The real costs in development are staff wages. Commercial studios working on console games also need to buy console deve systems (some of which are in the region of $10k while others are much cheaper) but their projects are usually larger than those of most small indie studios so percentage wise these costs aren't that great compared to wages.

When I was looking up costs to use software earlier I saw Photoshop commercial license was around $2000 for 2 years. But then again I knew that Photoshop is the beast of the bunch making their commercial licenses way to expensive. I’m pretty sure the 3d studio max ,maya, and a bunch of other development software packages work the same way.

I guess I just assumed that all the other development software companies worked under the same type of business plan, making developers pay through license subscriptions on top of initial product purchase. Especially because of how reluctant my old company was about allowing machines to have access to programs like office because of “licenses”

That’s not so bad then. I already have everything I need other then the asset producing programs. I guess I just gota get my feet wet and practice up on some milkshape and gimp so I can make some assets with programs that I am allowed to use commercially.

Yeah, between Blender, Audacity, GIMP, Eclipse (which I use for Java but which also works for C++) or VS2005 Express, OpenOffice, the free Platform SDK and DirectX SDK, and the myriad of other open source libraries, you can pretty much develop a game at the cost of a desktop pc and a windows xp license. With NSIS and InnoSetup, you don't even have to pay Macrovision for their InstallShield :)

Milkshape isn't free of course, but I don't know any other game development-related program that adds this much value at only 30 bucks or so.

Both ATI and nVidia also provide a whole bunch of free tools related to shaders, textures, and the like. ATI offers RenderMonkey and the Compressonator, and nVidia even has a whole bunch of royalty-free textures for free download.

As to the original topic: I don't have actual figures to back this up, but I believe that a substantial amount of the money in independent game development is being made in small games for the casual gamer segment, and in games aimed at mobile platforms.