How can indies make money off games? (Kickstarter, etc.)

How can they get their games published and/or distributed?

Are MMO's viable for indies?

What can be used to prevent pirating?

Has anyone here made a successful game?

Has anyone here made a successful game?

There really wasn't any reason you couldn't edit the first post and add this question now, right?

Please define successful.

1 - How can indies make money off games? (Kickstarter, etc.)

2 - How can they get their games published and/or distributed?

3 - Are MMO's viable for indies?

4 - What can be used to prevent pirating?

1 - Selling them. or be more precise
2 - by making them and opening discussions with a publisher.
3 - define the scope. MMO is a very broad term. A single-input text based mmo is viable technically, but may not be viable in terms of sales...
4 - Online distribution which requires a live connection to the server at all times (Blizzard-style) works for starters.

How can indies make money off games? (Kickstarter, etc.)

How can they get their games published and/or distributed?

Are MMO's viable for indies?

What can be used to prevent pirating?

1) Sell them, (If you want money before you got a product to sell then you could try kickstarter, but unless you're fairly well known allready it is hard to get people to invest)

2) Sell it on your own website using paypal or some ecommerce solution, contact valve for distribution on steam, talk to the owners of some local stores, etc.
(Publishers normally want quite alot of control so it is hard to remain independent and still use the big publishers).

3) Viable, sure, in some forms. (There is a huge difference between a social MMO and World of Warcraft)

4) a good distribution service and a reasonable price. Piracy is primarily a service issue. There will always be pirates though since some people are just cheap f..ks but those people aren't worth fighting (even if you win they won't buy your stuff, they'll just steal from someone else or wait until someone else manages to steal from you and share their loot, I'd say: don't focus on preventing piracy, focus on selling as much as possible. (DRM can delay pirates which might be effective if you have a game that people can't wait to get their hands on, as an indie they'll just move along to something else if there is no torrent for your game out).

The always online model only works if a significant portion of the gameplay is handled by the servers, this is fine for multiplayer games (and doesn't even have to be in the form of always online, it can simply be in the form of "serial-key is allready in use or invalid , no online multiplayer for you such as games like half-life have done (not being able to play with your friends is a big disadvantage for the pirates", For most games its just a bad idea for an indie to go down that route, (Look at blizzards release problems, look at ubisofts, etc), As an indie you live and die by the word of mouth, Having a pirate take your game without paying is far better than having paying customers who can't play your game because your DRM servers fell apart.