So how many of you have made a good game that have generated a good bit of money? $5000+ is just a number I came up with.

I've worked on many games that generated millions of dollars. Many of these were teams with 20 or fewer people, the smallest of them were a team of three for development (one programmer, one animator, modeler/artist).

... Or are you referring only to hobby games made by individuals?

A lot of us here work at large companies which have games that generate mind boggling amounts of money. Mind boggling. I am not exaggerating. I looked at the MRI and could SEE the boggles.

Yep worked on IP such as Sonic the Hedgehog and Metal Gear so millions.

If you are on about smaller indie projects Ive worked on mobile games that have netted over $5000 in either adverts or in app purchases.

Far Cry 3 here... made Ubisoft a bunch of cash; me, not so much :)

Ubisoft a bunch of cash; me, not so much

I don't worry about that so much.

I look at the company as a whole. The companies fund a lot of things that turn out to be failures. Lots of projects are explored and terminated early, others are cancelled late, some make it to market and fail. Through no fault of their own many other developers were assigned to those projects. Sometimes I have been assigned to those projects.

We all get paid our salary to work on whatever project we are on, those assigned on successful projects get paid a regular salary, but so do those working on unsuccessful projects. While the individual people don't get the massive rewards of a runaway success (apart from perhaps a slightly better annual bonus) the flip side is that you still get paid even when you are assigned to an exploratory R&D project that you know in advance will almost certainly never make it to market.

Released a lot of big-ish titles in my day job, and have also made an indie title that fulfils your success criteria.

That said, if my indie game had been proper successful, I perhaps wouldn't still have to have the day job (pleasant though it is).

I don't worry about that so much.

Oh neither do I; I absolutely love my job :)

I absolutely love my job

Hmmmmm, do you love your Ubisoft job enough to get the powers-that-be to ban the person using my Watch dogs activation code so that I can actually play the game? :D

Personally no, but I'm working towards selling some games. Professionally I've worked on Sims 3, Madden, and the new Tiger woods.

Off topic: I left though but EA was a good experience with smart people. I actually avoided crazy OT, but I always heard the before/after and other projects around me that had bad OT. I also left because of expected 12 hour days for a couple months. I've had two jobs outside of games though and I feel like there are game programmers and then there are the other programmers. Two different levels of intelligence in my experience. I actually just gave the first EA interview question to a couple people I work with at my new non-games job, and had some pretty bad results. Someone who started a year ago, fresh out of college, had no idea how a pointer worked...at the basic level. I was speechless.

Bottom line: if you are new, stick around and ask questions. I learned a lot on this forum.