On 7/20/2017 at 6:54 AM, frob said:

Make hobby games because you want to.

What I am saying is that attempting to profit from making your own games, is the same as attempting to profit from designing your own clothes.

You have the same problem where the average person doing this will make less than a person working for a low wage. Yet more than 60% of fashion designers earn above $5000, where only 20% of developers earn more than $5000 per month. 

In both industries you need to earn around that much revenue to earn a salary of  $1000 - $ 3000 that is considered average. So 60% of fashion designers and 20% of game developers earn the same salary as %100 of the legally employed fast food employees. 

As such there is less hope for a indie game developer than for a MacDonald's employee.

You need to really have a passion for games to drive you in those hard times.

On 7/20/2017 at 6:54 AM, frob said:

they're like the kids selling lemonade from a card table on a day too hot for people to be outside, on a dead-end street in suburbia, wondering why they have no sales.

Reminds me of the free to play indie market.

People play free to play games and thinking that they would make a game that isn't pay to win. Then two months latter I find them selling the characters, for more in a in game store than what they paid me for the rights to the characters.

And yes it's still pay to win if it's a character class that free players don't have.

On 7/20/2017 at 0:54 AM, frob said:

Make hobby games because you want to.

When approached as a business, with actual business plans, with market research, with business contacts, and with ensuring you have experienced people doing the job, in that case the odds are far more favorable.  

 

Most hobby and amateur developers make the games they want to play for fun, model them after existing successes, and never fully develop the ideas, let alone fully develop a product. Usually the products have no niche to live and are instead dumped among mass-market products. Usually they have no marketing, no distribution plans or processes.  Or in other words, they're like the kids selling lemonade from a card table on a day too hot for people to be outside, on a dead-end street in suburbia, wondering why they have no sales.

You just described me and my projects! As with new ideas I do frequently develop new concepts because sometimes I want to play something different.