Releasing an Indie Game

Musings on the state of indie game development.

GAMING

8/26/20263 min read

Retro picture of game developers presenting a game called Knock

Releasing an Indie Game:

Hi everyone. I released a video game. Going to get real really quick.

Back in college (pictured above), I had a group of friends who wanted nothing more than to make video games. We took game dev classes together, created game design bibles, made crappy prototypes on Unity, and tried like hell to become an indie team together. I think our team was originally called Giga Games and we worked on some Cthulhu detective game or something.

But as expected, life happened.

People had falling outs. There were careers that happened. Marriages maybe. Responsibilities had to be prioritized. Then eventually we all went our separate ways.

But I never stopped wanting to make things.

When I was younger, I imagined releasing an indie game as this huge triumphant moment. You make a good game, people find it, and maybe if you keep making good games, eventually you can make a living doing it.

Lucky for me, I got more realistic expectations as I got older. Releasing a game is still absolutely worth celebrating, but I understand now that shipping a game and building a sustainable career from indie game development are two completely different challenges. Younger me probably would've had a much harder time accepting that and gone all in on music or something.

The Brutal Reality:

You spend years making something and then immediately start worrying about collecting wishlists.

So you post a trailer.

You post that trailer on Reddit.

Then you post screenshots to game dev groups who are also trying to sell their things to you.

Two posts a week of SOMETHING.

You tell your friends, family, and DND group about your game.

You make a website and wage war over keywords and SEO.

It all repeats once you release the game; fighting for visibility against a digital graph that’s somehow affected by gravity.

And while you're doing all of this, thousands of other indie developers are releasing their games too.

And after all of that, there's no guarantee what happens next.

Maybe a few hundred people play your game.

Maybe a few thousand.

Maybe you get incredibly lucky.

Or maybe almost nobody does.

That's the reality.

I used to think that making and shipping the game was the hardest part.

But getting somebody to notice that you made the game is harder.

And that made me think about those friends from college again. I made it to the end of the tunnel. Would they have liked what they found?

I think a lot of people who get into game development start the same way we did: as kids who played a lot of video games and had a great game idea that would have the exploration of Elden Ring, the combat of Devil May Cry, the side content of Yakuza (had to mention it once per blog), and the story and social link system of Persona.

But for every Expedition 33, there are thousands of indie games you've never even heard of. If your reason for getting into game development is to pursue fame, money, thousands of reviews, or watching your game explode on Twitch, indie development can be a miserable experience.

And none of that means releasing a game isn't worth celebrating. Shipping something is an accomplishment on its own. It just means that releasing the game and succeeding commercially are two completely different challenges.

You don't control any of that.

You control whether you make something.

For me, I've realized that I make games because I have ideas stuck in my head and I want them to exist somewhere other than my head.

That's basically it.

Fedorable Life started because I looked at a progress bar at work and thought it looked like a life bar. Somehow that thought survived years of life filtering through me and became something you can download on Steam.

But there's something sitting in my Steam library now that used to exist only in my head.

And there's a little more space up there for the next idea.

That’s my why.