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I think there are more and more one/three people company making indie games and living off it partly from Steam and iPhone development. I hope you will be successful in your projects!
Steam's market is quite good. To be in Steam's marketplace is probably a very good thing. But, the barriers to entry are likely a lot higher than the Xbox 360 market. Just judging from what and who I've seen on Steam's store, I wouldn't aim to be there right out of the gate.
From what I've read it's pretty easy to get up on Steam. Terraria and Magicka are good examples of games from unknown teams making it big. I think Terraria was put together in something like 4 months, made a couple million dollars too.
I'm surprised by the "30 or younger" criterion. When I started programming in the '80s I found writing games a much more accessible, profitable and rockstarish idea than I do now (although I never actually wrote anything marketable). Maybe that's about me rather than the market though.
I'm currently creating an HTML5 Canvas games site in my spare time. So "not yet", but someday, depending on your definition of success!
I hope things work out for you. Keep us posted!
What is success? Game companies are easy to start and frequent to close down. Recommendation: Contract iPhone development or Android development. Get a decent but minimal app in the App Store using Unity or Cocos2d, and recruiters / devs will be falling over themselves to hire you. Consoles are a really crappy market. The CEO of the console company I used to work for really wanted to get into mobile. That was before…
Recently there was a video of indie game developpers that were living from their own games. You can see the video here : http://casualconnect.org/lectures/indie/diy-indie-game-dev-f... I think there are more and more one/three people company making indie games and living off it partly from Steam and iPhone development. I hope you will be successful in your projects!
A friend and I quit our jobs to start a mobile game company. The toughest things are we have to work like crazy to meet self-imposed deadlines and deal with a bunch of non-programming related issues like marketing and distribution. Mobile games are the easiest to get into (since you can rely on the app distribution models from Apple, Google, and Microsoft) and you don't need to think too much about cramming your soft…
Also, what avenues of marketing are you using?
The biggest hurdle is awareness. You need to market the shit out of your product or else no amount of spit & polish will save you from obscurity and dismal sales. Most devs and artists hate marketing, but it's actually THE most important part of your business. If people don't know about you, they can't buy from you.