I dabbled in shareware games for roughly 20 years. I had high hopes for making a revolutionary game and my ship coming in like Notch, but what I found was that making a game was never the difficult part. It was always about funding - making rent each month, affording food, etc. It was also about telling people no, because the closest people around me were often the most demanding of my time and energy, even going as…
See, I disagree with your "budget".. all it takes is a computer and a dream to build whatever you want. It doesn't take budgets.. Can you do it in the same time a team with 30 million in funding? Hell no, but with the right group of people and a lot of persistance you can make anything happen.. see SWG Emu http://www.swgemu.com/forums/index.php it's taken years, and years, but with determination and $0 budget they've…
It’s also true that there are few or no expenses in programming other than labor, but even living a subsistence lifestyle adds up. I think we each averaged over 500 hours per year, call it 10,000 total to be conservative. So we could have made the game over about 2 years if we could have raised $70,000 and paid ourselves minimum wage (which just barely makes ends meet for a single person where we live in Idaho). Instead we worked a bunch of dead end jobs, I ended up moving furniture for 3 years and my partner got sucked into computer repair rather than programming. We would work seasonally and then be on call at home during slow parts of the year and spend what money we’d saved on rent and food while we hacked on the game for days on end. Struggling with burnout and destitution for so many years set our careers and personal lives back so far that we still haven’t started families and we’re pushing 40.
What I learned from all of this is that if you want to raise money, you need to earn an order of magnitude more, somewhere between 2 and 10 times as much as you think, because of life’s expenses (mainly debts in this era). It works just like time where even tripling your estimate is sometimes not enough. As far as I can tell, there is nothing like an artist guild for indie programmers, no support structure to lend any dignity to the lifestyle through grants, commissioned work or the attention of benefactors. There’s just the starving artist mentality, which grows more unpalatable with age. I don’t view this as anything close to sustainable, so it’s no wonder that the overall quality of indie games has fallen to amateur levels (and eventually apps as their prices race to the bottom). It’s going to follow the same trend as books. I’m hopeful though that maybe something like a basic income might come along and rescue art from slow decline. Art is synonymous with culture so I guess that’s why I get so worked up about all of this, because I feel it’s intimately tied to whatever technological future we would like to see for ourselves and future generations.