People often find me very critical about my work and games, so I want to clear things up a little bit. Success in gamedev is very relative and can mean totally different things depending on what your goals are and where you are in your journey.

The first thing to consider is that I’m doing this professionally. So “releasing a game” is not a success anymore. Or should I say, it’s not what really matters. Yes, it’s still a success considering how hard it is and how bad things could go at any step, but the goalpost moved. When gamedev becomes your work, and in my case, what I’m trying to make my primary source of income, games have to be financially successful. But what does that mean? Am I talking about recouping the cost of dev time or making a milli? Well, let’s try to break it down.

The numbers

My main goal for now is to keep doing gamedev and ideally have it be my main source of income. This means I don’t need to rely on courses, YouTube (mostly sponsors), and freelance work. Removing those sources of income means I have less frequent revenue, so games have to make a bit more to account for future dev time.

I consider I need about 1000€ a month to survive. Well, maybe survive is a strong word, but with that money, I’m not really living the best life. 1000€ accounts for rent (400€ is my part, 800€ is the total), electricity, water, insurance, car stuff, internet, food, cats, and the small extras like eating out, having a drink with friends, buying clothes, etc. That makes 12000€ a year, so based on that, we can calculate how much games need to generate.

We can do a rough estimate that I take home half of the gross revenue. If you want the details, you have to remove the Steam 30% and then about 26% for taxes. I don’t pay additional income tax as I pay something called “versement libératoire” which is about 1.3% income tax every month. This is a thing you can do in France as a sole entrepreneur when you’re under a certain revenue. With that, we go from 12000€ to 24000€ a year, 2000€ a month if you follow. I know, I know, difficult math.

24000€ a year seems more than attainable, right? That would be about 48 days of freelance at my current rate. In terms of games, considering a game selling for an average of 5€ (it’s the kind of price I’m aiming for), it means 4800 copies. Accounting for a potential 10% refund rate, we go to 5280 copies a year at 5€ so I don’t lose money. To put that into perspective, if we assume a Birkett ratio of 30, it means we’d have a game with 176 reviews. This doesn’t seem incredibly high, but at the same time, it’s probably relatively rare on Steam. I don’t have the numbers, and I’m too lazy to find them, but if you want to look at them, please let me know. I’d love to know how many games released in 2025 have 176 or more reviews after a year.

Many degrees of success

So is that it? Selling a 4800 copies at 5€ in one year would be a success? Well, I would classify that as a first success. Again, I consider releasing anything a success, but one that is expected. So the first real success would be to break even. I also don’t count the milestones or secondary successes like reaching 10, 50 reviews, getting an award, or being played by your favorite content creator.

First success is a minimum to reach to be able to continue doing gamedev. A second step could be to make 2X that amount, giving more time to breathe and experiment but also go on holidays and start imagining buying a house or apartment one day.

The reality is that it’s more complex than this. As you release games, you have a compounding effect. While the older games are not going to sell that well, it can add up. You can also try to extract as much as possible from one game, porting it to other platforms, selling the IP, etc.. But that’s a lot of effort. Also, contract work pays so well it can be worth it to do it when opportunities arise.

Being ok with being “poor”

The more I do it, the more I realize that being an indie means being comfortable being somewhat poor. Ivy recently wrote about that if you’re interested. You can hope for a future big hit, but realistically, statistically, it’s not going to happen. I prefer to be ok with the idea of struggling financially doing what I love. If things work out better, I’ll take it, of course.

There are plenty of ways to make money outside of making games directly, but it might not be what you want to do. I’ve been juggling lots of different things in the past years, and while it made it possible for me to continue doing what I love, it also took a lot of energy and time.

I hope that this clarifies my position a little bit. To be clear, I’m not there yet, but it feels achievable. Gamedev is a marathon, it’s a game of resilience. I’m lucky enough to be in a position where I can take the risk. If I made 0 money right now, I’d still be fine. I could go back to my mom’s place, friends would help me, I could find a job.

I’m sorry if the writing is messy but I wanted to get it out fast without overthinking it.

Cheers, Eliptik

MrEliptik

Full-time indie game developer using Godot

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