I wanted to take a deeper look at what it takes to succeed in the games industry across all levels, not just the top-performing hits of 2024. AAA, AA, and Indie games face vastly different challenges when it comes to player expectations, marketing budgets, and production scale so I put together a data set that reflects those differences more clearly.

All numbers are pulled from GameDiscoverCo and Gamalytic. They are some of the leading 3rd party data sites but they are still estimates. It's the best we got without asking devs for the data themselves but still take everything with a grain of salt.

📊 Check out the full data set here (complete with filters so you can explore and draw your own conclusions): Link
🔍 Some analysis and interesting insights I’ve gathered: Link

I’d love to hear your thoughts! Feel free to share any insights you discover or drop some questions in the comments 🎮. Good luck on your games in 2025!

Youre a solo dev. You have 4 hours a day six days a week to work in your game. Doing all the code, graphics, animation, in your engine of choice. You can use free music from the internet and there is this loyal friend of all life (or two) thats willing to do the playtesting.

Youre proficent at coding. As a bonus, youre somewhat skilled at drawing and writting, but mostly from having done action, fantasy and romance comics in your youth.

Whats a reasonable game you could make in 4 months, and what can you expect out if it?

Just a casual hypotetical question. Dont get weird ideas.

Let's say a publisher has a studio, and one or more games they produce are profitable.

What is the purpose of selling/dropping that studio, with the understanding the staff won't be redistributed elsewhere. What is the upside to dropping something that gains -any- profit, and selling it effectively at a loss?

Hey! For context, I'm part of an indie dev studio Rocket Adrift, and we put out our side-scroller narrative game Psychroma in June of last year.

We released on PC and Linux through Steam, and only in English. To be honest, we had very little expectations on having any other languages for release or after. But a unique opportunity arose the week before our launch that we couldn't ignore.

We applied for free localization through a volunteer-run initiative. The initiative would initially deliver 21 languages all for free, and the goal was to start in the month of June. Psychroma ended up being picked among several different projects in a vote. Suddenly we were going from 1 language to 21!

In our 6 years of developing games, we had never gone through the process of localization before. We only had an educated guess on the scope of that process, but we were completely new to it otherwise. Well, we were in for a shock.

The overall process took over 6 months for 15 languages. The amount of work varied from part-time to full-time for the entire team, as we handed off tasks to keep things doable. But it was incredibly difficult to implement, took a ton of communication with the translators, and required all of us to make a lot of concessions about QA.

Part of the reason we struggled with it is we had not done the set up required to implement localized strings, particularly for the UI. We were using Unity Dialogue Manager, as well as Corgi Engine for our movement, camera and UI systems. Historically, both these plugins did not play well together during development, and required some custom scripts to function properly. This problem only exacerbated the localization process. It basically ended up becoming a one-person job to manually change over every single UI text string for every language.

Another contributing factor was organization. Since we had no internal formal process for delivering localized files, and testing or flagging issues, communication with the translation teams struggled. Tasks would be marked as complete when they weren't, testers were unclear on what build version they were testing on, and user errors slowed down progress.

We also learned during the process that the translation teams were made up of hobbyists and non-professionals, who were volunteering their time when they could to the project. To their credit, almost all of them came through with exceptional patience, skill, and hard work. At the end of the process, they were incredibly proud of their contributions, as they should be.

The major issue here is that them being volunteers created an imbalance of expectations for the quality of the translations versus the our teams' ability to deliver our work. Our budget had already been strained from the release of Psychroma, and we didn't have a lot of time to dedicate to localization, as we desperately needed to seek funding for the studio.

As a result, there were many elements lost, including several translation teams that had dropped off over the months. We tried our best to accommodate requests from the teams, a large one being font support for Thai and Greek languages (It turns out these alphabets have very particular issues around legibility and are very difficult to find support for in the pixel aesthetic we used). However, we were not able to find the cleanest solution to these issues, which contributed to a feeling of letting down the translators on our end.

Part of the reason we decided to pursue this opportunity was that it would theoretically open up our game to more Steam regions and markets, and therefore lead to higher sales. However in practice, this only ended up accounting for 5% -10% of players compared to our top-selling English-speaking market. We quickly realized after release why most studios, even AAA, don't prioritize most non-English speaking markets. It is an unfortunate reality that for the most under-served countries, English is the expected default for videogames. Therefore, these markets are always going to account for a low percentage of players and continue to not be prioritized.

Realizing the reality of the market made it really difficult for us to justify spending as much time and energy on the localization as the translation team expected. On the one hand, we were bleeding funds we didn't have for an update that wasn't guaranteed sales. On the other, we made a commitment to see this project through with this localization initiative, in whose cause we believed in strongly. We were in an uncomfortable bind.

All that being said, we are incredibly thankful for the efforts of everyone on the translation teams and we believe in their ability to further their cause.

At the end of the day, the fact that we were able to get more than 15 languages in was a feat that we never thought possible for our small, 3-person team. We are supremely proud of the results. However I think in the future, we would approach localization differently, and try to set the project up earlier for it, to save us from suffering the same pains again.

I hope this post helps future game devs consider the pros and cons of the localization process, and help weigh whether its a worthwhile endeavor for their projects. Understandably, not every situation will be the same as ours, and most studios have to set a side a budget for localization. But before signing up for a service, think carefully about how many languages you want, which ones would be most beneficial, and how much time/energy you will be able to put into implementation.

Thanks for your time!

Lego Racers is an old offline game (released in 1999). The original game didn’t support online multiplayer; it only had offline multiplayer (2 players using the same keyboard).

One day, someone decided to modify the game and make it online, and he built a working prototype.

I'm not sure if this is the right sub for this, but I wanted to ask how he managed to do it without access to the source code.

Here’s the repo, but without any README or documentation, it’s almost unreadable: roelvdwater/legoracersonline (sadly, it's been inactive for over 10 years).

The project includes something like an API for the game, but I don’t understand how they created it, since the original game doesn’t expose any kind of interface.

When we worked on an online game project at university, we had to integrate the network part directly into the source code of the game, meaning inside the game itself. If someone had told us, “Make an offline game, and then turn it into an online game without looking at the source code,” I would have had no idea where to start. That’s why I’m asking.

I’m not sure if this is something that’s typically taught, or if it’s something you have to figure out on your own, but when I looked at this, I was absolutely amazed. Now I’m really curious to know how the author of the repo pulled it off. From what I’ve read on a forum, the person who created this was a teenager at the time and developed the first prototype in just a couple of days. Here’s the reference, just if you’re interested: LEGO Racers Online - Modding Tools - Rock Raiders United

Thanks in advance for your answers!

We're publishing our first game on Steam and we are not sure what to fill in the store info about requirements, our game is a 2d roguelike about climbing and we haven't had any problems testing it in any computer so far. Here's our steam page for context https://store.steampowered.com/app/2645670/Eldritch_Climb/

I’ve set up a Steam page for my indie game, complete with a trailer, screenshots, and other materials, but nothing is public yet. I’ve read that you should start reaching out to press about a month before announcing, asking if they’d be interested in mentioning the games announcement. I’d love to hear any experiences with this process.

1. Private Assets for the Press: Since the game’s presence is private before launch, how do you handle sharing materials like the trailer, screenshots, or a press kit? Should I make specific parts available via unlisted links? How do you balance giving them enough information while keeping control over what's public?
2. Targeting the Right Press: When we talk about reaching out to the press, are we mainly focusing on smaller sites that specialize in indie games? For example, scrolling through eg. IGN’s news feed, it seems like indie games rarely get mentioned unless they already have a cult following. Is it worth even trying to contact larger sites, or should I focus entirely on smaller ones. I do sometimes see IGN post trailers to indie games on their Youtube, but I imagine those devs pay them for that?
3. Press Releases: Should I put out a press release for the announcement? If so, does this just mean emailing platforms like gamespress.com with the announcement details, or is there more to it?

Any tips, suggestions, or experiences with this process would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

Working for a game localization company, I’ve racked up some experience in the field and I’d like to help developers understand game localization better.

I mostly manage copywriting, and marketing related stuff, but I’ve worked as a translator on a few projects. Not only that, being a small company I’ve been and still am in close contact with the administration. Ask me anything localization related, whether you want some numbers, technical stuff or really any other information that you might need, or you are just curious about.

Just wanted to share something that absolutely made my week and reminded me why I love this crazy game dev world. I've been slaving away on my little baseball sim, and a player just went ahead and made a full-on newspaper-style front page recapping the first season.

It's not some super polished, professionally-designed piece of art (and that's kinda what makes it even better, tbh). Someone took the time to recap our first sesaon, with their own creative spin and I love that.

It’s moments like this that make the long nights of staring at code, the endless bug hunts, and the design headaches fade away. It's such a reminder that there's real human connection behind all this screen time, and that the things we create can really resonate with people.

Has anyone else had those moments where a player just does something awesome like this? I'd love to hear about them!

Happy developing everyone!

Think this is my biggest motivation killer, I work on a project for a few months, and then discover someone has already done the idea, and give up, because why would anyone play my game when they can play the other game?

I guess it is impossible to make anything unique considering there are 100 games released on Steam every minute, and ten times the number on Itch.io.

I noticed in a lot of games there's little to no background sounds so when you turn off the music game's soundscape feel really poor.

Even the games which have good sound design don't always fill the scene with sounds.

So for example Cult of the Lamb which sounds overall great doesn't have sounds for fire sources, there are wind/forest ambience that enhances the soundscape, but I still got the feeling that something is lacking.

I wonder if adding extra sounds to fill up soundscape in "no music" mode would interfere with the music when it's on?

Full disclosure I have 7 years programming experience. I do not have much game dev experience. I’ve tinkered with some things here and there.

From a difficulty perspective, how hard would it for a one or two person team to build something similar to Coffee Inc (Lemonade Stand on steroids), and would Unity or Unreal Engine be overkill for this project?

Hello for context I'm making a 2d top-down orthographic jrpg.

Just wanted to get thoughts on order of operations for a combat state machine(s).

For more context on combat; there will be 1 player which the player controls and between 1-4 enemies which decide randomly to attack or use one of their abilities. It is a turn based rpg much like paper Mario. Can I get suggestions on what a state machine will look like that I can start building?

I’m a fairly new hobbyist game developer. I’ve been learning to code for a while now, mostly making prototypes and small single-screen games. Recently, I’ve started putting my skills into practice by working on a full game of my own. I feel pretty confident in my ability to take my ideas and make them work in code. I can usually find a way to implement the things I want, and with some trial and error, I get them to work in my game. In fact, I often come up with multiple ways to do something, which brings me to the issue I’m facing now: deciding which techniques to use and why.

Here’s an example that sparked this question in my mind.
I’m working on a system for spawning waves of enemies in a round-based system for my game. I decided to tackle this on my own as a learning exercise, and the system works as it is. However, I’m wondering if it would be better to implement it in a different way.
Currently, my wave spawner is an entity in the game. It’s initialized with a set of waves and handles things like:

• Checking if a wave is complete
• Spawning a new wave
• Spawning enemies throughout the current wave

This is all done through the entity’s update loop. It works fine in testing—I can run a few waves, clear them, and trigger events like unlocking a door when a wave or all waves are completed.

However, today I had the idea of reimplementing this system as a finite state machine. The idea would be to structure the wave spawner as a state machine with states like WaveStart, WaveActive, and WaveEnd. The spawner would keep its list of waves (or a function for randomly generating waves), and the state machine would clearly handle transitioning between these states.

But as I started thinking about it, I realized the actual functionality wouldn’t change much. The wave spawner would essentially do the same thing. So, now I’m stuck wondering:

• How do I decide which method makes the most sense if both approaches work?
• Should I leave the code as-is until I encounter an issue that requires a rewrite? Or is it better to take the time now to figure out the “better” solution and implement it upfront?

So, after all this ranting, my question is:

How do I know which implementation of my ideas is best, and when should I just stick with what works?

GUILD - Global Union for Independent Labor and Development

A non-profit organisation supporting for-profit game projects.

GUILD aims to address the systemic challenges faced by indie game developers, providing a structured ecosystem where contributions to game projects are rewarded with financial stipends. Below, I outline the key pillars of this proposal, structured to address the current problems in the gaming industry and provide solutions, benefits, and safeguards. A system like this would have to be adapted to comply to your national laws but keeping the discussion on the global level may prevent us from getting lost in details, discussions on national level should be held seperately.

The basic idea is simple: earn credits by helping other developers, get monthly cash for your credits, the money comes from games finished by members of the GUILD.

This system is obviously not finished but I’d be happy if we could get a discussion started, maybe something good comes out of it. Please be nice to each other in the comments.

Core Values:

Non Profit: GUILD has to be a non-profit, with the goal to support developers. To prevent outside influence, GUILD has to operate on absollute financial transparency.

Egality: The value of work doesn’t stem from the skill or quality of work but from the time and effort that someone sacrifices.

Proactivity: GUILD has to make sure that established members do not automatically earn more credits than new members. It is supposed to be a system rewarding enagement.

Democracy: Developers in the nonprofit vote on major decisions (e.g., funding priorities, systemic changes). No member can have more than one vote.

Transparency: an anonymous whistle-blower system should protect members from harassment and abuse of power within projects

AI: AI is supposed to be a tool for people and should not be used to replace us. I personally am not sure on where to draw the line. I used ChatGPT to come up with this draft so…yeah.

1. Problem: Financial Insecurity for Indie Developers

- Many indie developers struggle with financial insecurity due to the lack of stable income and the flooded market. This forces many to work part-time jobs, limiting their ability to focus on game development. Not able to pay other developers, the possibility for cooperation is limited and people working alone is resulting in countless mini projects.

Proposed Solution:

- Implement a credit-based system where developers earn credits for contributing time to others’ projects. These credits can be converted into a monthly stipend, allowing members to focus on their projects alleviating the worries about financial instability.

Benefits:

- Provides a safety net for indie developers, enabling them to work full-time on their projects or find other peoples’ projects to work on.

- Encourages collaboration within the community, fostering a supportive ecosystem.

Safeguard:

- Stipends are tiered, and contributions are evaluated based on quality and adherence to project goals to prevent exploitation or gaming the system. Regular audits ensure fairness.

1. Problem: Lack of Career Development Opportunities

- New developers face significant barriers to entering the industry, including limited access to mentorship and skill development.

Proposed Solution:

- Establish mentorship programs and encourage members to take on tasks aligned with their career goals. Reward milestones such as skill improvement and successful task completion with recognition and increased stipends.

Benefits:

- Helps new developers build their skills in a low-pressure environment.

- Encourages experienced developers to give back to the community, strengthening the talent pool.

Safeguard:

- Mentorship credits and milestones are closely monitored to ensure fairness and prevent favoritism. Feedback loops allow participants to report any issues.

1. Problem: Exploitation and Unfair Labor Practices

- Developers risk exploitation through unpaid or undervalued work, with some contributors benefiting more than others.

Proposed Solution:

- Adopt a dynamic stipend model based on both time worked and quality of contributions. Introduce peer reviews and project lead evaluations to assess contributions.

Benefits:

- Ensures fair compensation for all contributors, regardless of role or experience.

- Encourages high-quality work, as stipends are linked to contribution value.

Safeguard:

- Quality standards and peer reviews prevent abuse, such as inflating hours or submitting subpar work. A whistleblower system is in place for reporting malpractice.

1. Problem: Difficulty in Sustaining a Non-Profit Organization

- Many non-profits struggle with funding and administrative challenges, particularly when reliant on external contributions.

Proposed Solution:

- GUILD is funded entirely by voluntary member contributions. Profits from members’ projects are reinvested into the organization to support stipends and operational costs.

Benefits:

- Ensures financial sustainability without dependence on external stakeholders.

- Keeps the organization focused solely on member welfare.

Safeguard:

- Transparent financial reporting and democratic member voting on significant decisions ensure accountability. External audits prevent misuse of funds.

This is probably an impossible problem, but imagine you had a community of players creating content for a game such as skins.

The skins can be traded, but need to be moderated to keep the marketplace from devolving into a mess of offensive or illegal content.

The brute force approach would be to employ moderators to ban controversial content, perhaps filtered towards them via some sort of flagging system.

I was wondering if there was some way to implement some kind of method that enabled the community to self moderate with less manual oversight.

Has anyone played with this before, or seen any inventive solutions to this?

Your goal is to play as a character trying to save the forest from devastation caused by corporations that are destroying it through various means.

Gameplay involves exploration, and in each area of the forest, you encounter enemies and challenges revolving around the devastation these corporations are doing to nature (i.e. in the great river area, you fight to stop pollution of the water, in the dense forest, you prevent logging machines, in the canopy of the forest, you fight through air pollution, etc). Most of the enemies are machines/robots, maybe some pollution slime creatures, and more.

Within each area there is is a main boss, which is a giant mech powered by the soul of an ancient forest animal spirit. For example, the boss in the Canopy area might be a giant mechanical falcon, or there will be one that's a mechanical bear, or fox, or rabbit, etc. Bosses will be themed to what their purpose is for the corporation, and will have attacks based on the animal itself. Defeating the boss frees the animal spirit and they intern bestow you with a charm to be used in the ability system.

The ability system revolves around attaching each spirits charm to a different piece of equipment or weapon, thus modifying the behavior or adding an ability. For example, the bear charm attached to the boots allows you to dash to break certain barriers, but the fox charm attached to the boots lets you turn invisible for a short time after dashing. If you instead attach the bear charm to your gloves, you can slam the ground with your fists causing damage in a shockwave. Each spirit results in a different effect based on which equipment item it is attached to, leading to a variety in "builds" that players can use to solve exploration puzzles or to succeed in combat.

I would love to hear any feedback, or thoughts on things I may be overlooking. Additionally, if within this framework you have opinions on what would be fun to experience in this game, please feel free to drop a comment!

Hello, as a rookie team, we have a project with a dark and disturbing atmosphere. We are working on a detective game that is basically inspired by The Coffin of Andy and Leyley and Omori. How can we publicize it in general? I would like to hear your ideas and suggestions. İt would really help.

Basicaly title.

I'm not talking about local co-op or couch vs games like Mario Kart, Overcooked and so on. I'm talking games where each player would bring their own machine, whether that would be a console or PC and play while being together in the same space.

To expand the question even further, do you think there is an audience for multiplayer games where a player hosts a server and players join via some code or IP, kinda like we used to play Minecraft back in the day?

Should I, or would it better to just let them cook? I've sort of given them a general idea of the "feel" I want for the game soundtrack, but I don't know, maybe I should do more? I just don't want to do something embarrassing.

I'm a layman but I'm just curious on the opinion of game devs, because I imagine most people just say this based on anecdotes and don't really know how any of this works.

Hello All! 🌟
I’ve recently started a new journey with my team, offering affordable services for the MENA market. We specialize in Arabic localization, market consulting, community management, and AR player support.

With 14 years of experience, we’re a start-up ready to help you bring your game to the Arabic community. Feel free to reach out! 🚀

So I know it is a bad time to launch during seasonal sales on Steam, while AAA games are launching or during Next Fest.

I also remember hearing something like you shouldn't release an indie game in Q2 or Q3 in the year, but I can't remember why.

When is it a good time to launch your Indie game? Also when do you think you shouldn't? Are there any hidden dangers that you should look out for except these major threats? What do you think?

Steam Next Fest registration is four days away. I've applied several times before but realized how much work it takes to compete and have a shot at the spotlight. Maybe I'm making a big deal out of it, but I want to take it seriously. This game is my baby.

But what if it's not ready? What if I could improve it EVEN MORE!? I think we always ask ourselves that, and sometimes that's not what matters. Timing matters.

I'd like some advice on the current state of Steam Next Fest. It feels like a big deal, so I don't want to waste my shot, and I'd love some input from streamers and fellow game devs, to let me know, honestly, how far I am from joining Next Fest. I want to release in early access this year, have spent more than two years on this current iteration and I feel like 2025 is a good time to release a game like mine.

Improvements to graphics, audio and the narrative are in the works, as well as several improvements to upgrades and trade, but the core systems and the gameloop are in place, I just need to point people at it and keep smoothing out the kinks. I feel like it is very doable within a short timespan.

Please take a look: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1870590/Gravity_Break/