I'm working on a game full-time, solo plus an artist. My knee-jerk reaction upon seeing this was to call BS, and offer my situation as a rebuttal. And then I realized that the simple fact of taking 1 year off paid work to do this is indeed costing me more than $100K, in a very real sense.

Yep, a good developer who's a jack of all trades can knock out a game or a series of games (Ex. Junya Ōta who did art, music, coding, level design, story, project management and everything for "Perfect Cherry Blossom" and a whole series of BulletHellShooters featuring BeautifulFightingGirls.)

Ōta-san doesn't need to cut payroll checks, but his time is quite valuable. If some guy who's mostly interested in business and marketing wants to pay for that talent, he'll pay quite a bit and have all of the overhead of managing other people people to boot.

What's the game?

It's a classic Action RPG, along the lines of Secret of Mana, with heavy emphasis on the Action side.

http://tilesandsprites.wordpress.com/

Great blog, thanks for sharing!

This feels a little like link bait to me, because it's silly just to drop arbitrary numbers on game development that determine its success.

Nobody would disagree that a high quality game requires a big blockbuster-movie size budget. Nobody would disagree that an indie developer can make $100k in a year if the game they make has a little polish.

A great indie game requires talent first. The ability to code well and make pretty graphics. Then it takes the patience required to apply the time it takes to make the game work perfectly and the graphics to look just right.

I think a lot of indie devs race to get their games to market because they're hungry to make money. Then when it doesn't earn anything because it isn't finished, they give up a little because it becomes obvious very quickly how much time and energy is required to make an awesome game.

What's your source of experience for these claims you're making? The author worked on Angry Birds.

I've written several top 10 games in the Android Market and have sold over $100K in product in just a matter of months.

EDIT: Top 10 games in their respective categories, I have NOT broken into the top 10 for "All Games" in the Android Market yet.

I think this applies to a very specific class of games. When people mention games I tend to this of three very distinct types:

Nano Game - something that a single individual put together over the course of a couple weekends. It works, it's fun to play, it may not be pretty to look at, but it will get played again and again then ignored. E.g., Gridwars, Mine Sweeper

Micro Game - maybe two people working together. It is polished took a couple of months to put together. It works, it's fun to play and it is girl next door pretty. It will get played until the sun burns up. E.g., anything that you'll find in the 10$ bargain bin when it first gets released

Macro Game - a group of people working together. It took a couple of years to put together. It is flawless, it's got a marketing campaign behind it and chances are it's going to get played by professional gamers and make a lot of people a lot of money. E.g., Starcraft, GTA, Quake

Nano games are < 10k, micro games are less than 100k and macro games anything more than 100k.

I would argue that the vast majority of games fall into the nano and micro camps. They may never get any traction, but nonetheless they are out there en mass. Because of that, it doesn't make any sense to me to say that it takes 100k to build a game without saying what type of game.

I like this, but I think it needs one more category between Micro and Macro. There are many games that are polished, and take a few people tons of work, but aren't big-budget blockbusters. E.g. Braid, Cave Story, Minecraft, Super Meat Boy - basically the darlings of the indie movement. These often take way more than a couple of months, but are a far cry from the likes of GTA.

I think the estimate may be optimistic. At least for a game that would make its ROI interesting to an investor. Either way, if I happened to have that capital laying around in my pockets... and if you happen to have a game idea and a small team ready to go... get in touch!

What about Minecraft?

What about it? Minecraft sold alpha quality software, literally. It said right on the website "Alpha" and now it's on to "Beta". Minecraft was basically taking preorders with the promise of an eventual polished released. And in the meantime you could play a buggy game you might enjoy. It's going to be quite a while before Minecraft is "done" and Notch is going to spend a lot more than $100,000 on it.

I was wondering if he spent $100,000 to develop it before it became a success. I'm not sure.

I think I read that he released parts of the game as he went?

In a sense he marketed it as he went, which seems like a good strategy. One that could reduce costs provided that you make a game people want.

Because you don't really know if you're making something people want until they try it out and tell you (by using it, hopefully continuously).

If you are making something people want, then I would think you could do it for much less than $100,000. It just might not be WoW or Grand Theft Auto.

I guess it depends on the originality of said concept. There were many games exactly like Minecraft before it's time, however, Notch had better execution and timing; See Wurm Online, Infiniminer, ect.

http://notch.tumblr.com/post/113252305/credits-due

Desktop Tower Defense, which I personally enjoyed more than Angry Birds took less than 100k to make.

Another point:

You need game developers to work full time on your project and preferably be local.