“I thought I could ship at least 700 units to stay in business”
Hi everyone OP here. Just to clarify some confusion&#x2F;mentions from the comments.<p>I&#x27;m from Romania. I used to make around 1.5k euros monthly from my last job + a small side gig. An average salary here is between 300-600 euros. My mortgage is around 200 euros. I was in the extremely lucky position to be the tech field and do so well pay-wise. When I took the decision to quit my job and finish my game the following statements were true:<p>- I had money saved up to pay 4 months of mortage + living expenses + a few beers in the weekends<p>- I was making games for about 10 years now and launched a few games before hand, smaller projects that had success (for me). I worked on bigger titles in the industry at a few big studios and even at small ones.<p>- And my game was supposed to sell 300 copies in the first month so that together with my savings I could test the waters and scratch an itch I had.<p>I was in a position that few other devs are: I live in a low cost country. Again from the scores I heard in Seattle and other US cities 1 month of mortgage there would cover my expenses for a year! I had the benefit of being able to live off of 500 euros a month which ties back to the previous sentence. And I had a game I was close to completing (I started it last year but stopped when I went to my last job).<p>I targeted a small niche in a specific subgenre with a backup niche in the roguelike genre. Dungeon crawlers are indeed a small niche but not so small that I couldn&#x27;t sell 700 copies. My biggest problem was having no experience with the way steam works right now (as opposed to the experience I had when I was freelancing a few years back after Gameloft).<p>If you google right now that average amount of copies and indie game sales on steam google points out 12,000. Not that it&#x27;s not true anymore (because it isn&#x27;t) but from where I was standing (and a few other devs who have other games in progress) moving 300 to 700 copies should be easy.<p>And I targeted my niche specifically: Older gamers (even developers), who don&#x27;t care about the graphics that much and who want a short, fast game they could play during breaks (or in my case while the compiler is busy).<p>I went over this facts quite a few times and it sounded doable. Worst case scenario come January I would go in search for another job. And this is were I was wrong, it sounded way too good and easy. At worst I&#x27;d finally scratch steam off my todo list and just do software again.<p>Now I understood, I took a gamble and it turned out to be worse, way worse than I ever expected. I could loose my apartment and all the money I put into it. And I was afraid of screwing even more things up (when things go wrong, they go wrong it seems).<p>A few days before launching my games (and way after the dice have been cast) I saw tweets from other developers on why people shouldn&#x27;t risk their lives and go full time. And I thought: &quot;It can&#x27;t be that bad&quot;. Turns out I can&#x27;t just release a game nowadays and have it sell directly. I was banking a bit on getting covered by a few specific niche websites during launch (it didn&#x27;t happen). And after I realized what hole I dug myself into I only had one thing on my mind: &quot;There&#x27;s a bunch of people like out there who still think it&#x27;s 2012-2013 when you could move decent money in releasing a small, niche, game&quot;. And there are. I have been speaking to a ton of devs since the post went live that did not see the reality factor here. The whole point was to warn a few other people that it&#x27;s not at easy. And I wanted to give me as an example because, again, I had a ton of things going for me: Low mortgage, I can live on peanuts and I don&#x27;t need to sell a whole lot of copies + some savings and a backup plan come January.<p>And with all the things going for me I still failed so what chances does someone else living in a higher cost country to succeed with a similar plan like mine?<p>I said this a few times since release on twitter, I just wish someone would have woken me up from my dream. Those tweets from my friends&#x2F;devs came too late for me. But maybe with the exposure this story is getting I can keep another passionate yet fool-ish dev from going through what I went through this month.<p>Edit: Small edit. The amount of devs who reached out to me with a game in production for about 2-3 years - part time for a few - is huge. And they are all scared because the math they did at the beginning does not line up with where things are today. Back then STEAM WOULD guarantee a huge amount of eyeballs on your game. Now all those eyeballs are split between so many releases. It&#x27;s scary for many, especially those naive (like yours truly).