Nope, that's why there are so many of them. They're all trying to be the first.

Not all of them do obviously, but indie games wouldn't keep getting made at this rate if they didn't make money.

Cheap Unity fees only apply when they actually employ this engine, which is much less often the case as many seem to think. There is a pletora of engines available, the biggest one which gets used by a growing amount of indies being the Unreal engine. But there's also a ton of smaller engines, some of which you could see in the humble bundle 2 weeks ago.

Also AAA seldom have any engine licensing fees, simply because they are developed either in-house or under the same publisher. You could however list engine development costs if you really want to.

Lol, sorry OP, but that was not a great question. Just ask the developers of the "Indie Game" documentary. I personally always felt those three games were all terribly overrated, BUT, they still made each one of those developers a fair bit of cash. Not ALL do, of course, just like not ALL retail games do.

But the thing is, for starters, indie developers who go the FULLY indie route, and/or get funded by KS or IndieGogo, etc., do not have to share any profit with a publisher, they only have to share money with the platforms they put the game out on. So they automatically get more profit, proportionally, than developers who work with publishers do, on average.

And yes, as others pointed out, Shovel Knight is a great example, as it's already made them quite a bit of money, and putting it out on more platforms now is only going to increase that. They have plenty of $$$$ to fund not one, but probably multiple future titles, AFTER they're done with the Shovel Knight DLC stuff, just from that game.

Not every game is a success story. But the ones that are, yes, probably do make a pretty decent profit. At least enough of one to live comfortably and fund future development.

There isn't much evidence out there (that I have seen) to indicate what proportion of indies are profitable.

A few factors to consider include:

- Profitable games are often VERY profitable due to low overheads
- Some games are produced as past times not intended to make a profit
- There is an enormous number of these games, diluting the impact the vast majority of them can make
- They often suffer from a lack of exposure.

All in all, I view it as likely a smaller scale (revenue-wise) version of the AAA model. A small number of developers make big money, an enormous number of them lose money.

Some do but most don't. Most of them flop.

For many, arguably most indy games, the goal is not to generate large profit margins (naturally, any project that exceeds expectations will gladly take it), but to generate enough revenue through sales (and ROI for whoever is bankrolling R&D and production costs) to make another game.

It doesn't really help in this thread to cherry pick the most successful indy games as this disingenuously suggests all indy games are successful.

If the developers planned their projects well, they should have a solid idea in advance what they can produce with their projected budget as well as what type of sales they should be looking at to justify said budget.

There is currently an excellent indy game exhibit at the EMP museum in Seattle about the indy game industry which included first hand accounts about the process of producing such games.

That is Cave Story. Gained a lot of popularity on Wii/DS, then moved to Steam and 3DS.

Yes, people even pay 20€ for them

cave story, one of the best indie games ever made, also very influential for the indie market!