u/JapanDoudou

For this discussion, the goal is to make a living from my games.

I want to make games professionally. The difficult part isn't the technical side. It's accepting that our passion projects have to face reality. And reality comes with numbers (the KPI)

I completely understand developers who just want to make the game of their dreams. For a long time, I did the same. I was making games because I want other players to feel joy playing them.

But today, building only what we personally want and hoping it finds an audience is relying on luck. Especialy when you want to live from the sales of your game.

Experience makes me thing these two approaches aren't incompatible:

• Keep your artistic direction and convictions while still questioning your game design.
• Making a game you genuinely love while paying attention to how players actually react.

I think the real challenge is accepting that our intuitions need validation. And ... validation takes time, resilience, and a willingness to step outside our comfort zone.

It's just ... spending hours on things that aren't particularly "fun": testing, marketing, analytics, onboarding, retention, steam pages, trailers, and user feedback, takes time. And honestly? That's where I struggle the most. Not because It's hard, but I don't find this fun. I mean : I want to make games, not stare at dashboards and statistics all day, searching why my trailer or screenshots doesn't convert Steam users.

The hardest part is i know it's necessary (or maybe I'm wrong ?)

From the outside, many successful indie games look like pure passion projects. It seems as if their creators simply followed their instincts, completely ignoring the market, and ... YOLO : "Look, a pinball game where you fight the stone head of a philosopher ! (Shoutout for Fallosophy)"

I suspect that’s survivorship bias. Or maybe not ? It's an open question !

We see the final game. We don't see the discarded prototypes, the old placeholders, the months spent gathering (sometimes brutal) feedback, maybe the pivots, or the creative compromises made along the way (some's are in Blood Sweat and Pixels by Jason Schreier)

Maybe every successful game eventually has to collide with reality. Maybe some developers are simply better at hiding the dents.

I’d love to hear from other devs here:

1. How do you balance creative (artistic or game design) vision with market feedback?
2. How much do Steam metrics, retention data, and player behavior influence your design decisions?
3. How do you stay motivated when success increasingly requires skills that have little to do with actually making games?
4. And how do you avoid burning out in the process?