Given the current market of indie mobile games we see that starting with a zero budget on promoting your game is almost impossible to make a living off your game, so will there be a decline in indie games? making it so that only big name companies can make games?
It could be like the indie music and movie scene where during the actual production is done independently, but the release and marketing will be done and distributed by the major companies.
I used to be an indie game developer, and have successfully self-published 1 game for the Wii U and 1 game for the New 3DS.
There was no publisher in between, and yet it proved it's perfectly possible.
On both games' release in the first month in each region the games made quite a nice amount of money.
It was always far from enough to pay all the bills, and both games received more criticism than love, but I was satisfied nonetheless.
However, I'm not saying it's perfectly possible to make a living this way, remember I've always been a single person developer studio (technically nowadays too as a web engineer at the company I work for, since I'm the only programmer there), but economics has always been the least concerning thing to me as a game developer, since I always worked as a web engineer as other companies at the same time.
But the games industry is still not suitable for a single person if you ever want to become successful.
One can have excellent programming skills, but will lack art skills, and vice versa.
And what you find an interesting concept might be seen as a joke to 1000s of others.
And however you look at it, there's the issue of publicity.
Free publicity exists, but will always be harder to do, and if done, far less attention will be caught.
On the other hand, paid publicity can be too unaffordable to care about, while still being the most effective.
It's something the huge, established game companies can easily afford with the guarantee that all the costs will be undone once the games starts to sell.
But to indie developers, and also doujin for that matter, the costs are too high, and sales will always be too small to cover it all.
I feel indie game developers can always find other ways of making money with their game like selling T-shirts with the game logo on them, and autograph game artwork. Indie game makers can sell their games, and accept alternative forms of payment like allowing buyers to buy their games with cryptocurrency, and alternative forms of payments like some messaging apps which let you send money with a chat app for smartphones, and payment apps like Venmo, Apple Pay, Google Wallet, Paypal, etc.
It can be difficult to make money by making indie games, but there is always a chance that your game will become popular. Flappy Birds is a 2D game with simple gameplay, but it was one of the most popular mobile games for a few weeks.
The cost of living in some countries is also not as expensive, so it can be possible to pay for rent, food, utility bills with a few hundred dollars a month or under $1000 a month.
