This article was originally published on May 30, 2025 - read the full issue here

By Rob Fahey

What is a realistic budget range for an independent game? This is simultaneously a "how long is a piece of string" question, because the variance among indie games is immense, and a crucial question for many creatives.

Debate around the "deprofessionalisation" of development has gripped the industry recently, but the controversy is largely a question of degree. No matter which side you take, almost everyone tacitly accepts that the term is giving a useful (if provocative) label to a process whose effects are, to some extent, already apparent.

One consequence is that many skilled, experienced developers have started wondering how green the grass might be on the other side of the fence; if large companies can no longer offer stability, the creative freedom and potential rewards of the seemingly booming indie market seem all the more appealing. But how much will it cost? How long is that elusive piece of string?

If you're a creative pondering that question, the celebration of the success of a game such as Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 will spur mixed emotions. It's an example of how a relatively small independent team can turn out what's essentially a really great AA-level title and achieve commercial and critical success, so that's fantastic to see. However, while the game's budget has never been confirmed, educated guesses suggest the low tens of millions ($ or €; it's a rough enough guesstimate, so take your pick), and the core team of around 30 was supplemented with a fair bit of outsourcing.

That's not quite as daunting as when the world held up Baldur's Gate 3, which probably cost around $100m to develop, as the standard-bearer for independent games, but it's in the same ballpark. For most people figuring out the economics of indie development, the gulf between the numbers in their hypothetical spreadsheets and those kinds of figures is impossibly vast.

Allow me a brief tangent to introduce the Poisson distribution. This is a probability distribution, like the famous bell curve (ie, the 'normal' or 'Gaussian' distribution), but the Poisson distribution shows the probability that an event occurs a certain number of times in a certain interval and has a different shape. It's squashed up against the left-hand-side of a graph, with low counts having the highest probabilities and a downward curve that tapers off towards zero probability as the counted number of events gets higher. (It's named after a French mathematician, but does also look a bit like a fish tail.)

It gives us one of those unsatisfying statistician answers to seemingly straightforward questions. If the question is "what is a realistic budget range for an indie game?", well, it follows a Poisson distribution. At the low end of the graph, we find games that are essentially hobbyist projects, with budgets of a few thousand dollars (some are made for far less cash outlay, but counting the cost of people's time, most games account for at least a few thousand dollars in investment).

There are tens of thousands of these games, but as budgets climb, the number of games starts to drop off dramatically. A couple of million is a realistic level for a lot of games – those lucky enough to have backing from angel investors or crowdfunding, for example – but by the time you hit that level, the number of games involved is probably an order of magnitude lower than when you were in the thousands. Once in the realms of a Clair Obscur or a Baldur's Gate 3, examples are vanishingly rare. Meaningful, sure, but complete statistical outliers.

If you want to get a feel for how the overall indie market looks, look to where the graph is high, not at the far-off outliers. Tracking new game launches on Steam through the month of May, for example, and excluding free games and other types of media, you'd find that, on average, around 45 new games launched on the platform every day.

This is not atypical, since SteamDB estimates that around 19,000 games launched on Steam in 2024. Those are immense numbers, and you can't dismiss them as being inflated beyond usefulness by hobbyists taking a punt with My First Game on Steam – in pricing terms, fewer than ten per cent of launches this month have been at the lowest Steam price (99c), and fewer than half are priced at under $5.

Granted, the biggest growth in Steam releases has been in "Limited Games", which haven't hit the user-engagement numbers required to have all their profile features enabled – but the number of fully enabled games launched on Steam grew from 2,800 in 2019 to over 4,200 last year.

These are the games which occupy the bulk area of our Poisson distribution of game budgets. The numbers are somewhat sobering, since most of them will sink without a trace (the explosive growth of Limited Games essentially tracks just that). However, most of them were developed at very low cost – low enough that their creators can shrug and move on to try something else.

Further along the graph we find a huge variety of different types of game in terms of the budgets involved and the sales required to count as a success – ie, the level of risk that the developers have taken on.

Risk profile is the real question here, and much more important than just talking about budgets. Focusing exclusively on cases such as Clair Obscur and BG3 can accidentally obscure (no pun intended) the decisions the bulk of developers are facing.

Those are huge games with huge budgets; moreover, they are textbook examples of survivor bias, since we're talking about them due to their success. If an indie studio gets together, raises a few hundred thousand or even a few million, and then absolutely fails to make a splash with their first game and disappears beneath the waves, we pretty much never talk about it.

Nobody interviews them or asks for a post-mortem article on the development process. Unless it was crowdfunded, we rarely even know the name of the game in question (since most don't reach launch before running out of cash). Yet those cases would be equally instructive and important to understand, if not more so, than the massively successful outliers.

In between those extremes lies a middle ground occupied by what's perhaps the most important area of the market for independent creatives right now – games which have found a successful niche, are developed on manageable budgets (in the tens or low hundreds of thousands, at least initially), and which turn around a steady revenue stream and a decent living for their creators, without having to be a Clair Obscur, or even a Balatro.

They're hard to market, require in-depth subject knowledge, and are still inherently risky, but their low cost and their creators' specialist insights help to manage that risk. The existence of games like this – a teeming mid-range of strategy games, niche sim titles, puzzles, visual novels, and so on, forming a sedimentary layer somewhere in the middle of Steam's sales charts – is quietly accounting for stable income for far more indie developers than all the celebrated indie critical darlings of recent years combined.

That's important to see as you measure out the right piece of string to fit your ambitions, your financial situation, and your risk appetite. For many creatives contemplating going indie, finding a solid niche you know well enough to have a series of moderate successes is a much better risk profile than trying to take a big swing that will totally wreck you financially if it doesn't land. Gigantic indie success stories are wonderful in that they point to a potentially better future for the industry – but the real inspiration and insight lies in the curve of the graph, not the outliers at the end.

This article was originally published on May 30, 2025 - read the full issue here