The Unsung Indie Heroes of Steam: Four Paths to a Sustainable Indie Career
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When people picture a successful indie game developer, they tend to imagine the outliers: the overnight hit
- the viral trailer
- the game that sells millions of copies and turns its creator into the industry’s next household name.
- This is just one version of success.
Between the blockbuster successes and the projects that earn almost nothing is a much larger, less visible group of developers quietly building sustainable careers. They may not dominate headlines or appear in every “Top Indie Games” list, but their games earn enough to fund the next project, or eventually make full-time development possible.
Games such as The Ouroboros King, 3dSen, Execute, and Master of Chess sit in that middle ground. Each earned its developers more than $160,000 in gross revenue, despite being made by solo developers or very small teams. The best thing is you’ve probably never heard of them.
Our analysis found more than 300 Steam games with estimated gross revenue of roughly $160,000 to $890,000. Once Steam’s fee, taxes, development costs, and other expenses are accounted for, that range can represent something close to an average US salary of around $70,000. It’s not a guaranteed route to wealth, and gross revenue is not personal income, but it’s a useful reminder that an indie career does not have to be all-or-nothing.
The developers below took very different routes:
- One leveraged a data-science background to make focused, achievable projects.
- One spent a decade on an unusual technical passion project.
- One used a smaller release to recover from burnout and build momentum towards a dream game.
- One spent years making games alongside a conventional software job before finding commercial success.
Their stories point to a more realistic and encouraging picture of what an indie game career can look like.
1. Oriol Cosp: Turning Data Skills Into Game Development
Leaving a secure, well-paid tech job for indie development can sound like a lottery-ticket gamble, but Oriol Cosp’s experience suggests that it doesn’t have to be.
Cosp made his first game, The Ouroboros King, while working full-time as a data scientist and raising a young child. He brought eight years of coding experience to the project and deliberately selected an idea that was both technically approachable and aligned with familiar player expectations.
His goal was to do for chess what Slay the Spire had done for card games; use an established foundation, combine it with roguelike progression and strategic variation, and create something recognisable but distinct. The concept reduced his need for extensive art production while allowing him to focus on systems, programming, and game design.
Time was not a commodity here.. Cosp reportedly committed around three to four hours a day, five days a week, and later used vacation time to accelerate development. He released a prototype on itch.io in June 2022, followed with a Steam demo, and committed early to a February 2023 full release.
The Ouroboros King launched on 27 February 2023. Cosp’s own sales expectations were modest: he anticipated making a little over $1,000. Instead, the game sold more than 5,000 copies in its first month!
In a blog post a year later, he estimated he’d made around $84,000 in profit after costs, including an allowance for his own time. For him, that made the move from data science to full-time indie development financially credible.
His second game, Gods vs Horrors, performed less strongly, but the important part of his story is what happened next. He documented the lessons, continued learning, and moved forward with further releases rather than treating one weaker result as a verdict on his career.
What developers can learn
- Price your own time - It’s easy to treat nights, weekends, and self-directed work as free. Early on, that may be unavoidable, but a sustainable career requires acknowledging that your time is valuable.
- Choose designs that match your constraints - Cosp didn’t start with a game that demanded a huge art team, a vast world, or years of content production. He found a concept that made practical use of his strongest skills.
- Borrow familiar patterns, then recombine them - Players who understand Slay the Spire, chess, or autobattler-style strategy have a lower learning barrier when encountering a new game built from similar ideas.
- Treat every launch as an experiment - Cosp’s detailed post-mortems turn releases into compounding experience. A project’s commercial result matters, but so does what it teaches about development, marketing, scope, and audience.
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2. Geod Studios: The Decade-Long Passion Project
The next route couldn’t be more different.
Geod Studios spent around 10 years creating 3dSen, a 3D NES emulator that reimagines classic Nintendo Entertainment System games in three dimensions. What began as a hobby project that was expected to take roughly a year eventually became a decade-long technical undertaking.
The VR version entered Early Access in 2019 with 46 supported games. The PC version followed in 2020 with 70. By the time of the final build, more than 100 games had been individually supported and built by Geod.
The scale of that work becomes clearer when you consider the original goal; Geod initially hoped that an algorithm could automate the conversion of NES games into 3D. In practice, the algorithm only worked around half the time, but instead of abandoning the project, he adjusted the plan.
He developed a four-step pipeline combining automation with manual work. Simpler games, such as Donkey Kong, could take a few days to build and more complicated titles, such as The Legend of Zelda, could take months.
That compromise was crucial. A fully automatic process would have been elegant, but it wasn’t workable. By accepting a hybrid workflow, Geod kept moving towards the experience he wanted to create; revisiting favourite childhood games in 3D.
The project also accumulated attention over time. The Early Access releases intrigued journalists, while the ongoing work created a reason for interested players to follow the project’s progress. 3dSen PC alone has sold around 27,000 copies since launching in 2025. It has also developed a small but dedicated community around 3dSen Maker, where users create and upload their own 3D versions of NES games. One community member has uploaded more than a dozen completed games.
Across both versions, 3dSen has generated roughly $600,000 in gross revenue. Spread over 10 years and reduced by platform fees, taxes, and expenses, that’s not a shortcut to a fortune, but it is a meaningful payoff for an unusually focused and enduring project.
What Developer's Can Learn
- A compromise can save a project - Geod did not get the fully automated process he originally wanted, but by changing the production method instead of abandoning the goal, he found a path to completion.
- Technical niches can be commercially valuable - A 3D NES emulator is not a broad, mass-market premise, but it serves a specific curiosity and a specific community exceptionally well.
- Progress itself can be marketing - Long-running projects can give players, journalists, and niche communities something meaningful to follow. The work becomes part of the story.
3. Payne Robinson: A Smaller Game as a Pivot
Payne Robinson demonstrates another route: learning game development from scratch while holding a job in an entirely different field.
Robinson is a full-time English teacher who taught himself game development in Godot. His original project, Grid Tweaker, remains his larger dream game, but it had a large scope and balancing that ambition with a full-time job made the learning curve steep and progress slow.
Eventually, he burned out.
Rather than cancel Grid Tweaker or force himself to keep working on something that had become overwhelming, Robinson switched to a smaller idea. The result was Execute, a project he completed in roughly six to nine months.
That decision did more than create a break from a difficult project. It gave him a way to regain enthusiasm, practise shipping, and build systems and skills that could later support work on Grid Tweaker. Small pieces of time at lunch and after work became meaningful because they were being invested in a project with a nearer finish line.
Execute generated around $206,000 in gross revenue, enough for Robinson to pay off his student loan. He’s also spoken about using a portfolio of commercial releases as a route towards eventually working full-time on his dream game.
His story is especially useful for developers who are still learning, who work outside the game industry, or who feel trapped by the size of their first ambitious idea. It is possible to keep the dream project alive without insisting that it must be your first commercial release.
What developers can learn
- Your first game does not need to be your dream game - A smaller project can build confidence, skills, reusable systems, and an audience without demanding years of all-or-nothing effort.
- A pause is not a failure - Switching projects can be the healthy choice when burnout is undermining progress. The key is to choose a smaller project that still contributes to your longer-term ambitions.
- Small, consistent time blocks add up - Lunch breaks and evenings may not be enough for a huge production, but they can be enough to ship a tightly scoped game.
- Transferable skills matter - Robinson’s teaching background also supports his YouTube work, where he explains his process in an entertaining and accessible way. A previous career can provide advantages rather than being irrelevant baggage.
4. Brane: Building Commercial Success Alongside a Day Job
Brane offers yet another view of game development; developing games alongside a conventional software career for more than a decade before finding commercial success.
He’d been experimenting with game development for years while becoming increasingly dissatisfied with his software-development day job. In effect, he was moonlighting as a game developer. His first commercial breakthrough came with Master of Chess, released in September 2025.
Like Cosp and Robinson, Brane has embraced a habit of shipping smaller projects and learning through release. But his early approach differed in that many of those projects were free-to-play.
Since 2017, he’s released small-scope games on itch.io, including the memorably named I Have No Hands and I Must Hug. Even his Steam release before Master of Chess was free.
Releasing free games is not the only or necessarily the best route though because developers deserve to be paid for their work, but free releases can remove the pressure of expecting a financial return from every experiment. For a developer with an alternative stable income, that can create room to practice, explore, and improve without attaching every creative decision to a sales forecast.
Brane’s other strength was commitment to an unusually specific niche. He describes Master of Chess as a niche game and didn’t expect it to perform as well as it did, yet its premise as a chess equivalent of Football Manager gave it a powerful identity. It wasn’t trying to appeal to everyone, it was attempting to delight people intensely interested in the intersection of chess and management simulation.
That focus helped attract dedicated fans. Brane built a Discord community of more than 1,000 members and posted development updates there every day, all while working full-time and becoming a father for the first time.
Master of Chess earned around $290,000 in gross Steam revenue and he then released another commercial game, Confidential Killings, with designer Lorenzo. That game performed even better, earning approximately $270,000 in gross revenue for each collaborator.
What developers can learn
- Stable employment can be an asset - A job can reduce financial pressure, and make it possible to experiment without needing every game to pay the bills immediately.
- Free projects can be deliberate practice - When used intentionally, they can help developers learn shipping, feedback, production, and audience-building before commercial stakes are added.
- Niche is not the same as small opportunity - A clear, distinctive promise can attract deeply invested players who have few alternatives designed specifically for them.
- Build a community around the obsession - Brane’s frequent Discord updates made his commitment visible. People often follow sustained enthusiasm before they decide to buy the finished game.
What These Four Stories Have in Common
These developers made different kinds of games, had different professional backgrounds, and worked on radically different timelines, yet their stories share several important patterns.
| Pattern | What it looked like in practice |
| They kept a financial foundation | None of them went full-time before their first game made it financially viable, and some continue to work conventional jobs. |
| They worked within constraints | Time, family responsibilities, technical skills, limited art capacity, and available income shaped their project choices. |
| They committed to distinct niches | Chess roguelikes, 3D NES games, compact programming-inspired puzzle games, and chess management are specific propositions rather than generic ones. |
| They built in public to some degree | Blogs, Steam demos, Early Access, YouTube, Discord, and ongoing development updates gave audiences reasons to pay attention. |
| They learned through releases | Their careers were not built on a single flawless plan. They adapted with prototypes, free games, smaller releases, setbacks, and post-mortems. |
| They found a way to continue | Each developer made compromises that kept game development compatible with their actual life. |
The point is not that every developer should make a chess game, spend 10 years on one project, quit their day job, or release free games.
It’s that successful indie development often looks more ordinary than the stories that dominate the media. It can be gradual. It can be niche. It can happen alongside a job. It can start with a small project rather than a dream project. It can involve setbacks, compromises, detours, and years of learning.
And it can still be a real success.
A More Sustainable Definition of Success
The game industry often presents developers with a false binary: either make a viral smash hit or disappear without a trace. There’s a broad spectrum between those two extremes.
For many developers, a sustainable goal might be to earn enough to finance the next game, pay down debt, build a portfolio, grow a community, reduce dependence on a day job, or eventually transition to full-time development when the numbers support it.
The developers in this article all continued because they found ways to make the work meaningful enough to sustain. They designed around the lives they actually had, rather than waiting for perfect conditions. They found niches they cared about, shipped work, learned from it, and allowed their experience to compound.
If you’re developing a game alongside a job, feeling overwhelmed by a large project, or worrying that a non-viral launch means the end of the road, these stories are a useful reminder that your path may not resemble the biggest success stories in indie games. And it doesn’t need to!
A sustainable indie career can be built in the middle.
Explore Your Steam Niche
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