Hard life of a indie developer
I wanted to share my experience diving into mobile game development since 2020. It's been quite the rollercoaster, and honestly, I'm feeling pretty discouraged.
When COVID hit and lockdowns started, I thought "hey, perfect time to finally pursue that dream of making games!" I'd been coding for a few years already, so I figured I had a decent foundation. I spent months learning Unity, watching tutorials, and building small prototypes. By late 2020, I had my first game ready - a simple but polished puzzle game that I was genuinely proud of.
The market reality hit me like a truck. Even pricing it at $0.99 (which feels almost like giving it away considering the hundreds of hours I put in), people just weren't interested. I tried everything - Reddit ads, Facebook marketing, even those mobile game promotion websites. The results? A whopping 12 downloads in the first month. Yeah, you read that right. Twelve.
I thought maybe it was just bad timing or marketing, so I kept at it. Made two more games in 2021-2022, each one more polished than the last. Same story. The free versions with ads barely got any traction either. It's wild because I see objectively worse games (no offense to anyone) getting thousands of downloads.
The most frustrating part? I'm currently working on what I believe is my best project yet - a word game Palindrome. I'm actually really excited about this one. The mechanics are solid. But looking at my track record, I'm terrified it'll face the same fate as my other games.
I've read all the posts about ASO, marketing strategies, and "building a community," but it feels like shouting into the void. The mobile market is so oversaturated that even good games get buried under an avalanche of new releases every day.
Has anyone else experienced this? How do you stay motivated when it feels like you're making games for literally no one? And please, don't tell me to "make games for myself" - I do, but it would be nice if at least a few hundred people actually played them.
Sorry for the rant. Just needed to get this off my chest.