[mr_crankypants]

It seems, though, that it's even worse than that for games. Every so often you see an article to the effect of, "Authors of that indie game everyone was talking about this summer ended up netting $not_very_much_at_all apiece."

The economics are just really, really bad. It's not just all the competition driving prices down so low that people will literally consider the price of a coffee to be too much to pay for several hours of entertainment. It's not just that a musician can hold down a day job and do what they love on evenings and weekends. It's also that the the potential payoff on your invested time is really, really crappy. To become a musician, you have to practice a lot when you're a kid, but, once you're there, the time it takes to produce new work is really quite low, especially considering how much replayability it has, especially if you're mostly playing standards and other traditional stuff. And, if people like it, they'll come see you perform it repeatedly.

Indie games, no matter how much I liked that game, I'm gonna play it once, and then, if you want me to be your audience again, you've got to basically go back to square one and start over.