[phendrenad2]

I'd love to see a histogram of all game budgets for every game on Steam. I think the missing middle would be immediately apparent. We'd see the AAA games in the $250-500 million range, a few scattered games below that, and then an absolutely huge mass in the <$10,000 range. I don't know why people don't make more games in the $100,000-$1,000,000 range. I suspect that it's hard to find investors for small projects like that.

[bsder]

$1 megabuck per year is roughly 4-5 developers and nobody else.

Yes, you can argue that some developers would work for less than that, but any programmers capable of generating a good game can then go get jobs somewhere else.

And you need art assets. And music assets. And sound effects. And ...

This is why there is no "middle". Earning $5 million on a game (not $5 million per year--$5 million total) is absurdly successful on Steam.

[messe]

> $1 megabuck per year is roughly 4-5 developers and nobody else.

In the US.

[whstl]

This is also assuming that those developers would be otherwise able to land 200k-250k jobs in traditional software development. Which is a bit rare today, as the bulk of people working in small games today isn't made of ex-developers, but of newcomers learning from tutorials with limited/niche experience. And maybe that's the reason it's hard to get an 1M investment, and the reason the market is a bit saturated.

[johnnyanmac]

A small dev team like this isn't working for 200k a year, unless we have aforementioned investors that won't want to invest peanuts. And to be frank, you don't need a 200k dev to work on such a game unless you're making No Man's sky or something that is at significant scale.

A Dev in this position would take a huge cut but negotiate for profit shares. Likely very large if they are such a small team.

[EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK]

What developers? There is Unreal engine. If there are any developers, they work on web site, internal tools etc.

[bagels]

Because it's exceedingly difficult/unlikely to see a return.