Read through this entire article, then went and did research on all the games. All of these games are point click and touch style simple mechanic art games. They each describe their blunders, as well. One overpriced their game at 9.99 on a mobile market, another didn’t advertise at all, several used publishers, and asked for loans. Spending profit before its even earned. There are three indie devs in that list that did well. One said he made over 100k, the others they never said how much. But if you do quick research you can see that their trailers have hundreds of thousands of views, and their games all got ported to each of the consoles. They also spoke in a much more positive manner about the experience.
The people who were negative about it listed their incomes as being low, but they each claimed to have earned several tens of thousands through loans, government plans and other investment sources.
This article is actually very inspiring to anyone making games for bigger audiences. If these people in dire situations making games from a minimal audience with very small teams can make enough success to get by, then people that have planned ahead can do it even better. One of the indie devs made a game where you sit on a boat and it floats along a river into random scenes. That’s it. He claims to be making 1-2k per steam sale off of that. To me that is absolutely amazing.
“This is why I’m cautious about telling my story. I don’t think I made good decisions.” -JASON ROBERTS, MAKER OF GOROGOA
A quote from the article above, if you follow his story, it’s a success story. He got signed on to publisher. These people that were interviewed made terrible decisions and still got by and more than a third succeeded(making livable wage or more).
It seems to me like its a very viable pathway to take. These articles are shaped deceptively, it doesn’t report much about the success but is detailed in the negative aspects which are purely based on each individuals living situation. Be careful when reading stuff like this, it is setup like this on purpose, media loves to play on emotions.