This whole thread is interesting, but I think this tweet gets at the key issue: Unity as a software organization has made a series of choices that have got them in a spot where charging professional devs $150 per month per seat isn't enough to sustain their army of engineers.

https://twitter.com/tkexpress11/status/1702054749296861190

Devs who've worked with Unity for years have seen the absolute mess that is Unity's design and engineering choices. Multiple rendering pipelines. Essentially a whole new engine with DOTS. 2 input system. 3 physics engine integrations. TONS of little add-ons like IAP support...

Just over 10 years ago, this guy, @DanNerdCubed literally changed the fate of our game RACE THE SUN, and thus, the course of our company, Flippfly. Our new game Whisker Squadron probably wouldn't exist if it weren't for a cool thing he did. A short thread:🧵 In 2013, the only way to get on Steam was to get players to vote for you on "Greenlight". Race The Sun being our first game, struggled. We had finished the game and hadn't passed the threshold to be greenlit. So we launched it on our website.

So.... Hiring my 15 year old daughter to run the Flippfly TikTok account is turning out to be an extremely good move! This is basically the period where she started posting regularly, and that build up is basically *entirely* from Tiktok: We talked about our strategy for the account and basically discovered through trial and error that the best strategy for us is just to make a *lot* of Tiktoks. It's essentially impossible to predict which ones will take off, so quantity>quality, just crank them out fast!

For the love of god, please don't announce your game and put a Steam page up as soon as you commit to development, a thread: I've spent a lot of time over the last year thinking about the best strategy for announcing a new game. There seem to be two opposing viewpoints on this. On one side, @RaveofRavendale gave a detailed GDC talk on how to do an effective page launch:
ubm-twvideo01.s3.amazonaws.com/o1/vault/gdcsu…

A thought about crunch:

I remember at time at my last studio game job, being in a meeting where we were discussing an ambitious new direction for a game feature late in development. One guy was super excited about the idea (I think it was his idea). Some of us who were a bit more production-minded expressed concerns that we didn't have time to do the thing, and that it would take weeks.
This guy was so excited about it, he set out to prove us wrong, and sent out an email letting us know he had it working, the same day.

What people THINK it's like owning an indie games company:
1. Spend all day working on your game.
2. Put it up on the store and watch the money come in.

Here's what's actually occupied my time for the last few weeks: 1. Getting a new accountant and working through a bunch of tax issues, including amending past years to take advantage of some tax credits we missed.

2. Resizing a bunch of images in photoshop for various websites.

It's weird being an indie on a tiny team where we all do a ton of things (art, programming, community management, writing, customer support, bizdev) and seeing specialists in these field publicly shit all over other indies for not hiring a specialist to do one of those things. Some comments professional Community Managers made about Ooblets (where they went as far as broadcasting out-of-context Discord posts to shame the devs) got me thinking about this, but I've seen it with writing, design, etc. etc.

Something I wished more gamers and indie game fans realized right now: A lot of the people who made your favorite games are honestly struggling to survive and keep making games in 2019. We've gone from a situation where 3-5 years ago, there were about half as many games on the market. When we launched Race The Sun in 2013, we were on the Steam front page for over a week, and that was a lifeline for us. These days you're super lucky if you hit front page at all.

I'd like to tell you a little story about what it's like to actually run an indie game company. We've been working on this Limited Run release for Race The Sun for some time now. We thought we were on the home stretch around June with getting everything finished... But Sony's QA found a couple bugs to fix in the Vita version. One of them was a minor thing that just took me a minute to fix. The other one was a crash. The game crashed 3 times for their testers. They weren't able to give me a lot of info - it was mostly random.