I quit my job to go full indie

16. September 2024

I'm excited to announce that today is my first official day as a full time indie game developer. After three years of CI/CD pipelines, several software migrations and bug fixes at NOI Techpark, it was time to say goodbye.

The plan

It was never my plan to become full time indie dev, because I thought that making games is just a hobby and a nice way to pass my free time. But things have changed and my games became too complex to be developed properly in my limited free time. So I had the feeling, that I need to try this adventure and see where it leads.

Now I can dedicate my whole day to my games, this blog and all the CI/CD pipelines I created for Godot and libGDX. My main focus will be the game that got too big to handle in my free time, Futsal Manager. I plan to release the first early access on Steam and itch.io early 2025. Having around half a year time, to finish my game, I feel that this date might actually be true this time. (I've been promising to finish this game to my friends already too many times)

The experiment

This whole "project" is actually an experiment, to see if I can make a living with Free and Open Source games. I truly believe, that the game development world can profit from Open Source games. There are already really nice Open Source game engines and libraries, like the Godot Engine and libGDX. I never used a closed source engine like Unity or similar, so I can't really compare them. But the bad news Unity had in the past months, show that betting on a Open Source and community built engine, is the road to go.

I also believe that gamers will profit the most from Open Source games. Being Open Source, limits the way one can profit from it, but in my opinion in a good way. Business models like packing the game with ads or micro transactions don't really fit in the Open Source world. Someone could simply make a copy of your game without ads, micro-transactions or a season pass.

Making a living with FOSS games

There surely are and will be many other business models, that are FOSS compatible. For now, I will simply follow the way Mindustry does it. You can get free copies of the game on itch.io, flathub, F-Droid etc... and a payed version on Steam.
This seems the easiest and safest way to do get some dollars out of a Open Source game. It solves the cheaper clone of the game problem, because I will offer the cheapest (free) alternative on the market.

Surely this "business plan" is not compatible with big AAA game studios, but who knows, maybe some day we will see a AAA Open Source game.

What comes next

Now you will hear much more from me, here in my blog and on Mastodon.
My git-steak (at the time of writing: over 1 year a commit a day) will continue and grow much bigger. I'm also considering some live development streams on Twitch and videos on YouTube. But for now, I will concentrate on finishing Futsal Manager.

Every feedback is welcome

Feel free to write me an email at info@simondalvai.org and comment on Mastodon or HackerNews.