Where do you get your costs? I've never heard of a game, indie or not, being developed by two people in under a year. That would leave them making 25k salaries if they just stopped and focused on their art and doesn't factor in the costs of everything else associated with it.
I mean, the contemporary AVERAGE game production cost is 20million. For a triple a title you're looking at 40 million easy. Some go over fifty million.
What are we factoring into the cost of this indie game production? Paying the team? Apparently not? Are we factoring in one time costs for buying production kits? Engines? Are we factoring in time costs?
I mean, I find it very hard to believe that 50k is the accepted norm for any game, indie or otherwise. Unless it's like... something made with game creator or some such with open source graphics.
Edit@YourEdit: Those are far far far from the rule, however. Having someone finish in a few days working alone, and those aren't the ones that really... do or get anything. I guess they could finance games like "I shot Andy Warhol" but those have such low overheads that it's pretty much pointless to do so. One guy can do it alone after work and it's not like doing a painting or shooting a movie, where you're going to 'lose your energy' part way through typing the sixteenth line of code or whatever.
This is the more common indie game scenario:
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Jonathan Blow came up with the concept of Braid in December 2004 while on a trip to Thailand, and started development work on it in April the following year.[30] By December 2005, a version of the game was completed that had the same number of worlds and puzzles as the final version, but lacked the final artwork; this version won the Independent Games Festival game design award at the 2006 Game Developer's Conference.[30] While working on the art direction, Blow tightened the presentation and mechanics of the puzzles to improve their playability.[30] During the game's three years of development, Blow put about US$200,000 of his own money into its development, most going towards hiring of David Hellman for artwork and for living expenses.[31][32]
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