How to aim your efforts to maximize profit?

So many questions... Probably the most important thing to discuss is that it is nearly impossible to make a living as an indie developer, no matter how prepared you are to maximize your potential profits.

Don't want to sound like a dick, but I think you are not ready to dive into making your own games for money. All those questions can not be answered, really, because one answer will work for game A, but will lead to total disaster if used in case of game B. If you don't see it, you need more industry experience.

Most indie developers are not profitable. You only see a few that make it but not the 1000's that don't.

It's a mix of luck, hard work, right time, right place and a lot of passion.

There's definitely no golden rules.

Make a good game. Make another one. And another one. Make games you believe in - passion does seem to matter. Thinking about what the market wants seems a very bad choice, none of the succesful indies got succesful by doing that.

Cross platform or not should really not be on your consideration. First make a good game. If turns out to be great demand for other platforms will rise and you do your math to see if porting it (or having it ported) makes financial sense.

Ads of paid - yeah, noone really knows. It depends on the game, the platform, the target audience, the playstyle.

Art vs GamePlay: Without good gameplay it can never be a good game so that should kinda be a given. Art comes secondary in that regard, although wickedly esoteric art styles can help you with publicity.

What platforms to avoid: The ones you are not comfortable with. There's little point in going there before you have a game that's worth putting there. When you have that, the consideration, as said above, is purely doing the math.

How long: That depends. Is it a fad? A community game? Modding support? Platform? Also, noone knows, ever, in advance.

As for porting, yeah, keeping it in mind can help. Having said that, some porting companies are wickedly smart.

Target requirements: Heh, what you say here flies in the face of any cross platform considerations. You should always try to support as low as you can go simply because your potential audience will be larger. Why artificially limit it by chosing high end? You can always add extra features on higher end, but targeting higher end will just mean your competition suddenly became triple A.

TL;DR - you're approaching this from the wrong direction. Money is the worst motivator to becoming a succesful indie as it'll by default introduce corporate reasining which is directly at odds with being indie. TL;DR2: Making money in indie games is nearly impossible, and it's very unlikely you could plan it.

As an LLC owner intent on being in the "black" as well as achieving artistic satisfaction, these are my current bullet points for how i am conducting business and running the company. Take them as you may, we are only about to release our first game, and I kept my LLC in the black last year animating trailers for other game companies. I have learned a few things so far, though:

Create a project that is well within the money and labor available.

Utilize your strengths and hire out/split profit with specialists in fields you are not professional grade (damned if I was going to learn programming..I'm pure art direction). They will do the work in 1/10th the time and it will be 10 times better than you'd have done. That is worth splitting up the pie for.

(This one is way personal opinion, but it's part of my business plan and is going well thus far) Stay away from pure mobile, aim above the "dogpiles" and strive to get into more exclusive pools (ie develop for the big three.)

NETWORK. If there's an Indiecade in your area, or a GDC, or any game industry related meetups, get your butt to them and have business cards. Networking is absolutely clutch.

Do not create an MMO.

Doesn't address a lot of your questions but hopefully some of this resonates with you.

" - Do you personally think it pays off to write a new engine?" - Probably not. It's great as a learning experience, and there are some clear benefits, but probably not enough to pay back the time you invest.

" - What system requirements should I aim at? I tend to aim low performance, but tend to think I should go for high end systems. " - It depends on the specific case, but I think many indies (myself included) have a habit of spending too much time making sure their stuff runs on older devices and minority systems (like linux for instance).

The one thing that most people seem to forget is that a stable game will always make more money than a not stable game. It doesn't matter how amazing your art is or how innovative your game play may be, if your game won't run for more than 20 minutes without crashing you won't be in business for long. I work for a fairly large company (it's specifically an MMOFPS), and it's painfully obvious monetarily when we have crashes versus when we have a stable game. Also, you don't want to aim towards higher ended systems from the start. That's a great way to make a large percentage of your potential player base feel alienated.

I'm not a professional developer, so I can't answer all your questions, but here are a few thoughts on some of them:

• art vs gameplay: Both are equally important, but for different reasons. The quality of gameplay determines the overall quality of your game, so thats the essential basement of your project and you should put most of your work into that. For most game mechanics, the artwork is pretty much irrelevant. However, the art is the first impression your potential players will get from your game, so its very important if you want to sell it. Even more important than the actual mechanics. "Fine feathers make fine birds", at least during those minutes where journalists/bloggers browse the web to find something to write about, or players browse steam to find something worth buying. People in general rely on what they see most of the time. So in conclusion, you need both the looks (for initial recognition) and the "inner values" (for good reviews and continuous recognition) and if you want to make a really good, successful game.

• writing a new engine: Common sense: no! Writing an engine from scratch requires a lot of work, so if you're not working on a revolutionary new gameplay concept that can't be done with available engines, there's no need for a new engine anyway. It will only dramatically increase the amount of work, decreasing your relative profit.

• multiple platforms: Common sense: yes. With each additional platform you gain access to an additional market with millions of potential players. Presenting your game in different places increases the chance of hitting a nerve with a particular audience. Then again, porting games to other platforms can be a lot of work, too. Most professional game studios will do some sort of market analysis (based on actual statistics) to assess whether or not porting will pay the bills. My personal opinion: Don't worry about markets, worry about your game. If the game mechanics would fit well on several platforms, keep that in mind from the start and go with a fitting engine (e.g. Unity). But if you realise during development that you'll have to settle on a specific platform (e.g. Desktop only because the controls become too complex for tablets), do it without regret.

• performance: You don't go for "high" or "low", you either go for "fixed" (=optimal performance for your concept) or "scalable" (optimal + lower levels). See multiple platforms - same thing. Most modern engines have tools and workflows to help you scale your games.

Most importantly: Try to make a good game based on an outstanding concept and keep focused on that, most questions will be answered along the way

sorry for bad english, not my native language

Making games is like starting a band. If you want to make it big, your motivation cannot be money.

Try to base your game to target an audience that will make it spread. Many of us remember flappy bird, right? It came out last year when I was in 9th grade and it was literally the ONLY thing people talked about. Why? Because everyone thought it was "cool" to be good at flappy bird. Posting pictures on social media, non stop talking about it; basically students did all the advertising for the game. But what it made it so intriguing? The fact that it seemed impossible, but it was very possible. People like to feel challenged but not challenged to the point of defeat. The mechanics used in flappy bird did a very great job of that. Another point - it was free. Why spend money on a game just to prove youre better than your friends? Eh. With the audience it was able to create, the ads were the best way to go with that. In the end earning MILLIONS. I'm terrible at writing stories so just take what you can from this lol

make a bland game with stunning graphics (99% of successful indies does that)

tl;dr make a damn good game

There is no one single solution to "how do I make more $$$ in the games industry." Don't expect to be living large off your first dozen releases. Jon Blow spent two decades as a game developer until he made a success from Braid.

Should I focus on game design (art, story) or game play?

Game design is the creation of gameplay.

Anyway.... it completely depends on what type of game you want to make. It can draw people for story, fun gameplay, or whatever. It's your choice. Neither is going to make you more money.

Do you personally think it pays off to write a new engine?

Yes, but what does this have to do with money?

Should I focus on ads or payed?

Whichever one suites you best.

What platforms should I avoid, if any?

Any that won't pay off. Think about your audience.

Should I avoid multiplatform?

No, why would you?

How long does a game keep paying off? (This seems important to me)

There is no single answer to this. Depends on the game.

Should I take into a account that a game should be easily ported?

It is not easy to port games (assuming you're writing from scratch)

How do you feel about opensourcing your game? Does it help or doesn't it?

Personally I would never do that, but either way you can't really make money from an open source game.

What do you do when people don't like your game and it isn't played?

Learn why they didn't like it and improve on that in my next game.

Do you keep and maintain a codebase for yourself?

Yes, again I don't see what this has to do with money.

What system requirements should I aim at? I tend to aim low performance, but tend to think I should go for high end systems.

Why would you want to restrict your game to people with high-end systems? Why would you want low performance on your game? If you want to "maximize profits" try to make it run as well as you can.