>>3620
If you can find a job working at an indie dev "startup", and you're willing to take all the risks associated with working for a startup… then go for it, why not?
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If instead you mean, like, start your own independent studio… that depends. If you have all of these:
- A really unique, engaging, MARKETABLE, well-scoped idea for a game.
- A team with all the skills necessary to make said idea (if you have all the skills necessary to do multiple or all jobs, remember that you're one person and you can only do one thing at a time).
- The scoping and estimation skills (i.e. experience having completed projects) necessary to make a fairly accurate ballpark for how long the game is going to take to make.
- Enough money to pay the team (which, again, may be just yourself) for the predicted development time, plus a buffer, plus emergency money.
- The ability to handle massive failure well
Then yeah, you can go for it if you want… but the market is incredibly saturated with indie games at the moment, and it might be hard for your game to be profitable in the long run.
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If you have an idea for a silly, low-depth game that "wacky YouTube personalities" would eat right up… if you can build it in a year or less, get right on it. Otherwise, it's too late, that market's already fairly saturated and only getting worse.
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An alternate means of getting your game financed in 2016 is to design your game to be inherently headline- and rage-baiting. Consider what hot-button issues are being discussed in today's political climate, predict what will still make headlines in the year that your game plans on shipping, and tailor your game's content to have controversy-potential at the time of its release.
Like, let's say you're making a "couch competitive" game like Towerfall or Samurai Gunn, and there's four selectable characters. Let's say you did the TF2 thing and made all your characters cis males. Awesome, perfect. Design a female replacement for one of the characters, and an overweight bisexual black female replacement for another.
As your game approaches release and you start showing off your characters, you should get people telling you your game is sexist and possibly transphobic because of the lack of minority representation. If they don't (unlikely!), you can seed this witch-huntery yourself, by posting anonymously on Reddit and Twitter. When the outrage reaches peak levels, to the point where you start to get death threats and boycotts and petitions being signed, give a public statement saying that you've replaced the one character with the female character, and you've replaced the other character with the overweight bisexual black female character.
Half the Internet will love you, half the Internet will hate you. This is what you want.
As you start generating outrage-bait headlines like crazy, also slip in hints that one of the other male characters… is actually FTM trans. That makes more headlines. Accuse groups on the Internet of attacking you, and make a victim of yourself. At this point you should probably change your sex and/or sexual orientation, or at least what you portray your sex and/or sexual orientation as. This is also when you create your Patreon. You can figure it out from there.