
People greatly overestimate the chances of success of a video game, even with $2.5 million. It’s even easy to fail entirely for reasons unrelated to developing a game, such as corporate governance.
It’s not totally comparable, because we did a physical game, the Kickstarter I created ended up succeeding and shipping (over a year late!), we lost virtually all profits to early company investors and surprise tariffs. It was basically a wash financially.

Makes sense. AAA games are finance projects more than creative projects. Yeah there’s a lot of art and writing and stuff, but it’s all calibrated to make the most money and anything that threatens it is jettisoned. This makes them formulaic to a fault.
Indie games are passion projects, so you see a lot of weird stuff out there. Most of them are utter failures, financially, but the ones that survive are truly something special.
I don’t see how this will stay consistent enough for art directors to sign off on it. It’s effectively just a hallucination based on your current video game frame.