No, I’m making a rebuttal to your claim. You claimed that Indies only need to make enough money to cover their time and money spent on the game.
My original statement is that they need to make the money they spent back if they want their game to be considered a success. Which is true. Then after you claimed they only needed to make enough money to cover the cost of their time and money, I expanded on that by informing you that they also needed money to cover them through the lean years while they were developing future games.
Yeah, no. You’re going to need to do more than that. This is your claim, that they always need to make more than the previous game, so by all means, submit your evidence.
I have evidence for my counterpoint, one of the most famous ones being Dragon Age 2, which, while it outperformed Origins in its first two weeks, drastically slowed and performed worse than Origins by the 3-month mark. It is considered a commercial success despite not outperforming Origins after 3 months.
There are also multiple EA sports games which have not surpassed previous titles, and both Battlefield and Call of Duty also fit with my claim, because both franchises have released games that did not outperform previous ones and yet were still considered financial successes by the studio and publisher.
This is simply not true, as any game developer of that period will tell you if you ask them.
Having a big hit that sold well was never a guarantee that you’d keep your jobs unless you were being bankrolled by a major publisher or corporation, and even that is not a guarantee. Westwood Studios’ closure is a classic example of that, because EA made bank with almost every single Command & Conquer game that Westwood released. But it didn’t save them from layoffs and eventually being shuttered in 2003.
Hell, in the modern day we can look at the studio Tango Gameworks, which made a big splash with their game Hi-Fi Rush only to be shuttered just over a year after its extremely successful launch.