Crevurre: The amount of small companies and games number in the thousand already. There should be tens of thousands of people involved

Crevurre: How do all these startups and others get funding? There are dozens of these all over Steam and they come out with all these projects.

Trooper1270: Back in the day, they used to be called 'Bedroom coders'...

WinterSnowfall: ... someone needs a reminder that most successful multi-nationals started out in someone's garage.

rtcvb32: Or out of their garages...

Trooper1270: Bedrooms are usually a lot warmer, especially for coders that are mainly sitting fairly stationary tapping out copious amounts of code. Whereas a garage would be more suitable for designing, building and testing hardware, where space is usually more abundant and warmth is generally less of an issue because of the physical nature of these tasks...

Crevurre: We're talking Eastern europe level of poverty getting publishing deals etc.

Trooper1270: Back in the day, they used to be called 'Bedroom coders'...

Crevurre: We're talking Eastern europe level of poverty getting publishing deals etc.

rtcvb32: Depends on location, time of year, humidity, etc. Running a small server in the garage makes more sense when it's cool, but during the summer the AC may be preferred.

rtcvb32: Though with the power of computers recently, you can do the majority if your work on a very low powered system and then move to a beefier machine to finish any intensive polish and filters.

rtcvb32: As for non-coding projects, yeah garages are probably better, and much easier to clean and keep the GF/Wife happy

ssling: Back in the day there was no Steam, Itch.io and common internet access so as amateur game developer best you could wish for was your game getting any attention at all as freeware because distributing it on your own was close to impossible for most people. Then everything changed and with rise of digital platforms publishers became (at least to some degree) obsolete and everyone could be actual dev getting revenue from their work.

Crevurre: [...] . There should be tens of thousands of people involved in this and somehow there's no content about it anywhere, nothing at all.

Linko64: Ok so, I'll try to cover this in the best way I can without spending an hour...though feel free to ask me on twitch and I'll happily talk.

Your indie guys tend to come from a few cuts -

Bedroom/grassroots - The ideal of indie, it's normally a team of less than 5 who work on a game in their spare time and self publish via Steam/Itch.

Grass Funded - the small team who are part-time, normally have some level investment from any number of sources. Not always attached to a publisher but not uncommon if they are. Early Access tends to be their default in order to sustain investment or sustain development after the first pot of investment.

Small indie - Normally a small team of under 15, attached to a publisher of any given size. From here it's a similar idea that scales up in terms of team numbers and investment...but where does investment come from?...WELL...

This is where things go wild it can be anything from a publisher itself, an investment group, crowdfunding, self-funding via a website or obtaining a grant based on the engine the game is being built with e.g. Unreal or Unity.

The investment level is wildly different and depends on a number of variables, there's no real simple answer for this. What I would point out is the number of publishers appearing, some former developers themselves. The rebirth of self publishing + social media has seen pretty much any with an idea and a playable product have a 'chance' of hitting it big. Crowdfunding was an element of that but acts more like a pitch tool these days in all honesty.