Decide up front how much you want your game to sell

"I do not make games for money, I make the game I love" is a perfectly legitimate thing to say on its own. But the market works like this now: the game itself comes second, and the real work is finding the hook before a line of code is written. The problem is not picking a spot between the two. Most developers make the game they love rather than the game the market wants, and when it does not land they get angry at the market.

Put your game on a scale. At one end is the game where the commercial result barely matters at all, the one you make purely because you want to make it. At the other end is the game designed almost entirely around a market opportunity. Every point in between is legitimate. The real problem is when your actions sit at one end and your expectations sit at the other. If someone who says they do not care about sales spends months posting clips and waiting for one to blow up, that person does care, they are just lying to themselves by saying they do not.

A good game with no marketing does not have zero chance, but it has a very small one. A bad game with no marketing is stillborn, and with marketing it sells a little at first and then bleeds out. A good game plus marketing only gives you a chance, not a guarantee. I have already written that a bad launch does not recover on its own; what this adds is that a good game is not enough on its own either. If you are playing towards the market end of the scale, genre, timing, visual language and positioning become part of the creative process rather than a layer added afterwards. The thing people confuse most here is mistaking that decision for chasing trends. But if the indie side is an ecosystem full of games that are copies of each other, chasing trends is exactly why. The question to ask is whether this is interesting enough among the games that look like it.

Look at similar games and work out how many copies they sold, how many reviews they got, and where their production values sit compared to yours. That does not give you an exact number, but it gives you the order of magnitude. Another method is to make a trailer before making the game and measure sentiment with it and a good page. The goal there is to measure, not to build an audience, so if you do open the page, have somewhere for people to go behind it.

With Metal Thunder I aimed a childhood wish at a gap I could see in the market, so I was closer to the market end of the scale. That is also why, when the game was selling 5 copies a day in January 2025, I decided to keep going: the visibility problem was a problem that could be solved. If I had been making that game purely for myself I would have stopped that month, and stopping would have been the right call. The decision was not about the quality of the game, it was about what I expected from it. I am at a similar point with DriveWave. I made it purely so it would feel like the racing games I played as a kid, and to hear a car engine while I make games. I have no market expectation for it. Honestly it is going well anyway, but it would be fine if it earned nothing, because it is an entirely passion-driven game. That is why I give it away for free.

None of this means build your goal around the market. A game that stands at the pure creation end is legitimate too; when I wrote that every game is a startup in itself, I did not mean every game chases the same goal. The conclusion is this: if you stand at that end, set your sales expectations there as well.