Survivorship Bias

Survivorship Bias happens when we focus on the small group of people or things that survived a selection process and ignore or don't take seriously enough the group that wasn't able to survive, either through optimism or because the latter were not so visible.

I was pondering about that when thinking about my future - yes, I know that's a bad habit. I was thinking most specifically about what kind of work I could do after I retire from software engineering. Something that I could do in a part-time manner which could yield some money to increase my quality of life. Being someone into art (drawing, painting, playing music), I realized that even there my options were quite limited, which can actually be a good thing.

Being someone who has already developed and published an indie game myself, I realized how much effort is put into it. Feeling it in your skin is completely different than just knowing about it. Making money from producing indie games involves marketing your project from the start and at every step of the development process, dealing with business stuff, and publishing. When you're a developer, it's quite easy to ignore all those aspects of the process and think that if you make a good game you will be successful - that's not true.

People often think that quality = success. Although we can draw a line between good and bad products and say that those that are good tend to perform better than bad ones (which can be very true), people tend to ignore the amount of effort needed to make a product that will perform well enough just because of its quality.

Even in the indie world, the best and most complete indie games tend to be produced by a group of people or by someone who dedicated years for development. You can of course point to some really big titles like Undertale and Minecraft and say that's false, but that would just confirm survivorship bias. That's the harsh reality of indie game development, and there's data to sustain this claim.

For someone alone to make a title of the quality of the greatest indie games would take so much time and effort that we can't say it's a complete gamble. Stardew Valley took 4 and a half years to be released, Undertale took more than two years. Being an indie game developer means that you're doing it because you love it, not because you expect success. Your metric of success should be the satisfaction of releasing a good game, and I would advise you to take care of all those boring business-related things so even if you're not expecting money to come your way, you still leave your doors open to it.

I was also thinking about anime, but anime is not that different from games, so I won't extend myself on that. The way I see it today, there's only one field that would fit that goal well: commissioned art work. I'm not saying this stuff doesn't need business and market-related knowledge because it certainly does, but at least you can produce in a time-efficient manner.

Still, I plan to do that with the mentality of doing it for personal satisfaction over money, so if I, with my mind's eye, see some project that would bring me profound joy, I have at least the time and resources to not worry about how it would result financially.

This very blog is something related to that. I'm just spilling thoughts into the void where they will probably never be read unless by scraping bots on the internet, not caring if I'm right or wrong, not judging what I say and not trying to understand my own contradictions. If you're a human and you're reading this shout, know that I'm very grateful for you, I really am. Even though you might just exist in my imagination.

Well, it's kind of sad that almost every indie project we can think of is doomed to financial failure, but I hope the future can be better for us. Things are getting easier over time and we may reach a time where we actually have time to do things.

One last tip if someone real is reading this: if you're trying to do something creative, try to find a business partner who will bother you with deadlines, marketing and other stuff. That way you can be almost fully focused on the creative and operational part of the job, while having someone handling the business and strategy side of things. I say "almost" because in partnerships, the work is always the responsibility of all the partners and their own way of doing things. So if you're going to do that, do it carefully. Don't choose someone just because they know business well - a partner should also be chosen for trust and comfort.