Wah, all talk into making games. What about selling them? Selling is more important than making them.

If doing games, I suggest going into small apps with short development like facebook aps. Selling games especially PC games = suicide cause sure pirate like mad. Promoting outside like awareness campaign oversea is really expensive. Malaysia is like Free to Play model. In Japan, this so call (doujin) amateur game makers actually makes money because piracy in Japan is a taboo. "Recettear" sold over 100k copies because of "Japan" brand. No point spending time,effort and especially money into something that would go down the drain. If sell in Malaysia price would be around RM 10 - RM 25 would be reasonable.

I suggest being amateur is better, you keep your job. At night or weekeend spend sometime doing it with a group. Almost capital free btw.

Welcome to the internet age, where you can sell your games everywhere not just the country you live in. There are people out there who believe in paying for products. They also happen to live in countries with higher currency exchange rates. So it is possible to make a living from making games.

Recettear didn't sell just because of its a "Japan" brand name, it pretty unique and good as well. Wasn't there a game called Amnesia that sold 200k which is not Japanese in origin?

Money should not be the only driving force when creating a game. If you can make good games, the money will come.

These days you could probably skip learning C++ in order to do games. Python is used in creating Eve Online for example. It can also use the libraries listed above.

Dreams alone wont make it a reality.

I think you need skills before you even start your own game.

Would be better if you try some game that use lua, as it's quite easy to use. At the same time, you get to experience game development yourself to see whether is it suitable for you or not. You can be filled with enthusiasm now, but after you actually get your hands on it, you might not enjoy it. The main thing is, you must enjoy making games, so that you can make awesome games. That is also why the Western developers make better games generally because they love making games. If not, look elsewhere, like i am in engineering now, as i like solving problems in running analysis.

EDIT: Ok I googled lua already. Which games uses lua?

Wah, all talk into making games. What about selling them? Selling is more important than making them.

If doing games, I suggest going into small apps with short development like facebook aps. Selling games especially PC games = suicide cause sure pirate like mad. Promoting outside like awareness campaign oversea is really expensive. Malaysia is like Free to Play model. In Japan, this so call (doujin) amateur game makers actually makes money because piracy in Japan is a taboo. "Recettear" sold over 100k copies because of "Japan" brand. No point spending time,effort and especially money into something that would go down the drain. If sell in Malaysia price would be around RM 10 - RM 25 would be reasonable.

I suggest being amateur is better, you keep your job. At night or weekeend spend sometime doing it with a group. Almost capital free btw.

If you game is good , you dont even need to worry on how to sell them.
You only need to worry when your game is crap.

Not necessarily true.

True, bad games sold well and good games may be in the darkness.

Also I like to design games, but so do most people, however, as long as I got the money to ask people to do it, why not?

I'll just be the publisher and design games.

Programming is hard to do, but easy to master.

But design is easy to do, but hard to master.

It's all on how you advertise your products. The problem with going Indie is that you do not have the luxury to properly market them. Unfortunately, if you don't market them, no one is going to hear about it. Forget about comparing your product with the success of Minecraft, because to get that lucky and successful as an indie is rare. True that it is possible to get to that height of popularity but to count on it happening to you is unrealistic.

Indie is a good way to start from, since it involves a lower budget compared to starting a company. Many university students are doing that as a start.

I don't really agree with that. Minecraft also didn't gain popularity from the beginning; until a year later when people begin to discover it. When Steam came into light, it then shot up to fame. Even if someone doesn't have the cash to market it widely, simply creating a website or a video is sufficient enough to get people into trying out the game.

Another thing is also waiting for a suitable publisher for the game. It can first be distributed freely or with a micro-payment system, until a good publisher comes by and handpicks it(like Steam buying the patent rights of Minecraft).

Indie is a good way to start from, since it involves a lower budget compared to starting a company. Many university students are doing that as a start.

I don't really agree with that. Minecraft also didn't gain popularity from the beginning; until a year later when people begin to discover it. When Steam came into light, it then shot up to fame. Even if someone doesn't have the cash to market it widely, simply creating a website or a video is sufficient enough to get people into trying out the game.

Another thing is also waiting for a suitable publisher for the game. It can first be distributed freely or with a micro-payment system, until a good publisher comes by and handpicks it(like Steam buying the patent rights of Minecraft).

Wait, what?

Steam own Minecraft? Source?

Plus, Minecraft picked up marketing speed after the alpha launched (Prior to that it was just a free alpha that was very different than how it was when the actual "pay to play" alpha launched) and word of mouth started spreading. It hit its stride around the time RPS started posting on it, or it was briefly mentioned in a TF2 blog post.

But yeah... Minecraft is still indie dude.

So your history of Minecraft's success isn't really right.

And you DO need marketing. Just looking through the list of games in TIGSource and that should tell you that you have a TON of competition and so you need to market yourself well to set yourself above a lot of the other crapware indie games.

Looky here for probably THE best guide to indie marketing
http://gillen.cream.org/wordpress_html/?page_id=693

My bad. Guess that I've overlooked into the Steam thingy. But I've to agree that marketing plays a huge role in generating customers.

About the Minecraft history, I've read it from PCGamer. It stated that Markus started a blog and posted a video of Infiminer(which came out as Minecraft later) in 2009

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