From Hobby to Commercial Game Development: The Reality of Making a Sellable Game

Many people get into game development as a hobby, dreaming of one day going full-time without realizing the massive gap between hobby dev and creating a commercially successful game (or at least truly aiming for it). I've been making games as a hobby for 25 years, but only in the past two+ years have I been working on Echoes of Myth as my first commercial game. The difference is staggering.

In hobby projects, you don’t need to care about target audiences or whether people would actually pay for your game. You can focus on small proof-of-concept ideas and quick demos. Marketing, store presence, achieving high polish, player outreach, and playtesting aren’t necessary.

Most importantly, scope is rarely a concern. There’s no external pressure to finish, no rising player expectations to meet, and no real consequence if you never release the project in a finished state.

I wouldn’t call myself an expert, but learning everything needed to complete a commercial release and attract paying players has been my biggest motivator. Seeing projects through to completion is a skill on its own, requiring a constant balancing act between refining my vision and adapting based on feedback. This means making both small and sometimes significant pivots to ensure the game remains feasible to develop as a solo dev while still appealing to an audience.

In software development, changing specs are a common frustration—"the business side doesn’t know what they want." But in enterprise projects, there’s usually a clear goal with a defined outcome. Game development is different. The "fun factor" is elusive. A game can be technically excellent but still fail if it isn’t enjoyable. And fun isn’t something you can fully design upfront in a waterfall-style process.

You need a vision, but development is an ongoing experiment. It’s about testing how elements work together, gauging player reception, and constantly iterating. This makes game development inherently agile, but also highly prone to scope creep. Rolling back ideas, cutting planned features, and constantly refining scope are critical skills for actually shipping a finished game but making those decisions can often be very painful.

I’m learning this firsthand with Echoes of Myth. I’ve already made several pivots—some based on my own realizations, others driven by player feedback (Game Development is Iteration - Pivot, Pivot and Pivot Again). I hope the biggest course corrections are behind me and that my current plan is solid enough to finish while still appealing to players. But more validation is still needed.

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