How do you actually make your money?!?
Back in the 2010s there was this unfortunate situation where a lot of people assumed that younger indie games writers on twitter were actually working on indie games full time. This was, as far as I could tell, mostly not actually the case. I spent all the 2010s working for Tencent and Tencent subsidiaries, and all the indie games I made were in my spare time, on nights and weekends. I knew other people in the space with day jobs as well.
I was working 8 hour days on the weekend to complete most of the games I worked on in the 2010s. I did it so that I could work on indie games while still getting access to "good" health insurance.
I had a couple folks contact me within the first few years of the 2020s to ask whether they should go write for indie games full time, and I always told them no, because I actually hadn't done that, and I knew people who had, and it was really difficult for them, and they suffered a lot!
I took a couple years off from this work-every-weekend lifestyle, and then I finally left big corpo life to go work for a mid-sized, two-project indie studio. But I've been back on that work-on-the-weekends grind for Skin Deep. Skin Deep has quite a few part-time workers on it who get most of our cash from other gigs, and not because we're not paid - it's just that an smaller game made by a smaller team doesn't need full time contributions from everyone all the time. The game is just not big enough to need someone like me working on it every day of the week.
I think all the time about how many people who work on indie games do so as a second job, or part time labor. I also think a lot about the people who can only work on indie games because they get health insurance through their spouse.
When I was a kid I used to imagine that God could see everyone's interpersonal connections and HUD-style data displays. Like, God could look at someone and see everyone they'd sinned against, connected to them by red lines. God could see a transcript of their financial crimes, maybe. I used to sit in church and imagine that. I would zone out and imagine that God would probably look at the pews the way the Terminator looks at people with his red HUD!
What I'm saying is: if you could actually see what the contents' of people's bank accounts look like in this industry - where they actually make their cash, and where that cash comes from, and what they do to earn it - shit would look very different. Having a HUD for people's real lives would be crazy. If you could see all the consulting gigs they do, and the part time work on other people's projects, and the jobs they have teaching or working in other industries, and their spouse's jobs, or their inherited property, or whatever... it would be illuminating! You would learn a lot!!
The best I can do is admit that the entire time I was building my portfolio, I always had another job, and it was usually very hard and depressing, and I was often very bad at it, but I did it because it gave me health insurance for my diabetes shit and kept me alive and avoided a lot of suffering. There was a period of time where I worked in market research, and an overlapping period of time where I rewrote machine-translated localizations of games, and an even more overlapping period of time where my job was to research games and fill out nine-page reports describing their monetization systems. I also had a role for a while where I had to make a PowerPoint about every company my boss's boss was going to meet with, and put the LinkedIn photographs of the company's founders on it, and then label each with the pronunciation details for their name. It was extremely dull work! I never talked about in on twitter. When I joined Riot some people congratulated me for "making the jump" to full time game dev, and then I had to tell them that I'd actually worked for game studios for five years already, and my job had just been boring, and invisible.
But now you have my Terminator HUD display data. I recommend that you actually ask people for theirs - within reason, of course. A lot more of them than you expect would be willing to give you a real answer!