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This is my very first blog, so I'm not sure the ins and outs of writing one. I will do my best and hopefully become better at writing them. In the last few weeks, I have been contemplating starting a business in making games. I have done countless research on starting a business and have finally come to a point where I'm ready to begin registering the business and getting a website up and running. I have decided to write a blog on said website, which will mainly consist of dev logs on the game I will be working on. I also plan on making dev logs on YouTube, showing my progress, not only for other to see, but also for a record of what I did so I can learn from it for future projects. My first game will be on iOS, as 3D games are just too ambitious. The plan is to make a 2D action RPG. It's not going to be as complex as Pokemon or Zelda, but will be big enough to keep my interest. A lot of people suggest making simple games first, but that doesn't interest me. I want a challenge. Hopefully running a business will kind of force me to stick with a project, instead of just making a prototype and moving on. My first hurdle has been making the website. I've decided not to use a CMS such as Wordpress, as I have enough web experience to make my own. I want it to be customizable and I want to make it as secure as possible for when I start implementing a login mechanism with mailing lists and the sort. I have the skeleton of a website with enough visual fidelity to be released, but I just don't know what content to put in. I don't have any images to put up and I'm not sure what to write, as I haven't actually done much development work yet. I'd love to know what you guys think I should add. The website isn't public, so I can't show you what I have, but if you have any experience with this kind of thing, I'd love to hear from you. I hope to write more blogs like this in the future, so any feedback on my writing or suggestions on starting a business would be greatly appreciated. Also, If you are thinking of starting an indie game business of your own, I'd be happy to share the info that I have gathered.

This was planned as a response to this thread in the micro blogging system (See: http://www.leadwerks.com/werkspace/statuses/id/7596/) but look at the size of it and you will see why I made it a proper blog post instead. ___ Here's a hard truth for indie devs: Your stuff isn't anywhere near popular enough that you could even consider the dynamics of the entire market as you do not have a snowballs chance in hell of getting that kind of traction for your product. You are not going to reach the clear cut and homogeneous entirety of the Steam user base. Instead you are probably going to reach a barely predictable heterogeneous fraction of it. The majority of the market will simply not care so addressing an under served niche audience as well as the bulk of the market can be a very prudent choice. There's a reason why all three big Mac port publishers (Aspyr, Feral and Virtual Programming) have collectively started rolling out Linux ports. They understand the dynamics of a niche market, they have done business in one for years, exclusively. Check out these sales data articles (https://www.gamingonlinux.com/articles/sales-statistics-from-developers-part-3.4090), they are mostly concerned with Linux but quite often include Mac data as well. While some of these numbers are silly low ( often owed to the fact that these ports released months after the initial Windows only release and if you look at Rust in article 1 and 3 they manage to catch up) both platforms combined can run anywhere between 6-15 percent regularly, significantly more in extreme cases. It's mostly the popular indie titles that have platform statistics more in line with total market share. But be frank with yourself: How likely is it that your game is going to be the next Rust compared to the likelihood of it being any of these games you have never heard about before? Could you honestly just ignore around 10% of total sales? (Much more in percent if you look at it as an increase over a Windows only release.) In essence you are running the Lemonade stand on the street so thinking like you were the CEO of Coca Cola doesn't exactly apply to you. And while Mac's growth is certainly limited due to the nature of being based on premium products (Some people will never shell out this much extra for a computer while cheaper options exist.) Steam Machines could increase the size of the Linux install base enormously while having just about no chance of negatively affecting the Linux market share. The people that are already using Linux for gaming on desktops do not care whether or not console machines do well or fizzle into irrelevance.