A fellow indie developer, Cliffski, blogged the other day that releasing games as an indie is stressful.  I can't find the link though (maybe it was an article and not a blog post).  He sure is right about that.  There are a number of things that make being an indie much more stressful.

When working at a mainstream developer, the owners have to worry about paying the bills of course, but the normal employees are pretty oblivious.  Plus the developers tend to have a relatively (what relative means could be another entire blog) steady advance payment coming from their publisher.  With the indie, the indie is the owner and pretty much always knows how far out he/she can pay the bills and there is no steady payment coming from anyone.

Most of the risk for mainstream devs is getting the project signed in the first place (we've seen plenty of devs go out of business from this), not when shipping (at least short term risk).  When the game is finally done, gone gold, and is selling, everyone except the developer starts making money.  On most projects, the developer never sees any money past their advances anyway, so there isn't a huge amount of worry over how well the game is selling.  Everyone does want their game to sell well.  There is just a huge gap where the advances need to get paid back and publishers usually only pay royalties once a quarter.  It's hard for people to be too concerned about something they don't expect and won't happen for at least 3 or 6 months down the road. Indies on the other hand, don't typically get publisher advances so almost all of their risk happens when they ship a game. Will it sell well or will it flop.  If it flops, can the indie survive? Most likely they won't.  With a mainstream developer as long as they sign the next contract, they will be mostly ok.  An indie needs their games to sell reasonable well so that they can fund the next game.  If they don't they go out of business.

For a mainstream developer, there is also a nice 2 to 3 weeks break between going gold and the game hitting the shelves which is great because you probably just worked a ton of hours in the last month or six.  Indies tend to release their games through digital distribution which means there is no or very little time between gold and shipping.  The day of or maybe the next day the indie is at least hearing about issues if not already trying to actively fix them.

So anyway, if you are prone to worrying about things or stress bothers you too much don't become an indie game developer.

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