There are a lot of indie game developers who come from an enthusiast background rather than a business background (some may have been professional enthusiasts but someone else gets them a check every two weeks), which causes a lot of this. Enthusiasts don't understand that salaries for engineers chew money really, really quickly.
HN is not exactly immune to this: see people commenting like that $20k for a ruby project was more than a few week's wages.
As someone who went from professional enthusiasts (web-game industry) to indie about a year ago and crowd funded my first game[1], I think I can say a few words on the subject.
First of all, you correctly identified the biggest cost to making games: paying programmers. The solution to that is to be the programmer yourself (or have a programmer friend be your equal partner).
Past that tho, making 2d indie games is (or can be, if you're smart about it) very cheap - Cardinal Quest's entire art budget was around $3000 (music, graphics, etc). Since it also took about half a year of my time to make that's an almost negligibly small amount of money.
The game ended up making a bit over $30k from the desktop and flash versions (direct sales for the former, branding deals and ad revenue from the latter) and the android (done but not yet released) and ios (almost done) versions will hopefully make at least that much again.
It's less than a normal programmer's salary (I didn't get to keep all of it as there were some costs such as the aforementioned music & graphics) but it's enough to pay my living expenses and thus fund my next game.
I clicked on your website's link in all honesty expecting (without justification) something that would be horrible. The website design and the game logo fully went along with my original (again unjustified) bias. But the game pictures intrigued me to click further, and I saw the youtube video.
The youtube video was not only extremely well edited, but showed what was very interesting gameplay. I further went on to click on the Kongregate link, and had fun for a bit. The reason why I'm saying this is because you clearly dedicated enough love to this project, and to me, the product itself seems amazing. I know you are currently opperating with a very low margin, but if you are considering continuing with this or future games, consider spending a bit more time/money on marketting (I hadn't heard of this game before), and branding (consider investing some money on the website and game logo).
All that aside, this game is amazing (though I won't be buying it for a recently selfimpossed spending freeze, but some time in the future! :D ), and I wish you all the best. Let the world (or at least HN) know of your future projects!
IMO, it's a two-sided problem. You've got indie developers with little understanding of the business pitching consumers who have even less understanding.
Sharper minds than mine have already demonstrated the emerging pattern on Kickstarter: that a majority of the "backers" don't really see themselves as investors, or even charitable givers. They see themselves as consumers pre-ordering hot products. They're handing over X dollars in exchange for Y goods (and maybe a tiny bit of Z street cred). It's a very transactional relationship. And the problem with such a transactional relationship is that the backers/buyers are expecting to get Y as quickly and cheaply as possible, nevermind how the sausage gets made. (Ironically, Kickstarter is all about the sausage-making process, but its users are uninterested in process; they want finished goods).
The article raises a lot of good points about the problems that the Kickstarter paradigm presents for indie developers, hobbyists, and enthusiasts. But it only scratches the surface of the backer-as-consumer issue, which, to me, is a much dicier one. In the long run, I think this dynamic will be net-beneficial to indie content and product development. In the short run, would-be developers and creators will need to think critically about precisely which stage of their fund-raising vs. sales vs. marketing activities take place on Kickstarter, and about who the Kickstarter audience represents in the lifecycle of their product launch. (Are Kickstarter backers your hardcore fans, with a higher willingness to pay to get the goods before everyone else does? Are they early product evangelists? Are they beta testers? Are they something else? And, most important, do they see themselves as any or all of these things?)
I suspect that the long-run winners at the Kickstarter game will be the ones who develop the most sophisticated and savvy method for differentiating both among Kickstarter user sets, and between Kickstarter users and mainstream consumers -- and, accordingly, the best ways to differentiate the product offering to these sets of users.
> see people commenting like that $20k for a ruby project was more than a few week's wages.
I suppose if you're 20 years old with no responsibilities and you sit in a room coding 16 hours a day you could stretch $20k pretty far. If someone has the ability and desire to work for a formal $30k salary then I don't begrudge them declaring what they can do on the cheap.
On the other hand, I roll my eyes when someone who spent 500 hours building an app says it's profitable because they have enough paying users to pay the server costs.
That really depends on a few things.
If they built it as something that they wanted to build anyway than having it pay for the hosting + some change might be a good outcome.
Also if your app is making a profit, even a small one then everything else being equal it will eventually make a return on those 300 hours if it holds.
Sometimes people on HN confuse spending $20K on living expenses while you're trying to start "the next Dropbox" with bidding $20K for a contract job that can never make you rich. I suspect most Kickstarter projects are closer to the latter.
HN is not exactly immune to this: see people commenting like that $20k for a ruby project was more than a few week's wages.