Solo indie game dev here, I’m primarily like this because of dumb reasons.

Imagine you’re a drummer, and you’re seeking a band. However, instead of finding people who either need a drummer, or want to form a new band, you get people telling you, that you did a grave mistake by focusing on drums, since drum machines exist. Bass players assume if you don’t want to pay them upfront, that means you want to exploit them. When looking for vocalists, you get told that how great instrumental music is, and a really bad singer can ruin a band. After many circles, you get told that you should just play drums under pre-recorded guitar loops.

I call this effect “djentification”. Formerly collaborative art becomes easier to produce for a single person, then it becomes the new standard, with people instead try to speialize in a way they can most effectively produce said art alone.

Cheap is relative. Was speaking to an indie dev who lost half a million of his savings on making a game that wasn’t very popular and eventually he had to stop working on it.

Obviously there’s indie games that cost nothing except the time of the person who’s making them; that still exists. But then on the upper end of things, I would say it can go into the multiple millions. We’ve certainly worked on games that are multiple millions of dollars just in development costs. If you’ve got a group of people coming together for a game, and it’s a sizable team, then that’s gonna cost [a lot].

I mean, that’s obvious. There absolutely are solo devs. And everyone needs to have money. More people, more money needed.