When I started making games, I turned out to be ok at pixel art when I tried it, which allowed me to make flash games and sell them on FGL for prices ranging anywhere between $500 and $2000. Through making my own games and gaining a certain following, I started getting asked to work on other projects. I'd be offered either revenue share, or an hourly rate for my work. Eventually, I started making successful games with Colburt, and started seeing more success with my own games. It's been an uphill battle and it still is, but through experience we're getting better at fighting them.
Colburt's story is roughly similar to mine, except that he didn't have the art skills I do, and he was smart enough to recognise that early on, so he started working with artists to get further with his games.
I know this thread is about Ceosol's journey as a full-time stencyler, I just wanted to take some time to offer a different perspective.
I don't want to sound mean, but I've started noticing, Ceosol- you champion your approach often, while negating others' successes by talking about how they're outliers, not the norm, etc. While I absolutely agree that making games is difficult to succeed in, I don't share your point of view. You can't just say Colburt and mine's games are not what people should expect to make, not when we manage it consistently. It's not luck that AdventureIslands gets featured every single time he releases a new game. It's through skill, experience, recognising your strengths and weaknesses and addressing them.
While doing contract work to generate income and gaining experience at the same time is a completely valid approach, I don't actually think you're doing the smart thing. Your contracts appear to be of fairly low value for the amount of work you're putting into them, and as a result you aren't creating games that improve your situation in the long term. You're creating games for very little money, often appear not to even get paid for your work despite having contracts in place (again, that is NOT normal), and they're not on a level of quality that builds you a fanbase, or exposure, or inspires confidence in higher profile, better paying clients.
I think a better approach for you would be to assess your strengths and weaknesses (and your weakness, in my opinion, is your art), address them (by hiring an artist, or offering to collaborate with them for revenue share), so you can create higher quality games. You can go for iOS and keep reiterating on games until you reach a level of experience and quality to be successful in that space, or go the Greenlight + Steam route, or sell them on FGL (which I think still exists), or even still do contract work but with output that you can use as leverage in the future.
Building a portfolio of quality work is extremely important for an indie developer's long term survival. People often talk about the indie games scene being flooded, saturated, hundreds or thousands of games being released every day! etc. But SO MANY of the games being released every day -in any space- are of extremely low quality, and that's why I believe it's not an accident or dumb luck that certain people can consistently make games that do well. I also believe that anyone can make quality games through practice, time, repetition.
I don't know how to put this more nicely, but I feel like you've put yourself in a dead-end situation and I can't agree with how you are presenting it as 'the smart way to go because people who have success are outliers.'
