I do not believe it is physically possible to become as rich as somebody like Notch or Taylor Swift simply on your own. Notch’s wealth primarily comes from his $2.5 billion deal with Microsoft to acquire Minecraft, at that point Minecraft was essentially a symbol of consumerism with a fuck ton of merchandise that was (obviously) being created by other people. Notch would have been making money from licensing fees simply because he owned the IP. He may have made the game but he was still essentially profiting off of the work of other people.
An example of a game developer who works entirely alone and does not sell the rights to the IP of his game to others is RobTop Games, creator of Geometry Dash which is one of (if not the) most popular games on the app store and Steam. He’s living comfortably sure but I doubt he’s worth much more than $5 million. He’s estimated to have grossed $21 million from the game and this is over a 10 year period.
I do not believe it is physically possible to become as rich as somebody like Notch or Taylor Swift simply on your own. Notch’s wealth primarily comes from his $2.5 billion deal with Microsoft to acquire Minecraft, at that point Minecraft was essentially a symbol of consumerism with a fuck ton of merchandise that was (obviously) being created by other people. Notch would have been making money from licensing fees simply because he owned the IP. He may have made the game but he was still essentially profiting off of the work of other people.
An example of a game developer who works entirely alone and does not sell the rights to the IP of his game to others is RobTop Games, creator of Geometry Dash which is one of (if not the) most popular games on the app store and Steam. He’s living comfortably sure but I doubt he’s worth much more than $5 million. He’s estimated to have grossed $21 million from the game and this is over a 10 year period.