Indie game postmortem writeups are the most underutilized free education in game development. Hundreds of shipped indie titles publish detailed postmortems on Game Developer, Reddit, itch.io, and personal dev blogs every year, yet most studios making the exact same mistakes never read them.
Table of Contents
After collecting and categorizing patterns from postmortems published over the past several years, the recurring failure modes are strikingly consistent — and almost entirely preventable. Below are the seven lessons that show up again and again, a look at why indie games actually fail commercially, a realistic development-timeline check, and a simple template for writing your own.
Quick Answer
The lessons that repeat across nearly every indie game postmortem: cut scope earlier than feels comfortable, start marketing a year or more before launch, protect the team from burnout by assuming the project will take longer than planned, pick an engine that matches your existing skills and stick with it, get strangers playtesting within the first half of development, and plan multi-platform distribution deliberately rather than as an afterthought. Most commercial failures trace back to a combination of these — not one dramatic mistake.
Scope Cut Late Costs The Most
The single most common indie game postmortem regret is some version of “we should have cut scope earlier.” Studios can almost always pinpoint the moment they should have removed a feature, but kept building anyway because the sunk cost felt too large to walk away from. The result is extended development time, an exhausted budget, and sometimes a worse final game because the cut features had already been half-integrated into everything else.
Postmortems that describe an on-schedule launch almost universally credit an aggressive mid-development scope cut as the reason it happened. The practical fix: decide what’s truly core to the experience, ship that, and treat everything else as a candidate for a post-launch update, DLC, or the next project entirely.
Marketing Started Too Late
The second most common lesson: marketing was treated as a launch-week activity instead of a development-long discipline. Postmortems that describe starting audience-building a year or more before launch consistently describe outperforming comparable games where marketing began only a few months out.
The pattern that works across writeups: open the Steam page early even if it’s sparse, post development updates on a consistent cadence somewhere the same audience can find them, submit to every relevant free festival and showcase, and treat marketing as a recurring task inside every development sprint rather than a separate phase. For the specific tactics that compound over a launch cycle, see our indie game community-building guide.
Burnout Is The Silent Project Killer
Many indie game postmortem writeups end with some version of “we don’t know if we’d do this again” — not because the game failed commercially, but because the team burned out shipping it. Long solo or small-team crunch stretches routinely produce a shipped game and a developer who needs a year off before touching another project.
A useful framing that shows up repeatedly in postmortems: assume the project will take meaningfully longer than your first estimate, and plan both team and personal capacity around that longer timeline rather than the optimistic one. Developers who protect their own pace tend to ship more games over a career than the ones who grind through one and disappear.
Engine Choice Rarely Matters As Much As Expected
Indie game postmortems mention engine choice constantly but rarely name it as the primary reason a project succeeded or failed. Unity, Unreal, Godot, GameMaker, and fully custom engines have all shipped successful and unsuccessful titles. What matters more, according to the writeups themselves: matching the engine to your team’s existing strengths, not learning a new engine in the middle of a project, and not switching engines after substantial work is already built.
Studios that switched mid-development describe it as one of their biggest regrets in almost every case — the migration cost consistently outweighs whatever the new engine promised to fix. Game Developer’s postmortem archive has several concrete examples worth reading firsthand, including the A Short Hike postmortem, which covers a solo developer reusing tools from a previous project instead of chasing a new pipeline.
Playtesting Earlier Would Have Saved The Launch
A recurring pattern across postmortems: “we found this problem in playtesting two months before launch but couldn’t fix it in time.” The problem itself wasn’t unsolvable — it was discovered too late to solve cheaply. Yet many studios still delay external playtesting until late in development, often out of a reluctance to show unfinished work to strangers.
The fix that postmortems describe working: get strangers playing builds early in serious development, while the game is still ugly and incomplete. That’s fine — the feedback on core mechanics and pacing is irreplaceable, and the cost of changing course is dramatically lower when the problem surfaces early instead of during final polish.
Distribution Beyond Steam Was Worth It
For most indie game postmortem authors, expanding beyond Steam generated meaningful long-tail revenue well after the initial launch spike faded. Studios that stayed Steam-exclusive often mention, in hindsight, uncaptured revenue on Xbox, Switch, mobile, GOG, and Epic — platforms with smaller but less saturated audiences that can still discover an older title.
The caveat postmortems are honest about: certification, porting work, and store-specific marketing all cost real time and money, and a rushed port can damage a game’s reputation on a new storefront just as easily as it can help. The lesson isn’t “launch everywhere at once” — it’s plan a multi-platform strategy deliberately, during production, rather than scrambling to retrofit it after the Steam launch numbers come in lower than hoped.
Why Indie Games Actually Fail Commercially
Postmortems rarely blame one catastrophic mistake for commercial failure — they describe a stack of smaller ones. The most common combination: not enough people knew the game existed before launch, the store page didn’t communicate what made the game worth playing, and the launch collided with market saturation or a bigger release the same week.
The second cluster is about the game itself, not the marketing: mechanics or pacing that read confusing rather than intriguing in the first ten minutes, a genre or hook that didn’t match what the target audience was already searching for, and scope that outgrew what the team could finish to a polished standard. A studio can do marketing well and still fail if the core loop doesn’t hold up in the first playtest session — which is exactly why scope discipline and early playtesting show up as separate lessons above rather than one combined tip.
How Long Should Indie Game Development Actually Take?
Postmortems are consistent on one point: whatever your first estimate is, the real timeline will be longer. Rough ranges that hold up across dozens of writeups — a tightly-scoped small 2D game typically takes a solo or two-person team three to nine months of focused full-time work, or nine to eighteen months part-time. A mid-size title with more systems, art, or content lands in the one-to-two-year range for most small teams. Ambitious projects comparable in scope to Stardew Valley or Hollow Knight have taken three to five years even for experienced developers, and well-known examples like Cuphead and Undertale took roughly five and three years respectively.
The factor that moves these numbers more than any other, according to the postmortems themselves, is scope — not engine, not team size, not budget. For a deeper breakdown by game type and team size, see our dedicated guide on how long indie game development actually takes.
How To Write Your Own Postmortem (A Simple Template)
Postmortems follow a consistent structure across the studios that write good ones: original vision (what you set out to make, and why), what went right (specific, concrete wins — not “the art was good” but which decision produced it), what went wrong (equally specific, without assigning blame to individuals), what you’d change next time, and the numbers that back it up — wishlists, review scores, revenue, and time to breakeven if you’re comfortable sharing them.
Timing matters as much as structure. Write it a few months after launch rather than in launch week — enough distance to be honest about what didn’t work, but soon enough that the details are still fresh. Keep the tone descriptive rather than defensive; the postmortems that get shared and referenced for years are the ones that admit mistakes plainly instead of spinning them, which is also what makes them useful reading for the next studio.
indie game postmortem lessons FAQs
Where can I read good indie game postmortems?
Game Developer’s postmortem archive, the r/gamedev subreddit, itch.io devlogs, and personal developer blogs linked from Steam pages are the most consistent sources. Search for your genre plus “postmortem” to find the most comparable writeups.
Should I write a postmortem after my own game?
Yes, even if the game is small or didn’t sell well. Postmortems are as valuable as an internal team retrospective as they are as public content, and writing one forces honest reflection you’d otherwise skip before starting the next project.
What’s the most common reason indie games fail commercially?
Not enough people knew the game existed before launch, usually because marketing started only a few months out instead of a year or more. It’s almost always paired with a second factor, like scope creep or a confusing first-ten-minutes experience, rather than a single cause.
How long should an indie game development cycle be?
A small, tightly-scoped 2D game typically takes a solo developer three to nine months full-time; a mid-size title takes one to two years; ambitious projects can take three to five years even for experienced teams. Plan for longer than your first estimate.
When should I start telling people about my game?
As early as possible — postmortems consistently favor opening a Steam page and starting development updates a year or more before launch over waiting until the game looks finished.
Is it ever okay to switch game engines mid-project?
Postmortems almost universally discourage it. The migration cost — rebuilding systems, relearning tooling, retesting everything — consistently outweighs whatever problem the new engine was meant to fix, especially after substantial work is already built.
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