That's a great sentiment. I'm not interested in getting super rich, I'd just like to do interesting work and have some freedom in my life. Hopefully that's not too much to ask.
I'm not the most amazing software developer in the world, nor am I the most astute businessman, but after a little more than decade of work and persistence, I'm in a position where I can do pretty much everything I've always wanted to do. Part of that time was spent figuring out what I actually always wanted to do (age brings clarity of focus, I think). I travel full-time (I'm in Bozeman, MT right now, on my way to Yellowstone), I run a company that builds stuff I'm really proud of and millions of people use, I work with two guys that I really enjoy working with, I occasionally get to meet up with our users and customers and they're awesome, and I make enough money to live on without having to think too much about money, and the revenues continue to grow at a modest but steady rate. I'm definitely not rich, and the subject of this story has made more in a couple months than I've made in four years of running Virtualmin, but I've got nothing to complain about.
Most importantly, I have as much freedom as anyone I know, including several millionaires and a few billionaires.
Your story is my goal. I don't need cars or giant houses, I just want the freedom to solve interesting problems and the responsibility of making the business decisions.
Depends on your definition of "pretty good living". Anyway, I would not count on it.
Jason Rohrer [1], programmer and indie games developer, author of recent award-winning Sleep is Death [2], manages to get by on around $10K/year. From what I hear, lifestyle this can support in the USA is frugal to the extreme.
He lives that way by choice. He could make more money than he's making, by charging for more of his products. Though it sounds like he's about to begin having an overnight success any day now, since he seems to have started making products for sale on a more regular basis, and he seems to have become pretty good at what he does. He's smarter than me, it took me a good ten years to reach that point, and he's only ~five years into his chosen profession as a game maker.
I currently live on about $40k/year, but I've had years where I lived on credit cards for months at a time (I don't recommend it; too much stress; but I had the house with mortgage and everything and thought all that stuff was important; I know better now, and could squeak by on $15k/year if I was willing to live like the regular folks and park in one place for the whole year). In the past decade, my best years tax return showed income of $85k and my worst showed income of about $8k, with most years being closer to the low than the high. I've been on a very steady upward trajectory for the past four years (with the first year running Virtualmin being the $8k year, where I lived mostly off of savings from the $85k year, which was the year previous).
My definition of "pretty good living" is that you get to do the things that matter to you and you don't go hungry or go without medical care, and don't have to think much about money. My definition of "pretty good living" does not necessarily include a McMansion in the suburbs, an SUV and a sports car and a motorcycle in the three car garage, 52" television in the "media room", etc. I know plenty of those guys, and I'm way happier than they are. You can make more money working for others, in the short term (and sometimes even in the long term, though I suspect my net worth will cross those guys by a dramatic margin sometime within the next five to seven years).
Yeah, this guy is making a stack of profit but the problem for everyone else is that there can be very few, if only one indy game in this class at a time to get this much attention and be top of mind for such a diverse group of people.
This feels like even more luck than hitting the top lists in the app store. One particular example relevant to hacker news would be Jeff Vogel (http://jeff-vogel.blogspot.com/), I'd wager that in the long years he has been in the indy game industry nothing has taken off like this, sure hes games aren't really aimed at these type of novel concepts that have to potential to take off but it somewhat illustrates the different between a successful indy games producer and something on the level of success of minecraft currently.
Probably almost none. It's very rare to find a gaming-related story on HN that gets any popularity, because the HN community overwhelmingly focuses on web development and getting/being filthy rich, which are both uncommon things in indie gamedev.
It's kind of frustrating sometimes, because a lot of these web apps are so trivial technically, compared to games.
OTOH one clear business lesson that experience has taught me is that it doesn't really matter how hard something is to do. What matters is how many people will pay for what you've done, and how much they'll pay.
Difficulty can be a moat to deter competitors, but that's about it.
Still, sometimes the "I wrote web app, I'm teh hot programmer!" can be annoying to us systems types.
Bad news: You will probably not be one of them.
;-)