This blog is based on our first 6 months of building our studio, during which we tried, failed, learned, retried succeeded at the activities needed to establish a business that...well... can do business!
If you are seeking mentorship or consultation for your new game studio, please check out our Consultation and Mentorship page to learn about how we can help you. We can guide you and show you all the steps we took to get our studio business-ready in a short time.
From September to December 2025, Noodle Goose Games completed the Ontario Creates Futures Forward program hosted by Toronto's Hand Eye Society, during which we learned lessons in building a sustainable and successful studio. Here is our reflection, after having gone through Futures Forward and several other business activities before, during and after the program. These included registering and incorporating our business, completing foundational business activities (formalizing policies, business agreements, minute book and ledger, business plan, financial forecasting), attending industry events, running business meetings, and applying to several public and private grant and funding opportunities. We are proud to say that we are ready to do business and are working towards a polished prototype with a concrete timeline to market and crowdfund it.
We've learned through the last half year is that most indie game studios won't fail to make money because their games are bad... They fail because they never built the business their creative work needed to make money.
The dream is almost always the same: “make a successful game”, instead of not “build a successful studio”. That distinction is the root of the problem.
If you want your indie game studio to make money, you need to understand one fundamental concept clearly, and without romanticizing it:
The moment you decide you want to earn money from your game, you are running a business.
A business is not a vibe; it’s not passion, nor is it late nights fueled by caffeine drinks and hope.
Doing business at its core is money moving in and out. Zoom out, and its an endless series of activities that don't even include making your game. Once you accept that, everything changes.
Most businesses operate at a loss in their first year, often longer. This is especially true if:
-You’re part-time
-You’re solo
-You’re learning everything for the first time
Indie studios are no exception. In fact, they’re worse off, because many are built entirely on passion, isolation, and unrealistic timelines. Success doesn’t come from avoiding loss. Rather, it comes from having a strategy and stamina that outlasts the loss. If you’re working alone, wearing every hat, feeling isolated, and running purely on motivation, that burnout you feel isn’t a personal failure; it’s a structural one.
If this is your first business, or even just your first game business, you are almost guaranteed to be bad at it.
Not because you lack talent; because you lack experience.
Business skill is learned through starting, making mistakes, and using your time wisely to learn from them. On top of that, luck plays a huge role:
-Being in the right place
-Meeting the right people
-Catching the right trend at the right moment
This is why indie devs who stay heads-down in development for years, without networking or staying current in the industry, end up perpetually behind. Business is relational. If you don’t stay up to date with your industry and the people in it, you won't find opportunities, nor will they find you. One of the things we found at the right time and right place was Futures Forward program. I highly recommend applying for it if you're in Ontario if you're looking to level up your game studio and business skills. There are a few organizations that run it. We received support from Jordan at Hand Eye Society along with many mentors that supported the program weekly. They passed on valuable knowledge and strategies. We avoided many mistakes and mishaps due to this guidance.
Stop benchmarking your expectations against Reddit threads and TikTok success stories. What you’re seeing are highlight reels and highly curated information.
You don’t see:
-The failed prototypes
-The grants that got rejected
-The months to years of unprofitable work
-The studios that quietly shut down
Consuming content can help, but only to a point. At some stage, scrolling becomes procrastination disguised as learning.
Meanwhile, the actual work—building a business—goes untouched.
Here’s a hard truth: The first idea you invest money into will probably not be the one that succeeds. A colleague of ours once advised us to make our first few games as quickly as possible. If those first few don’t succeed, that doesn’t mean they are wasted. See them as tuition. If your entire plan depends on your first game “hitting,” you’re gambling, not running a studio. Sustainable studios assume iteration, pivots, and failure as part of the process.
If you want to be serious about making money, you need to shift your mindset, fast.
Ask yourself:
-What are my actual goals with this studio?
-Am I willing to treat this like a business, not just a creative outlet?
-Can I explain who this game is for and how I’ll reach them? Can my creative work generate fans?
You need to value your studio and your work.
That means:
-Set deadlines and meet them
-Develop a business strategy and plan
-Learn about and do financial forecasting
-Develop a real marketing strategy
-Track progress with numbers, not vibes
Making the game is only a small part of the job. Making money will require months (often years) of focused work on the business side alone.
Most indie studios don’t fail because they lack creativity. They fail because they lack discipline to outlast the losses, mistakes, the hardships of owning and operating a business.
If your game is brilliant, ambitious, heartfelt, then it deserves a business that can actually support it.
Passion without structure doesn’t build studios…
Discipline does.