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itch.io Community » Game Development » Help Wanted or Offered

Rev-share sounds great. It almost always fails. I want to fix that.

A topic by Blackjax created 83 days ago Views: 771 Replies: 15
Viewing posts 1 to 6
Blackjax83 days ago (4 edits)

Everyone wants rev-share for their idea.

Nobody has money. Everyone has ideas. Rev-share sounds fair, indie, and practical. It feels like the only way to get a team together.

And yet almost every rev-share project I’ve ever seen or heard of dies.

Not with drama. Just quietly. People stop responding. Tasks stall. The Discord goes silent. Eventually everyone moves on.

The pattern is always the same:

  • No real scope or written plan
  • “We’ll figure out equity later”
  • No accountability beyond vibes
  • No marketing until the game is basically done, if it ever even gets close
  • No money for tools, contractors, or polish

I’ve been on these projects. I’ve watched other people burn months on them. At some point it clicked that the problem isn’t rev-share itself. It’s that it’s informal, fragile, and built on trust that never gets written down.

So I started building something to try to actually solve rev-share.

The project is called IndieDevshare. The goal is to make rev-share projects more legitimate and more likely to finish by giving them structure and tooling from day one.

What I’m building:

  • GDD templates that force people to actually define scope
  • Automated written rev-share agreements instead of “we’ll split it fairly”
  • Contribution tracking so work and ownership don’t rely on memory
  • Automated marketing during development, not after launch
  • Built-in fundraising, similar to Kickstarter, but tied to milestones so teams can have actual runway

The landing page is live here if you want to see the direction: https://indiedevshare.com

Who I’m looking to talk to

I’m not trying to assemble a big team. I’m looking for a small number of people who want to help solve the rev-share problem with me.

In particular:

  • A marketing-focused person Someone who knows how to get traction from zero. Indie dev audiences, messaging, positioning, early distribution, testing what actually resonates. This project does not succeed on features alone. It succeeds if the right people hear about it early.
  • Engineers Frontend or full stack. The current stack is Next.js on the frontend, Python FastAPI on the backend, and Postgres. Python is intentional so agent-style workflows and LangGraph can be first-class, especially around marketing and project automation.
  • Product or design-minded people Especially if you’ve been burned by rev-share projects and have strong opinions about what signals legitimacy versus what is just noise.

A bit about me

I’m Christian. I come from fintech, working on production systems at real scale where reliability and responsibility actually matter. I’ve built and operated software in that environment, and I’m treating this project with the same level of seriousness. LinkedIn is below for reference.

This is early. No salary yet, but I’m open to equity with the right people. The business is already set up and I’m in this for the long term.

If this resonates, you can reply here, DM me, or reach out directly:

Christian

UPDATE:

Update: I have an Early Access environment live at https://ea.indiedevshare.com where you can see features as they are built and give direct feedback in Discord. Based on early feedback, I have pivoted the focus more heavily toward milestone-based funding and accountability as the core layer, with funding mechanics being the next major piece I want to design properly.

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Biim_Games83 days ago(+1)

You can have all of those things and they might help, but the main reason for failure is the budget. No money = loss of motivation 99.9999% of the time,

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Blackjax83 days ago

that sounds then like the problem that needs solving.  how to get them funding.

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Biim_Games83 days ago (1 edit) (+1)

Funding is not easy, especially nowadays when everyone is struggling with money.
If I could suggest I would be rich by now. Unfortunately the few funding you might get are related to dark things, like for example investing in gambling, crypto or AI. So I can never access funding, because I avoid to build games that give issue to people instead of giving happiness.

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Blackjax83 days ago

Interested in helping figure this out?

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VosDespero82 days ago(+1)

I'd say the main failure isn't money or budget, but the scope of the project itself. The fact that the majority of these Indie development teams are trying to create MMORPGs is a definite problem, and usually leads to failure.

Project scope is the biggest pitfall to any development process, people need to realize that all of these games they're wanting to create took another studio with 40 employees 3 years to make. 

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Biim_Games82 days ago

That for sure, but if you want to create a commercial game, it's very likely that it will take a few months of works, especially if the people are not professionals (professional developers very rarely will work on a revenue share project of random people). Therefore no one would even take into consideration to develop even a simple game.

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Blackjax82 days ago

not really sure there is one problem.  There's multiple as already called out.  I'm envisioning IndieDevshare as a suite of tools (independent from each other, but tightly integrated) specializing in helping small indie teams.

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The Ed82 days ago(+4)

I think the main reason why revshare games never get completed are the devs.

Professional or skilled devs usually don't tend to join random projects with no promises for pay so most people are either hobbyist or beginners, and once people start realizing they can't really make the game or profit from it, they leave.

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Blackjax81 days ago

i'm making this first class in IndieDevshare.  To have milestone based funding to help make the project more legit, thus better talent, but better success.

If you want to help think through these things, come to the discord:
https://discord.gg/rnKruUjSnN

would love to have you!

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Mythic Forge Games80 days ago

This project looks interesting. Would love to learn more about what direction it's going and what it's meant to be. I work as a UI/UX Designer with a bit of experience in game and product design. I would talk more about it. I sent you a discord friend request from artoftagi.


Hearing you talk about it make me feel like this should be a tool for new developers to help organize themselves. But looking at the website it looks like something more similar to a Kickstarter.

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Blackjax80 days ago

I accepted your invite!

Yes, when I originally posted this, I was looking at the organizational aspects more.  But based on feedback from others here and in other places, the root of all the evil seems to be money.  So i'm now looking at this more the outside in and figuring how to get a carrot in front of dev teams.

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redonihunter80 days ago

If people join together for a commercial product, they need to do so formally. Any product that intends to sell commercially better use a single entitiy that enters contracts with the publisher and the publishing platforms. And anything with a promise of revenue share is bound to be a commercial thing eventually. Even if only pocket money trickles in, or is expected.

Joint copyright is a pain. And unregulated, this is what would happen to the project. So each participant could sell the product any way they liked - under obligation to share profits with the joint copyright owners. Try enforcing that, if the people are all around the world. And how would platforms react, when multiple people tried to sell the same product. Which they legally  could try, under joint copyright.

For Itch, this section of the tos is interesting:

Publishers affirm, represent, and warrant that they own or have the rights, licenses, permissions and consents necessary to publish, duplicate, and distribute the submitted content.

Joint copyright does not need consent. In my opinion, it is a royal pain the nether regions.

Which is where your project wants to fill the gap. Provide structure, contract templates, remind people to actually enter a contract before committing months of work and so on. And of course, help in other ways.

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Blackjax78 days ago

Is this something you'd be interested in helping me explore?

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redonihunter78 days ago

I just wanted to point out this joint copyright issue. I guess most hobby enthusiasts are not aware of this. If people do join up to create a thing together and to not have some contracts, best written down, they end up with that strange copyright situation, where everyone has all the rights, and could sell individually, but would be required to share the profit. Which sounds like a nightmare, if the group breaks apart mid project or someone suddenly wants to remove their contribution. Or when people disagree about how much share they should get...

So I wanted to express that this is a good idea, to give people some structure for this. I consider "rev share" a bit of a fuzzy area between hobby projects and semi professional works, with a lot of wishfull thinking involved. But maybe I am mistaken about this a lot.

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Rob Necronomicon78 days ago

I've joined several and each one has fizzled out for one reason or another. Most people have had their reasons for leaving and that's fair. But given my experience here I don't feel like putting in a lot of work into someone else's idea anymore, because of the failure rate. I'd rather do my own project now, even if i have to learn how to program it. 

At least if (or when) it fails it would be my own fault. :)

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