From Indie Studio to Gaming Empire: The Ultimate Guide to Building a Multi-Million Dollar Mobile Game Business

From Indie Studio to Gaming Empire The Survival Guide for Game Studio Founders Who Refuse to Quit I sold my apartment to fund my studio. Then I moved into the office, because I couldn't afford both a place to live and a place to work. For six months that office was my home while I shipped my first PC game. If that sounds insane, this book is for you. The gaming market is worth over $200 billion, and most of that money never reaches the people who actually make the games. Talent doesn't protect you. I've watched brilliant developers go broke and mediocre ones get rich, and the difference was almost never the quality of the game. It was the decisions made around it: the business model, the timing of the pivot, the contract that should never have been signed. This is the book I needed fifteen years ago and nobody had written. Who's telling you this I'm Serhii Komar. Over the last fifteen years I've bootstrapped multiple studios without a dollar of outside money, launched more than ten games, and grown teams from two people to thirty. I've worked on titles pulling in a million dollars a month. I've also been ghosted by investors, burned by a partner for $30,000, hit by mass layoffs, and kept making games through an actual war. I'm still here. Still shipping. This is the only thing I've ever wanted to do, and I've learned how to keep doing it when everything says stop. What's inside How I reached first profit with almost no money and a lot of stubbornness How to choose between premium, free-to-play, and hypercasual, and how to read the signal that it's time to switch How to build monetization that grows revenue without treating your players like marks How a failed premium game became a free-to-play title earning $30,000 a month after I rebuilt it What a $30,000 partner betrayal taught me about contracts and the people who exploit them How to turn raw hires into senior talent and lead a team without standing over their shoulders How to structure a studio so it's worth something real to an investor or a buyer, not just a download counter There's also Mystery Castle, my first mobile free-to-play hit, built in two months with recycled art and no budget while my team was running on fumes. It's the reason we survived. The honest part Fifteen years of this industry has handed me investor silence, partner fraud, economic collapse, and revolution outside my window. I've condensed all of it here, including the parts that still sting. If you've ever stood in your studio at 2am wondering whether you've lost your mind, you haven't. You're just doing one of the hardest things a person can choose to do. This book will help you do it without burning out, selling out, or losing the reason you started. Start building a studio that lasts.