/vr/ - Retro Games

>>5170351
And just from top of my head:
One of the most successful Polish games of the 90s, Polanie (essentially a Warcraft 2 clone, but about unification of Polish tribes in 9th century), was made by bunch of IT students as a party joke that suddenly got serious when they sit down and started to code it. And it sold "whooping" amount of copies, too: slightly above 5 thousands.
Kupiec, an (in)famous trading game, started out as a C64 game made for fun and to test randomised outcomes, but was picked up by the "big" company (a literal garage business) that got then constantly re-released on different platforms. Final turn-out of sales for C64, Amiga and PC was somewhere around 20 thousands and it was MASSIVE and considered sensational. The game looks like pic related.
And so on and forth. But the main obstacles were three-fold. On one hand, it was all "indie dev" and pretty much made for shit and giggles by people who were toying with their coding skills, which meant there was pretty low technological "glass ceiling" for those games. On the other hand, there was the obvious issue of piracy, that meant the game might sold 5k copies, but half of the country played it anyway. It was simply pointless to invest any sort of money into developing "serious" games, because they were going to get pirated anyway. And finally, the "peak" of computerisation in Poland happend around '97-'98. That was about the period where computers stopped being this expensive gadget only the rich could afford and hobbists knew how to use, but actual average family could (and did) buy one. So by that time, developing games in indie dev model was pretty much impossible anyway, because they would have to compete with mid and big-sized studios with their trash games, the only advantage being lack of language barrier. Which by the late 90s was less and less of an issue anyway.