Money is an obvious constraint for an indie studio, but a founder's attention is often even more important. There are only so many hours in a day in which a founder can think, create, make decisions and solve problems. The real challenge isn't simply finding more resources; it is deciding which problems deserve the resources you already have.

When people talk about the economics of indie game development, they usually start with money. How much does it cost to make a game? How much should you spend on marketing? How many copies do you need to sell? Should you take a publisher deal? These are important questions, but after several years of building my own independent studio, Paezo Hellas, I've come to think that they distract from a more fundamental problem: a small studio has very little attention to distribute across a very large number of competing priorities.

In a large company, responsibilities can be divided among specialists. A programmer can focus on programming, a designer on design, a producer on production and a marketing team on marketing. In a tiny studio, particularly one built around a founder, all of those responsibilities can end up competing for the same person's time. The founder might spend the morning fixing a bug, the afternoon writing a press release, the evening updating a website and the next day researching publishers. Every one of those activities may be legitimate, but doing one necessarily means not doing another.

That makes attention a form of capital. The difference is that financial capital can be replenished. If I spend €1,000 on something and it turns out to be a mistake, I can theoretically earn another €1,000. If I spend 30 hours on something that turns out not to matter, those 30 hours are gone permanently. I therefore think the central economic problem for a small studio is not simply how much work it can afford to do, but which work deserves the founder's limited attention.

The Founder Can Easily Become the Bottleneck

This is where running an indie studio becomes deceptively difficult. When you are the person responsible for everything, almost everything feels important. Development is important, marketing is important, community management is important, business development is important, legal administration is important and maintaining the company's infrastructure is important. The problem isn't necessarily that any individual task is useless; the problem is that they cannot all receive your best attention simultaneously.

There is also a psychological trap here. Administrative work often produces visible results. You update a website and can immediately see the new page. You reorganize a store listing and can immediately see the changes. You create a spreadsheet and now you have a spreadsheet. Creative work can be much less satisfying because you may spend six hours designing a mechanic and end the day with a game that looks almost exactly as it did that morning.

That can encourage founders to confuse activity with progress. A full calendar isn't evidence that the right things are being done. The useful question is whether the work is moving the company toward something that matters.

For me, that means periodically asking a very simple question: if I spend the next five hours on this, what will be different afterward, and is that difference more valuable than what I could have achieved elsewhere?

Money Can Buy Back Attention

Money still matters because it can eventually solve the attention problem. When a studio has sufficient resources, it can hire people to handle tasks that don't require the founder's direct involvement. An accountant can handle accounting, a lawyer can handle legal work, a community manager can handle routine communication and other developers can take responsibility for parts of production.

The economic question isn't whether the founder could do those jobs personally. Of course they could, especially in a small studio. The question is whether the founder's time has a higher opportunity cost elsewhere.

If spending €1,000 allows you to recover 30 hours, the real question is what those 30 hours are worth when redirected toward the work that only you can do. If those hours can produce more value than the cost of outsourcing the task, then the expense is effectively a way of purchasing back scarce attention.

This is one reason that scaling a studio isn't simply about acquiring more money. It is also about progressively removing the founder from work that somebody else can perform adequately, so that the founder can concentrate on work where their involvement has disproportionate value.

This is also why my personal situation has influenced the way I build Paezo. The studio does not currently need to provide my entire income, which means I can afford to be patient with it. That doesn't guarantee success, but it changes the decisions I am able to make.

If a studio has to generate enough revenue immediately to pay its founder's living expenses, every project carries enormous pressure. A game that needs another year of development becomes a financial problem. An experiment that might fail becomes difficult to justify. A founder may be forced to optimize for whatever can generate money fastest rather than whatever could create the greatest long-term value.

Because Paezo doesn't currently have that burden, I have more freedom to think about intellectual property, long-term brand development and projects that may take years to mature. In that sense, outside income can actually increase the studio's creative freedom rather than compete with it.

However, patience only works if it is accompanied by evidence. It is easy to tell yourself that an audience will eventually appear or that an IP will eventually become valuable. If the audience isn't growing, the product isn't improving and the company's position isn't changing, simply waiting longer doesn't solve the problem. Long-term thinking should give you more time to find something that works, not an excuse to ignore evidence that something doesn't.

The Three Questions I Use

This has led me toward a simple framework for deciding where my attention should go.

First, is the problem important? If solving it won't materially affect the game or the company, it may not deserve significant attention. Second, do I need to be the person solving it? If somebody else can eventually do the job adequately, it may not be the best use of the founder's time. Third, is this the highest-leverage problem available right now? Even if something is important and I am the right person to handle it, there may be another problem whose solution would have a much greater effect on the company's trajectory.

Those questions are more useful to me than simply asking how much I can accomplish in a day. They force me to think about opportunity cost rather than activity.

Building a Company Means Protecting the Founder

The longer I work on Paezo, the more I think that protecting founder attention is itself a form of company building. If the founder is permanently exhausted, constantly switching between unrelated tasks and spending their best hours on work that could have been delegated, the company eventually inherits those inefficiencies.

The goal should therefore not be to make the founder capable of doing everything forever. It should be to build a company in which the founder's limited attention is increasingly concentrated on the things where it has the greatest leverage: creative direction, intellectual property, strategy, important relationships and the decisions that genuinely require the founder.

That also changes how I think about productivity. The objective isn't to fill every available hour. It is to make sure that the hours that actually matter are being spent on the right problems.

The Real Indie Studio Budget

An indie developer obviously needs money. Games cost money to make, and insufficient funding can kill a perfectly good project. But money is only one part of the resource equation.

A founder also has a finite supply of attention, and that supply is impossible to replenish. You can raise capital, hire employees, automate a process or outsource a task, but none of those things gives you another lifetime.

For a small studio, I therefore think the most important budgeting decision isn't always "How much money should I spend?" It is "Where should I spend my attention?"

That is the question I'm trying to answer with Paezo Hellas. The studio is still small, the future is uncertain and there is no guarantee that every experiment will work. But if I can consistently direct my limited attention toward the problems with the greatest potential impact, then I at least give the company the opportunity to compound the value of every hour I put into it.

And for an indie studio, that may be the most important investment you can make.

If you want to read more about the author’s gamedev journey you can read his book Paezo Hellas: The Unseen Systems Behind Enduring Worlds.