What Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End teaches us about the real journey of making games
For most indie teams, the Demon King is money
Most indie teams set out like an adventuring party in a fantasy novel. The goal is to clear the monsters and slay the Demon King. In practice, that means getting noticed, landing a big hit, and in the end, making money.
To be fair, a company exists to turn a profit. And anyone who looks around the industry will find teams that struck it rich overnight, like lottery winners. So, like the wide-eyed parties of fantasy fiction, most indie teams go into development carrying the same hopes. They hope for a publishing deal and outside investment. Above all, they hope that this game, the one they’re making right now, will be the big one.
The map has changed
The reality looks very different. According to analytics firm Gamalytic, more than 60% of the roughly 13,000 games released on Steam in 2025 earned less than $1,000. Around 40% never even recouped the $100 Steam Direct fee. AI is driving an explosive rise in release volume, while the number of players actually willing to pay for games has barely moved.
In this environment, it is close to impossible for an indie team to make money from a rushed, half-finished launch. Even well-made games backed by serious money and effort are more likely to fail than succeed. To put it bluntly: for an indie, the moment money becomes the goal, most first projects become failed journeys.
So what is our game actually for?
Most fantasy stories race toward the moment the Demon King falls. The hero overcomes impossible odds, gathers companions, and finally stands before the last boss. That is the climax, and the end of the tale.
Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End goes the other way. It opens with the hero’s party returning to the royal capital after the Demon King has already been defeated. The first episode begins exactly where other stories would roll the end credits.
It follows Frieren, an elf mage who lives for more than a thousand years, as she retraces the journey she once shared with her old companions. The result is a grounded, realistic take on the hero’s tale. Above all, it is a fantasy masterpiece that shows, with lyrical and finely observed emotion, how precious the small adventures shared with the people beside you really are.
Game development works the same way. You don’t need to point to the many lottery winners whose windfall ruined their lives. An indie team should not let its goals sink into chasing publishing deals, investment, revenue, and aggressive monetization design.
Two reasons revenue shouldn’t be the goal
First, the odds. Indie development is about focus. Even if we pour everything into the simplest goals of content and fun, winning players over is extraordinarily hard. We are competing with major studios, highly sophisticated developers, and an endless catalog of proven classics and blockbusters. Everyone wants to make money, and everyone studies the market relentlessly. Only a handful get chosen. Just as amateurs rarely beat professionals, it is extremely difficult for an indie to post dramatic revenue in today’s mature market.
Second, the shackles. Publishing deals and investments signed while a game is still rough, before its value has been properly recognized, all turn into shackles over time. You get a lowballed valuation, unfavorable terms, and pressure to work to someone else’s schedule instead of your own game’s. In the rush to slay the Demon King quickly, the party loses its identity and its direction.
The adventure has meaning in itself
Every adventure means something because of the companions walking beside you.
Frieren will let a mimic swallow her whole rather than give up the grimoire inside a treasure chest. Her companions are often exasperated by how readily she takes risks to collect spells that seem completely useless.
Yet as the story unfolds, those “useless spells” create moments that connect people to one another. And above all, watching Frieren come to understand the value of her companions through the journey reveals a kind of worth that efficiency can never explain.
Indie development is the same. The things that look inefficient by market logic can become a team’s own unique magic. That could be a strange mechanic that’s yours alone, a devlog you keep posting, or a reply left for each individual player. This is exactly where the value of indie comes from, the value majors can’t imitate.
Find players before you find revenue
That is why an indie’s first goal should be building a player base for your game, not revenue. Players who enjoy your story, and players who talk with you. That is the starting point.
In the villages along the road Frieren walks again, traces of Himmel’s party remain from decades earlier. They aren’t grand, heroic battles. They’re small acts of kindness toward the townsfolk. The people they touched remember, and that memory is what keeps the hero’s story alive.
Early players and small communities work the same way. They are the people who will remember your game and wait for your next story. Once you give players a clear reason to enjoy your game, revenue can follow in any number of ways.
What does today’s development mean to us?
The advice I always give to the heads of mid-sized studios and to indie teams alike is this: make today’s development with your team meaningful. An indie team’s true happiness doesn’t arrive after the publishing deal, after the investment round, or after the revenue starts coming in.
So if you’re an indie, today’s work with your teammates should be enjoyable, or at the very least meaningful. And we should be able to enjoy the act of building a new world together with players through games. We may not slay the Demon King on this journey. But whether that journey ends as a failure ultimately depends on what we set out to achieve.
By Professor Jung Musik
Department of Game and Visual Studies, Gachon University / Doctor of Game Engineering
Founder of Indiegame.com
Professor Jung Musik is an Associate Professor in the Department of Game and Visual Art Studies at Gachon University and holds a doctorate in engineering. He was a founding member of Trigger Soft in 1994 and has since served as Director at NCSoft, outside director at NASDAQ-listed Gravity, and Vice President of Lunosoft. He organized Korea’s first indie game contest in 2003 and has supported the domestic indie game ecosystem for more than two decades. He currently serves as a member of the Korea Game Rating and Administration Committee under the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism, and as chair of the Content/Digital/Space division of Seongnam City’s Fourth Industrial Revolution Special Committee.
