If your kickstarter fails, you still can explore other monetization options.

Regardless of what option you take, it is possible people are just not gonna care about your game or won't like it - there's no way around that. Most people on itch.io do not earn a living wage with their games, if they earn anything at all. It's a crowded marketplace.

My personal impression is that it is very unlikely to hit the jackpot and go full-time with your first game, no matter if it is funded via Patreon, Kickstarter or IAP.  Starting as a side gig and transitioning to full time if you get lucky enough to find funding or get a surprise hit seems to be far more common.

The problem is that the video game market is horribly saturated. It doesn't matter if your game is good or not; what matters is whether the public even knows about it.

For example, if you check the "Recent" page on Itch, you'll see that the first page only shows games released in the last few hours.

Besides a good game, you need a good marketing campaign, and even that is uncertain these days. Every day I read about more people who have invested in marketing campaigns and aren't recouping their investment, simply because there's too much competition.

On Itch, there are a few niches that are much more successful than the rest, but in general, it's more of a developer's space than a player's, so the average game doesn't usually get more than a few hundred views, and very few of those will translate into sales or Kickstarter support.

I'm not going to say it's impossible to make a living this way, but I will say that the statistics are against you. The few people I know who manage to pay their bills with indie games are people who have been developing games for years and have created several titles, building a large and supportive fanbase over time. But achieving that with your first game in a short amount of time is very difficult (well, unless you do thorough market research and try to capitalize on what sells, but usually indie developers try to make the game they envision).

So, I don't think I'm necessarily the one to tell you what to do but I can tell you what I did, and what I might have done differently if I could have.

Coming up as a nobody outta nowhere, I released an indie JRPG game on Steam. No followers, no budget, no marketing. Along the way I tried releasing in chapters. I tried offering a demo. I even did Early Access on Steam. I think I might've even tried a crowdfund somewhere along the way... It took 20 years from when I first was like "I got an idea" to "I published my own game", just as a result of how life happened along the way. It doesn't actually take that long to make a game, normally.

I did a 4 minute video about the experience that you can see on my game's page, here on itch. (Neverspring Chronicles)

If you ever have the time to watch it, there might be some useful anecdotes in there because you sound a lot like me at different stages in my own indie dev journey.

Anyways, long story short, that particular video actually gave me a lucky break. I had made it just as sort of a pressure relief, to blow off some emotional steam after so many years going at it alone, to pretty much zero audience. But people seemed to relate to that video, and it wound up acting as an accidental marketing boon. YouTube shadowbanned me for some reason for that same video lol. It hit 30,000 views, 5000 likes, and 1700 subs in like 6 days and then suddenly, abruptly, it stopped forever. My overall channel has had like 68 views in the past 6 months. Not sure what happened there, but it killed the momentum in the cradle.

Analytics and numbers-wise, I was looking at maybe 30-40 units sold over 2 or 3 years of Early Access and the first days of release. That video brought in some quality players, really cool people who helped find bugs and gave awesome feedback that made the game even better in the end. The boost from that video (30k views, 5k likes, 1.7k subs) translated into roughly 1500 wishlist adds on Steam and about 350 units sold. The game has been out 1 year as of March and is somewhere between 500-600 units sold.

From what I've researched, the scariest part of all this is that I did pretty well lol. A nothing nobody outta nowhere using RPG Maker MV to write a love letter to the JRPGs of the 1990s... By all acounts, I shoulda stayed at 0 units sold. In the past 5 years, there have been over 44,000 indie games released on Steam alone. Out of those 44,000 indie games, barely half of them have sold $500 in units over those 5 years. With Neverspring Chronicles, I lucked out and made maybe $3,000 in the first year, but all that went right back into the game as I've been continuing to update it with upgrades. Most recently, a total art overhaul with work done by artists here on Itch. (actually, all my stuff is done thanks to Itch artists lol)

What would I have done differently?

For one, I can't stress the importance of paying attention to other game titles. Make sure you don't release around the same time some other hyped up game title is releasing or you'll get lost in the numbers for sure.

Second, and probably most important for modern indie devs, you gotta sell yourself. I'm so busy as a solo dev, I don't have time to make YouTube videos and chat on Twitter or whatever the mode of social media. And even if I did, I'm just not built for that sort of thing and it's a huge handicap.