Investors are not required to form an indie studio, in the case where every team member of that studio has some means to pay their own rent/mortgage, bills, and feed themselves for the entire duration of the project. If you’re in the US, you’ll also need to figure out how you’re paying for health insurance. This could be a passion project in addition to a day job, but coordinating work/life balance in that scenario with multiple team members is exponentially difficult.

Money adds up quick. Let’s use some round numbers and say you want to hire a team with some experience (those folks that just got laid off and are looking for work). Let’s say everybody on the team costs the project $100k/year in salary & benefits. Let’s just imagine that includes costs a normal employer would pay: insurance premiums, IT hosting costs, all the little stuff. Note, this is underpaying people with more than 5 years experience who live in California (where many game dev studios are based). Let’s say you can get the game made in one year with everybody starting on day one and ending on ship day, exactly 365 days later. People will be wearing multiple hats, but let’s be general.

1x Gameplay Programmer 1x 3D Artist (general modeler) 1x 2D Artist (general texture artist) 1x Game Designer (Camera/Controls/Combat) 1x Audio Designer

$500k

Expanding that team:

1x Animator 1x Character Artist 1x Environment Artist 1x Prop Artist 1x VFX Artist 1x Lighting Specialist 1x Tools Programmer 1x Render/Optimization Programmer 1x Level Designer 1x Narrative Designer

$1.5M

That’s a 15 person studio, where people are still wearing multiple hats like UI, Music, IT, Testing, other things I’m forgetting about. This isn’t anywhere close to a AAA sized team of 100+ people.

This is also assuming you can stick to a STRICT time schedule. In reality you’re probably going to need a very small team at the start and not grow until you finish prototyping, then again once you’ve done a vertical slice.

Anyway. This post got real long. The gist of it is the people making the game need that money to live. There should be space in the industry to make a game with a team this size, paying your employees something close to what the big studios pay them. Getting that kind of money has been incredibly difficult these past few years.