How much money can you make from developing a relatively successful game?

I'm doing computer game making as a subject for school next year and I'm still wondering about which Media-related career path I should choose.

yeah might be a bit offtopic but Minecraft was a school project too... And only like every 3rd person playing it has bought it, still Notch doesn't need to go to work anytime soon

Let's say as example:

You made a super-awesome game called "Buh!", you made it in a few months, developed it with the free Unreal Developement Kit, for modelling you used blender, for texturing gimp. With this setup you have paid nothing so far and can already create epic games.

Then you release the game in the internet, on a webblog for example. Some people will try it out, since we said it's super-awesome, the people will like the game and will recommend it to their friends. After this you decide to sell it for only 1 $ per game. (Thats far away from the amount you can ask for a super-awesome game, but the low price can get even more people to play the game.)

Now let's say the game gets "only" sold 500.000 times. (Since Mincraft and Super Meat Boy already reached over 1 million copies as independence game (means the developers don't belong to any publisher), it really could happen that you sell that much copies of your game.

On this point you made already 500.000 $. Now you could decide to sell the game on steam for 4 $. Steam haves alot of special offers all the time so your game could become even more famous as it was before. If you now sell only 100.000 more copies, you get around 3 $ for it. (I'm sure steam wants an amount of the money too, so we say they want 1 $).

So now you have 900.000 $, which is really easy to get atm. (Depending on the huge success of Minecraft and Super Meat Boy. Super Meatboy is a 2D game, which was made by 2 guys and first released as a free game on a online games site, but it became way more famous as they thought and released it on steam then. So currently you don't need to create a Call Of Duty clone, it's enough if you use your creativity. Not even the graphics care a lot atm, it's more about individual style and gameplay.)



Also I decided that I will stay at my school, at least until I have found a good job and they accepted me already. I think thats the best option I can use.



@Erickyle: I have nothing against a single ally so why not.