He declared in that book that his games sell 6 figures a year ( 100.000 - 900.000 usd )
He has 10 new games in his catalogues
If I take his words literally we are not far away from a turnover ( annual revenues of his company , not number of copies of course ! ) in terms of milion dollars

Should his turnover be of " only " (sic) hundreds thousand dollars ..well in my opinion he his a pro
The difference between mr Vogel ( a pro ) and me ( an amateur)is :

He can afford to spend the whole day in game programming ( me some hours a week )
He has 20 years experience in game programming ( me just 3 - 4 years)

Consequently I dont try to do what mr Vogel does ( not to mention Oblvion )
I prefer to focus on small casual games

This is my 2 cents suggestion to the newbies

Again we pretty much know how he's doing. He's selling about 10k sales - 15k sales- $300.000 dollar range. My problem with your post is you want to dismiss him as an example one can do an RPG in A6 because of this. Nonesense. Mr. Vogel at one point wasn't making any money, just like you and me, and thankfully he never had anyone telling him to avoid massive RPG's because he was broke, alone and wasn't a pro. But hey, he persisted, created exile- which saw two sequels. If you never played exile try it. It's about as massive and complex as you'd want. And he did that broke with no time other than off time from his job.

Sure today he makes a good living because he was successful. But you and me are in the EXACT same place as Mr.Vogel was before his first release. In fact we have many more advantages. We already have a stable engine which he had to build. We have a much larger art pipeline than he's ever enjoyed in that 2d .bmp map world he's games are done in. There's no Tourbosquid for him to shop. No code snips in AUM or on a forum, no texture packs and no way to auto compile into an EXE.

His ONLY advantage was he had no one there telling him he couldn't do it. "No you can't do a big RPG. Only pros do that! do tetris!"

He is an example one can tackle a RPG as a loner and succeed as well as start two other RPG series and suceed in them as well.

His games will always be limited as the 2d graphics are so ancient. We on the other hand can easily top them. We are in Fact in a better position as our 3d engine will open up more customers that would never touch that 2d tile RPG.

I say do some small projects to learn then go full board out. You certainly can do a RPG and damn good one and the word 'pro' is meaningless. Be thankful your not one- as you'd then be likely hamstrung by that bighouse funding you that 'tells you' what kind of game to do and what audience to target.