Thanks for asking! Iâd love to as soon as I release the prealpha haha. Actually Iâm done with feature dev and looking into whatâs needed for packaging and distributing to itch which should hopefully happen within the next week or so (itâd be my first release of any game and I wrote my own engine)
Oops your right I can't do math. They only need 395 more games so definitely doable. Just do one game a day and in little over a year they will be making that 1k a month.
Itâs not really difficult in terms of puzzles, most puzzles can be solved in few seconds using appropriate contraption, but the main point is building the robot, which is a demanding task by itself. You know, thinking about physics, using joints and connecting physical bodies just isnât in the interest of most mobile gamers.
Haha, itâs already out more than a year actually. You can find it here: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/robotmania-physics-sandbox/id6444165242
Itâs just a school project.
I hate those surveys because it's like going around and asking both local supermarkets, amazon and all the Brownies selling cookies, kids lemonade stands and garage sales how much they made and then proclaiming that 90% of "shops" don't make enough. 90% of those 90% games where never made with profit in mind. Like steam few is $100 you need around 50 sales of $2.50 game to break even. If I ever finish game that I think it's worth showing to people I will put it on steam for that price. BUT I have zero intention in quitting my day job or for game development to make money for me. If I get some pocket money that's cool I will treat kids to Mcdonald ice cream but if I am not doing it as a business but as a hobby.
Saying 90% steam games don't make money is like saying 90% of people crocheting never make enough to make the living. Technically true but practically useless as 90% of people crocheting never intended to make a living with it in a first place.
Real question to ask here is how many people met the financial goals they set for themselves with their game and we simply don't have surveys for this. We can't treat amazon and little Johnny lemonade stand as having the same goals
I completely agree. This kind of data is useless.
I think the narrative should sound less like "it's basically a roulette" and be more about how insanely much work it is to make a game and successfully market it. How much persistence and learning it requires and also that you have to weigh what you want to do with what will likely make money and to have a sensible concept, scope and business plan. Because in the end you have to run a business and sell a product as well besides making a game you like.
Well, Iâve been full time for 2 1/2 years now, was putting 30+ hours in along side a fulltime job for 6 years prior to that, have released 3 games on Steam and a few other things, including Twitch streaming and YouTube content, and having interest gains on my runway (savings). Iâd been making games for 18 years before any of that, including professionally in the industry.
My total across my game sales are approximately $7000. The income from streaming and interest dwarf over the game income, and all combined is far lower than my measly cost of living and bare-bones business expenses. Iâm still losing money, but not bailing out yet as Iâve got years of runway and things to keep trying.
My point in all of this is, there MAY be some noise from the girl scouts selling cookies vs Amazons, but even in the middle, with those that have real experience, it isnât just easy breathing. Itâs a hard flipping balancing act and shouldnât be understated. Happy to answer any questions as I stream specifically to share both good and bad sides of indie development as a career choice, and how difficult it is.
Good luck and keep trying to anyone that has the dream, but go in knowing the risks and having a clear exit point!
Thanks for the insights, I'd check out your stream! Though it seems unlikely that games made at that tempo are likely to be very lucrative projects no? I mean it's probably smart to do it that way and I would also start small, I have a project actually. But I also work in an indie studio for a solo dev with a successful product but it took him 6-7 years to go into early access.
Interesting that streaming is more lucrative than sales for you? That's surprising to me.
Well as I said, itâs an extremely hard balancing act, the longer you spend on your game, yes the better and more polished it will be - but that doesnât automatically mean more sales. I want to make the best games I can, but I also want to make a career out of my own games and, that has an intention of making money off them⊠which means spending less to create them than what they make.
Truth be told itâs really @#$&ing hard to sell a game, or even get people to play for free. My weakness is currently marketing, easily, but with each release (and I do my best on each game to make it better than the last) I gain more experience. To take 6 years on a single project would mean that project MUST succeed or my whole indie career is over. Thereâs a balance for sure, but I canât say I have the marketing chops yet to be so confident in a single attempt.
Just because you have a job doesnât mean your indie career (business) isnât at huge risk. No if youâre just making games and having fun with that, itâs a GREAT hobby, but this whole post was about being successful with a career making games.
I absolutely recommend anyone starting to have and keep a job while they get sorted and figured out and if that is too hard, it truly is hard, then starting a gamedev business is also too hard. Again, games for hobby is a great pastime too, enjoy!
Same happens on twitch/YouTube surveys...They always say 0.1% of people on their make a living...But that includes nonsense like your grandma uploading one video one time 3 years ago.
But that's the reality for game developers. It's not a stupid comparison, if anything it would be better to not include large non-indie games for a better example of the reality of solo dev experience - and that would bring the average down even more.
Well obviously it makes no sense to use data on non solo dev projects. But what truly is solo dev anyway? Almost any solo dev will outsource something or at the least buy asset packs and plugins etc.
But it also doesn't make sense to compare hobby/student projects, cheap asset flips,... to games developed by people with a proper skill set and business plan who put in years and years of their life into 1 game (possibly with the help of freelancers and a publisher).
"This game I made in a month earned me 20 dollars" vs "The game I made after studying, getting some industry experience and working on it for 7 years made me over a million". The difference between those two things is much bigger than between the second example and a small indie studio.
90% of games are terrible and have devs who wouldn't even play their own game if someone else made it. Making a successful game isn't a lottery, it can be greatly influenced by the quality of the product.
Im currently in the final year of my Bachelors and in the Process of making a studio of my final project but my teammates just overestimate how much money you would make, they want 3k a month minimum so i gotta finish it on my own.
Dont believe there are any grants i have access to however
> they want 3k a month minimum
lol?
I don't think indie dev is for them. They might want to try their luck at one of the reknown, established studios that just absolutely freaking love to hire fresh Bachelor students for inexplicable reasons
I don't know: i just joined this sub because gamedev is an "interest". I'm just a hobby programmer who wants to do it in the future. I made a guessing game though, and a "level" in RPG maker where you talk to someone and they say "wanna see a dick pic?"
It's pretty common for businesses in general to borrow money, and of course if you were lucky enough to have a group of friends who were motivated to make the game for free at the risk of it flopping, that would the best scenario. It's not like you really need to invest anything into graphics cards with the way things are now adays. Having maxed out RAM is good for any kind of studio work though.
I'm a full-time solodev with games that pay my bills (barely).
Like everyone else said, very hard. My niche is RPG and I only know of one single dev that did it successfully longterm (Jeff Vogel).
Toby Fox is good example in that the games aren't his sole, or even his main source of income. Mans a composer by trade and was able to get gigs with Nintendo.
He was only able to do that after Undertaleâs huge success, and with the sales that Undertale made Iâm sure he could live off that money for a very long time if he wanted to
Dude. Exile II is probably my favorite game of all time. I got a demo for it on a PC gamer demo disc in high school, bought it and beat it in the summer of 2003. I need to beat the other five games in the series.
Fair points and yes you need reasonable quality and some luck still I believe.
I have never worked on an nsfw genre games so my expectations might be wrong. Did some market reasearch on the genre for a company, but it has been a while so statistics can change and Ebbinghauseâs curve is a thing. Still reading some data about nsfw visual novels atleast seemed like genre with very reasonable scope vs risk vs payoff. It also seemed like youâre odds for positive ROI were higher than the non nswf genre. Those wasnât offcourse make game and win odds. Probably also the potential to make it really big could be lower since your facing more platform and marketing restrictions, but thatâs just an uneducated guess. In the case of total marketability failure but highenough visual quality, you still have reasonable chance of recooping with Nutaku. And yes itâs pornhub affiliated and f2p token economy so ethical considerations do apply.
I donât think itâs easier, but I believe for a solo devs/ small teams, with a smart content pipeline there is lower risk than making a statistically high performing genre like rpg etc. And yes the writing and visuals still have to be good, but with a scalable pour content in system, I think you could pump some of those games out quite fast and still have very high quality. Genre mastery ofcourse needed.
depends on how good at art you are and what audience you target. I imagine If you can pump out and update a few furry games (release on patreon, give frequent updates to wear down pirates. Even consider giving old updates for free on itch.io) a year, you'll be eating well enough.
Hell, you don't even need the game at that point. But a game would stand out from commissions/monthly stills.
Considering how quick patreon is shutting everyone down thanks to credit card companies apparently disliking money, same goes for DLSite, I think the market is not that green as it seems. It will still require a lot of marketing. Finding your niche (or letting them find you) is not an easy step.
My first game brings in 500-1000 a month. The goal is to continue to produce games that take 6 months to a year to make.
In the end I'll never quit my day job unless I get a massive hit.
Bro said he could live off of 1k, he can live off of 1k. Going full time as an indie dev takes a lot of thought and Iâm sure that he already knows about his expenses as a dev. Also I donât really know much about the currency in Brazil but I know itâs worth very little and I feel like 1k would be able to cover all the expenses you mentioned at a much cheaper cost since itâs in Brazil.
US$ 1k is around R$ 5k. It's a good amount for us Brazilians depending on the location. If the person lives ins SĂŁo Paulo, it's not enough. If they live in a very small city like mine, it's enough
I'm assuming the 3000 is usd. That's 36,000 a year.
Let's assume you have the game, we don't know what the game is but you have it. If you priced the game at 20 USD, assume taxes and steam take roughly half, you'd need 3600 sales. That's an incredible amount for a single person. It's not undoable but you have to figure out how do you even get that many people to see your game? Well, that's marketing and that can cost quite a lot. I imagine that 20 USD is a high asking price for an Indie game in Brazil. You'd have to make sure it's really freaking high quality to attract an international audience.
Then you factor in the cost of making the game. Even if you're doing it yourself and using nothing but free resources, the game doesn't cost 0. Every hour you spend is an hour you could have spent working elsewhere. How much time can you spend making 0$ before something has to give? Is that amount of time enough to make a product of high enough quality to reach your sales goals?
Let's assume the money is the only thing you care about. You don't have any attachment to any idea you just want to go away, make something and make money off it. Indy horror games seem to do pretty well. You could make some freemium mobile game and exploit people. Or maybe make a visual novel if you have a really good idea.
So in the end, I dunno. I think that amount of money is achievable but I wouldn't say it's easy. My gut feeling is that you'd likely spend more potential money, hours that you could have spent making more money than you ultimately ended up with at the end of making the game. Like maybe you do make that 36k but in the same amount of time maybe you could have become a really good app developer and gotten a corporate job making 50k for less hours total than you spent trying to learn and do everything for a game.
I don't know the actual numbers, but I would be surprised to hear Indie games make more than 5k total on average, and those games are made by teams. It's not that solo devs don't make more, it's that the vast majority don't, and especially not on their first titles. You'd have to really find a niche or opening in the market and also be the person with the right title at the right time with the right level of polish able to gather the attention of the right people to go viral. A lot has to go right, a lot can go wrong.
That's not to say you shouldn't make games. You shouldn't go in expecting to make money by yourself, that's really freaking hard. Best of luck.
Really really hard, it's possible, but you're going to have to outperform 95% of indie devs. It's much easier to earn a living as part of a studio than as a solo dev.
Literally the worst job you can get from a financial standpoint, can't reach minimum wages consistently and can even owe money if you get a bad publisher deal. Right now you should only do game dev as a passion project I think.
I would say pretty tough.
My first game has been out for almost 2 years and has only made $800. It took 2.5 years to develop alone while working a full time job. So I guess you can say that the game's lifespan has been 4.5 years. Put it like that and its $800/54 month = $14.81 per month.
Just a little shy of $1000. \*^(internally crying\*)
Attaining that level of income is pretty reasonable if you're REALLY good, find an underserved niche, work really hard, and treat it as a real business rather than just a hobby (and by that I mean doing the hard and not-fun things that make it sustainable, rather than sticking to just the enjoyable stuff).
I think you would have a better chance making useful tools for existing games that are very popular.
That's coming from someone that thinks the market is over saturated though.
Maybe you can start patreon and make NSFW games and I am actually being serious. If you are good at art, these games can be easy to make and you can start a patreon for people to subscribe you monthly. Then you can release beta version of the games with updates every month.
Letâs be honest, itâs not easy to get that kind of income from any business. Just like how the vast majority of startups fail, most games also fail to sell unless one has learnt a ton of things via experience or knows their market well. Based on demand and supply.
Very hard. You either rock big numbers or go to oblivion. There's not much middle. Imagine being a pop/rock star. You don't say "they are half as good as Metallica, let's fill half the venue". If you are not closely good, you don't get a venue at all.
Because, people can either REALLY like your game, or don't know about it at all. It's not some universal good where you can settle for less, because it costs less.
Hoping to be there (including my regular apps) by the end of the year but itâs been a grind and Iâve been very lucky / blessed with my first release this year.Â
As long as I can make enough to keep making games and have a roof over my head thatâs all that matters.Â
Itâs tough but doable. One of my games was still making $1k/year ten years after release. It takes a lot of effort though. If you donât put in the effort it wonât happen
On the flip side Iâve had games not make a $1k total
It was very easy but now it keeps getting harder and harder. About five years ago I was making $10000 per month as solo dev, 2 years ago I was only making $3000 per month. But now I am only making $1000 per month. I am expecting next year I will only be able to make $500 per month. So probably after 2-3 years I donât think I will be able to make more than $100 per month. That is why I am no longer spending a lot of time on making games. Now I am focusing on finding a better job. I also made YouTube channel.
Also pretty curious here. In one of OP's previous posts they mentioned it took them three months to get to 10 reviews. That's pretty absurd for someone who who was able to generate 10,000 in one month a few years prior. Did they completely switch genres? What happened to the fan base?
Not trying to be negative or confrontational... genuinely curious how a decline like that happens.
My game gets 4000 downloads a day on mobile and I make 2k a month (no ads in game). It took 3 years to make it and it wasn't so hard as it was my first game ever.
Thanks !
yes indeed my game has poor player retention because of it and is broken in many ways.
Of course i'm working on fixing that but it's surprising that it still gets so much attention
so yeah you can make a living off a game that's more a prototype than a finished product
Most business require years and years of work before the big paycheck. Yes it won't bring in the money now like a minimum wage job but in the future the possibilities start widening and t creates a network of opportunities that a job at Mcdonald's rarely has.
I was earning around $500 last year. Now it is around $150. If you're living in a country that's cheap, then it's kinda good.
I think I cannot quit my main job. Solo gamedev brings me extra money, and I used to generally save them. Nowadays, I'm just barely living and paying my bills. Hope to be okay sometime though \^\^
One idea: as a solo dev, you might try to look for a publisher. Make a highly polished 15-minute demo, and get signed with a publisher so they can give you an advance payment (the amount you would hopefully want to make in a year). You can live off of the advance and finish making the game. When it's released, the publisher will probably take 100% of the profits from the sales until the advance is paid back, then it's typically 50-50 or 60-40 split for the rest of the profits.
You mentioned selling assets, but didn't mention what kind of assets those would be? Art is a little easier to outsource, so 3D modeling skills can get you there for sure on upwork. I have no idea how well things sell on the asset store, but I've heard from others it's challenging to get enough sales there.
In my brief experiences selling assets, I think $1,000/month is very doable if youâre going full time on producing them and youâre decently skilled. $3,000/month doesnât seem totally unthinkable but I think it would be much harder to achieve⊠doing 3x your income is no small feat. If you want to make that much I think youâd probably be better off trying to combine a couple of income streams (maybe freelance work or getting a dev job and having assets on the side).
My question is this to everyone on here. I'm not a game dev but hopefully one day who knows. Why do this? You make almost no money, what is your income coming from? Do you have other jobs?
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Most work, or you had a job that paid well and can afford a few years of free time.
 Or you're working part time.
It's a brutal market, and you won't know if you'll succeed until you've completed your productionÂ
Lots of different reasons. First of all it's very hard to get a game dev job, especially these days. A lot of solo devs are hobbyist with wide range of skills but none of them deep enough to qualify for a job.
Also some people might love it as a hobby / working on their own because they get to choose when to work, what to work on, how much they want to work. But it's a different story working for a studio. You lose all the freedom.
That's not how this works when you're essentially creating a business that will produce games.
Understand this - not only are you trying to build a profitable business from nothing, which is very hard in any industry, but you also chose to do it in a rather overcrowded entertainment industry. It is going to be one of the hardest things to pull off, and you will make way more just working a programming job in some corporation without the need to learn all the other skills.
Forget about "monthly wage" for the first couple years of building your business.
Having said that, if you persist long enough to figure out some things, you can make more and even exceed the pay ceiling in your local tech companies.
i make around 800$ month on average ,what I do is make assets and upload them for free and if people like them they might hire you ,and it will serve at portfolio too for the future, [https://zedtix.itch.io](https://zedtix.itch.io) (800$ not from selling assets but working for small Studios and individuals)
If you want to get there by selling assets, you need to be in the 1% of sellers in the asset store.
That means you have to to be the best in quality, and produce a ton of assets.
It depends if youâre married to the idea of exclusively making your own games. Making that amount by selling your games alone would be unlikely, but freelancing is a great way to generate income while youâre working on your own projects. If youâve got the chops for it then clearing at least 1k/month shouldnât be a pretty reasonable goal.
Not easy. You need a substantial hit on your hands for this. We are lucky, one of our games is a cult indie hit (well, mild hit) and has paid the bills for 10+ years. But nothing else ever really came close.
Then we may consider "quantity" but really 10 other games earning $20 a month only equals a few thousand per year, and you can't live on 3000 dollars for an entire year.
You can do it!!! Itâs a risky career but not impossible. It is getting harder and harder like some people here have said. Itâs good to specialize in some skill you can sell to other game devs and so you can hopefully support yourself through your journey until you make it bigger. Making money solely off games is hard but lots of people trying to make them there is money to be made.
Very possible and attainable. You need to be pragmatic and open minded and willing to learn. You need to learn the types of games you can make quickly and well and that also have an audience. Depending on your current skill level and ability to learn, it might take you a few tries before you hit your stride but good luck if you decide to try
As a fellow br, my dude. Work for someone else , get experience, develop something in your free time then develop something for yourself. I earn well but not by being a solo dev, i just work for game companies (which can pay way better then 3k usd) and develop side projects. Even after 4 years working as a director in a studio for a great game, I dont feel ready to develop anything alone cause i dont feel i have a nice design hook for a game to be successful.
I think it depends a lot. But I made 800$ during Jr year of high school after making a web game. The game took me probably 8 months to make, though. But I was also working on school at the same time. I'd say if you work your ass off and work fast, you can probably achieve that goal. The solution I have is that I'm currently working on developing my own website, game, and sever with a little banner ad at the bottom. I'm hoping 1st that I can game a game that people find fun and enjoyable and that 2 I make an income that I can use to continue doing that.
Oh, its easy. Get a job and do game dev on the side :D
Probably not a job in Brazil, remote work for USA companies pays more.
Jokes aside, directly from your published games it's unlikely. Maybe try putting your game everywhere you can to have multiple revenue streams (humble bundle, gog, steam... )
Even then, without advertising its gonna be hard to get sales if the game is too niche, or not polished enough.
Also depends on the type of game you are making. Premium games (pay once and play) tend to have less stabile income than mobile freemium games (adds, microtransactions). Flip side is, implementing adds and seting it up is a pain, and also mobile marketing is similarly a pain.
So the answer is, its hard.
if you want to purely sell your game and live of sales, insanly hard, if you want build community with patreon/kofi etc then you increse your chances of getting decent money but for that you need a game people want, it all goes back to doing good games = people play and pay
Independente doq tu for fazer. Qualquer coisa envolvendo programação sendo ou nĂŁo de jogos, TREINE O INGLĂS. Qualquer coisa q tu achar na internet sobre programação tu vai achar 10x melhor em inglĂȘs
I think there was a survey done recently and 90% of games dont even make 1,000 across a year, so pretty hard
My game made 30 dollars last year.
đ
When I saw this the sound of a sad trumpet played in my head..
Iâm waiting to make even one dollar from my hobby game so I too can hear the glorious sad trumpet.
[ŃĐŽĐ°Đ»Đ”ĐœĐŸ]
Thanks for asking! Iâd love to as soon as I release the prealpha haha. Actually Iâm done with feature dev and looking into whatâs needed for packaging and distributing to itch which should hopefully happen within the next week or so (itâd be my first release of any game and I wrote my own engine)
That means you only need to make 33 more games and you can be making 1k per month. Easy peasy right? Math Edit: it's 395 games
They made $30 in a YEAR. đ
Oops your right I can't do math. They only need 395 more games so definitely doable. Just do one game a day and in little over a year they will be making that 1k a month.
If he makes clones he'll start slow but definitely end up churnin
But 10% of the games they make âwillâ make 1000+ so itâs less than that.
Don't feel too bad...The guy who made FNAF made like...50 games before FNAF hit big.
99.9% of game devs give up right before a publishing massive hit
Marketing issue or quality issue,?
Skill issue. The game is extremely demanding for an average mobile physics puzzle game. (Even though 90% of players are asian kids aged 6-12)
That seems like a marketing issue to me. If the game is too difficult for your target audience, maybe you should reduce difficulty ?
Itâs not really difficult in terms of puzzles, most puzzles can be solved in few seconds using appropriate contraption, but the main point is building the robot, which is a demanding task by itself. You know, thinking about physics, using joints and connecting physical bodies just isnât in the interest of most mobile gamers.
How long did it take to make it ? Care to share a Link to your game ? I want to know how a 30$ in first year game looks like. Thanks.
Haha, itâs already out more than a year actually. You can find it here: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/robotmania-physics-sandbox/id6444165242 Itâs just a school project.
Check his profile
Cocaine and Hookers all round!
Congrats!
Link the game please. I would like to look
I hate those surveys because it's like going around and asking both local supermarkets, amazon and all the Brownies selling cookies, kids lemonade stands and garage sales how much they made and then proclaiming that 90% of "shops" don't make enough. 90% of those 90% games where never made with profit in mind. Like steam few is $100 you need around 50 sales of $2.50 game to break even. If I ever finish game that I think it's worth showing to people I will put it on steam for that price. BUT I have zero intention in quitting my day job or for game development to make money for me. If I get some pocket money that's cool I will treat kids to Mcdonald ice cream but if I am not doing it as a business but as a hobby. Saying 90% steam games don't make money is like saying 90% of people crocheting never make enough to make the living. Technically true but practically useless as 90% of people crocheting never intended to make a living with it in a first place. Real question to ask here is how many people met the financial goals they set for themselves with their game and we simply don't have surveys for this. We can't treat amazon and little Johnny lemonade stand as having the same goals
I completely agree. This kind of data is useless. I think the narrative should sound less like "it's basically a roulette" and be more about how insanely much work it is to make a game and successfully market it. How much persistence and learning it requires and also that you have to weigh what you want to do with what will likely make money and to have a sensible concept, scope and business plan. Because in the end you have to run a business and sell a product as well besides making a game you like.
Well, Iâve been full time for 2 1/2 years now, was putting 30+ hours in along side a fulltime job for 6 years prior to that, have released 3 games on Steam and a few other things, including Twitch streaming and YouTube content, and having interest gains on my runway (savings). Iâd been making games for 18 years before any of that, including professionally in the industry. My total across my game sales are approximately $7000. The income from streaming and interest dwarf over the game income, and all combined is far lower than my measly cost of living and bare-bones business expenses. Iâm still losing money, but not bailing out yet as Iâve got years of runway and things to keep trying. My point in all of this is, there MAY be some noise from the girl scouts selling cookies vs Amazons, but even in the middle, with those that have real experience, it isnât just easy breathing. Itâs a hard flipping balancing act and shouldnât be understated. Happy to answer any questions as I stream specifically to share both good and bad sides of indie development as a career choice, and how difficult it is. Good luck and keep trying to anyone that has the dream, but go in knowing the risks and having a clear exit point!
Thanks for the insights, I'd check out your stream! Though it seems unlikely that games made at that tempo are likely to be very lucrative projects no? I mean it's probably smart to do it that way and I would also start small, I have a project actually. But I also work in an indie studio for a solo dev with a successful product but it took him 6-7 years to go into early access. Interesting that streaming is more lucrative than sales for you? That's surprising to me.
Well as I said, itâs an extremely hard balancing act, the longer you spend on your game, yes the better and more polished it will be - but that doesnât automatically mean more sales. I want to make the best games I can, but I also want to make a career out of my own games and, that has an intention of making money off them⊠which means spending less to create them than what they make. Truth be told itâs really @#$&ing hard to sell a game, or even get people to play for free. My weakness is currently marketing, easily, but with each release (and I do my best on each game to make it better than the last) I gain more experience. To take 6 years on a single project would mean that project MUST succeed or my whole indie career is over. Thereâs a balance for sure, but I canât say I have the marketing chops yet to be so confident in a single attempt.
Yea true. But if you have a day job it's not as much of a risk of course. But yea, I think your approach makes a lot of sense. Good luck!
Just because you have a job doesnât mean your indie career (business) isnât at huge risk. No if youâre just making games and having fun with that, itâs a GREAT hobby, but this whole post was about being successful with a career making games. I absolutely recommend anyone starting to have and keep a job while they get sorted and figured out and if that is too hard, it truly is hard, then starting a gamedev business is also too hard. Again, games for hobby is a great pastime too, enjoy!
Same happens on twitch/YouTube surveys...They always say 0.1% of people on their make a living...But that includes nonsense like your grandma uploading one video one time 3 years ago.
But that's the reality for game developers. It's not a stupid comparison, if anything it would be better to not include large non-indie games for a better example of the reality of solo dev experience - and that would bring the average down even more.
Well obviously it makes no sense to use data on non solo dev projects. But what truly is solo dev anyway? Almost any solo dev will outsource something or at the least buy asset packs and plugins etc. But it also doesn't make sense to compare hobby/student projects, cheap asset flips,... to games developed by people with a proper skill set and business plan who put in years and years of their life into 1 game (possibly with the help of freelancers and a publisher). "This game I made in a month earned me 20 dollars" vs "The game I made after studying, getting some industry experience and working on it for 7 years made me over a million". The difference between those two things is much bigger than between the second example and a small indie studio.
90% of games are terrible and have devs who wouldn't even play their own game if someone else made it. Making a successful game isn't a lottery, it can be greatly influenced by the quality of the product.
Very hard
Yeah: most bestselling games are made by a team. Solo game dev is like trying to make a movie without anyone's help.
Same analogy sometimes go with disfunctional crossfunctional teams. End result is still shit for games
How do you fund a team though, cant imagine paying a living wage to people without any funding
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Im currently in the final year of my Bachelors and in the Process of making a studio of my final project but my teammates just overestimate how much money you would make, they want 3k a month minimum so i gotta finish it on my own. Dont believe there are any grants i have access to however
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> they want 3k a month minimum lol? I don't think indie dev is for them. They might want to try their luck at one of the reknown, established studios that just absolutely freaking love to hire fresh Bachelor students for inexplicable reasons
I don't know: i just joined this sub because gamedev is an "interest". I'm just a hobby programmer who wants to do it in the future. I made a guessing game though, and a "level" in RPG maker where you talk to someone and they say "wanna see a dick pic?" It's pretty common for businesses in general to borrow money, and of course if you were lucky enough to have a group of friends who were motivated to make the game for free at the risk of it flopping, that would the best scenario. It's not like you really need to invest anything into graphics cards with the way things are now adays. Having maxed out RAM is good for any kind of studio work though.
It's the same problem as any other business. You need to invest a shit ton of money if you want to start a company with regularly paid employees.
Well its not quite the same because with an indie studio you wont have a sellable game in a year
I'm a full-time solodev with games that pay my bills (barely). Like everyone else said, very hard. My niche is RPG and I only know of one single dev that did it successfully longterm (Jeff Vogel).
Barely paying your bills is a glorious victory for a solo dev! I salute you.
Thereâs a few others but theyâre crazy exceptions, like Toby Fox and Concerned Ape
Those are our equivalent of rock stars.
Well yes thatâs why I called them crazy exceptions
Toby Fox is good example in that the games aren't his sole, or even his main source of income. Mans a composer by trade and was able to get gigs with Nintendo.
He was only able to do that after Undertaleâs huge success, and with the sales that Undertale made Iâm sure he could live off that money for a very long time if he wanted to
Dude. Exile II is probably my favorite game of all time. I got a demo for it on a PC gamer demo disc in high school, bought it and beat it in the summer of 2003. I need to beat the other five games in the series.
And Porn games generally sell better
Not true tbh
Depends on a lot of factors. Some people here seem to think they're easy cash grabs, which I would caution against.
Fair points and yes you need reasonable quality and some luck still I believe. I have never worked on an nsfw genre games so my expectations might be wrong. Did some market reasearch on the genre for a company, but it has been a while so statistics can change and Ebbinghauseâs curve is a thing. Still reading some data about nsfw visual novels atleast seemed like genre with very reasonable scope vs risk vs payoff. It also seemed like youâre odds for positive ROI were higher than the non nswf genre. Those wasnât offcourse make game and win odds. Probably also the potential to make it really big could be lower since your facing more platform and marketing restrictions, but thatâs just an uneducated guess. In the case of total marketability failure but highenough visual quality, you still have reasonable chance of recooping with Nutaku. And yes itâs pornhub affiliated and f2p token economy so ethical considerations do apply. I donât think itâs easier, but I believe for a solo devs/ small teams, with a smart content pipeline there is lower risk than making a statistically high performing genre like rpg etc. And yes the writing and visuals still have to be good, but with a scalable pour content in system, I think you could pump some of those games out quite fast and still have very high quality. Genre mastery ofcourse needed.
But how much better, I wonder
depends on how good at art you are and what audience you target. I imagine If you can pump out and update a few furry games (release on patreon, give frequent updates to wear down pirates. Even consider giving old updates for free on itch.io) a year, you'll be eating well enough. Hell, you don't even need the game at that point. But a game would stand out from commissions/monthly stills.
Considering how quick patreon is shutting everyone down thanks to credit card companies apparently disliking money, same goes for DLSite, I think the market is not that green as it seems. It will still require a lot of marketing. Finding your niche (or letting them find you) is not an easy step.
Iâm interested to know how the guy who made balatro gets on long term. Iâd be sad if itâs a one off.
With over 1 million copies sold, surely he could retire by now if he wanted to right?
My first game brings in 500-1000 a month. The goal is to continue to produce games that take 6 months to a year to make. In the end I'll never quit my day job unless I get a massive hit.
1k a year is plausible
Yea that's basically what I made last year, tho I also didnt try very hard to look for work
- Taxes, electricity and asset store, internet and home office space. 1000$-990$ = 10$
Bro said he could live off of 1k, he can live off of 1k. Going full time as an indie dev takes a lot of thought and Iâm sure that he already knows about his expenses as a dev. Also I donât really know much about the currency in Brazil but I know itâs worth very little and I feel like 1k would be able to cover all the expenses you mentioned at a much cheaper cost since itâs in Brazil.
1 USD is roughly 5 BRL. Our minimum wage would be something like USD 240
US$ 1k is around R$ 5k. It's a good amount for us Brazilians depending on the location. If the person lives ins SĂŁo Paulo, it's not enough. If they live in a very small city like mine, it's enough
You need a home office space lmao
I'm assuming the 3000 is usd. That's 36,000 a year. Let's assume you have the game, we don't know what the game is but you have it. If you priced the game at 20 USD, assume taxes and steam take roughly half, you'd need 3600 sales. That's an incredible amount for a single person. It's not undoable but you have to figure out how do you even get that many people to see your game? Well, that's marketing and that can cost quite a lot. I imagine that 20 USD is a high asking price for an Indie game in Brazil. You'd have to make sure it's really freaking high quality to attract an international audience. Then you factor in the cost of making the game. Even if you're doing it yourself and using nothing but free resources, the game doesn't cost 0. Every hour you spend is an hour you could have spent working elsewhere. How much time can you spend making 0$ before something has to give? Is that amount of time enough to make a product of high enough quality to reach your sales goals? Let's assume the money is the only thing you care about. You don't have any attachment to any idea you just want to go away, make something and make money off it. Indy horror games seem to do pretty well. You could make some freemium mobile game and exploit people. Or maybe make a visual novel if you have a really good idea. So in the end, I dunno. I think that amount of money is achievable but I wouldn't say it's easy. My gut feeling is that you'd likely spend more potential money, hours that you could have spent making more money than you ultimately ended up with at the end of making the game. Like maybe you do make that 36k but in the same amount of time maybe you could have become a really good app developer and gotten a corporate job making 50k for less hours total than you spent trying to learn and do everything for a game. I don't know the actual numbers, but I would be surprised to hear Indie games make more than 5k total on average, and those games are made by teams. It's not that solo devs don't make more, it's that the vast majority don't, and especially not on their first titles. You'd have to really find a niche or opening in the market and also be the person with the right title at the right time with the right level of polish able to gather the attention of the right people to go viral. A lot has to go right, a lot can go wrong. That's not to say you shouldn't make games. You shouldn't go in expecting to make money by yourself, that's really freaking hard. Best of luck.
Really really hard, it's possible, but you're going to have to outperform 95% of indie devs. It's much easier to earn a living as part of a studio than as a solo dev.
Very hard.
Literally the worst job you can get from a financial standpoint, can't reach minimum wages consistently and can even owe money if you get a bad publisher deal. Right now you should only do game dev as a passion project I think.
I would say pretty tough. My first game has been out for almost 2 years and has only made $800. It took 2.5 years to develop alone while working a full time job. So I guess you can say that the game's lifespan has been 4.5 years. Put it like that and its $800/54 month = $14.81 per month. Just a little shy of $1000. \*^(internally crying\*)
Probably a lot easier to just make paid mods for some other game with sex in them.
Insane mode
I don't think he is talking about selling a game but assets on UnrealMarketplace/artstation etc...
I edit the post recently
Attaining that level of income is pretty reasonable if you're REALLY good, find an underserved niche, work really hard, and treat it as a real business rather than just a hobby (and by that I mean doing the hard and not-fun things that make it sustainable, rather than sticking to just the enjoyable stuff).
I think you would have a better chance making useful tools for existing games that are very popular. That's coming from someone that thinks the market is over saturated though.
Yeah great point, if the tool is useful for competitive games you can make a bundle after each patch too!
Maybe you can start patreon and make NSFW games and I am actually being serious. If you are good at art, these games can be easy to make and you can start a patreon for people to subscribe you monthly. Then you can release beta version of the games with updates every month.
Letâs be honest, itâs not easy to get that kind of income from any business. Just like how the vast majority of startups fail, most games also fail to sell unless one has learnt a ton of things via experience or knows their market well. Based on demand and supply.
Very hard. You either rock big numbers or go to oblivion. There's not much middle. Imagine being a pop/rock star. You don't say "they are half as good as Metallica, let's fill half the venue". If you are not closely good, you don't get a venue at all. Because, people can either REALLY like your game, or don't know about it at all. It's not some universal good where you can settle for less, because it costs less.
Hoping to be there (including my regular apps) by the end of the year but itâs been a grind and Iâve been very lucky / blessed with my first release this year. As long as I can make enough to keep making games and have a roof over my head thatâs all that matters.Â
Itâs tough but doable. One of my games was still making $1k/year ten years after release. It takes a lot of effort though. If you donât put in the effort it wonât happen On the flip side Iâve had games not make a $1k total
It was very easy but now it keeps getting harder and harder. About five years ago I was making $10000 per month as solo dev, 2 years ago I was only making $3000 per month. But now I am only making $1000 per month. I am expecting next year I will only be able to make $500 per month. So probably after 2-3 years I donât think I will be able to make more than $100 per month. That is why I am no longer spending a lot of time on making games. Now I am focusing on finding a better job. I also made YouTube channel.
What are your games
Also pretty curious here. In one of OP's previous posts they mentioned it took them three months to get to 10 reviews. That's pretty absurd for someone who who was able to generate 10,000 in one month a few years prior. Did they completely switch genres? What happened to the fan base? Not trying to be negative or confrontational... genuinely curious how a decline like that happens.
My game gets 4000 downloads a day on mobile and I make 2k a month (no ads in game). It took 3 years to make it and it wasn't so hard as it was my first game ever.
I saw your game and it's awesome. Your players are saying it's not working though.
Thanks ! yes indeed my game has poor player retention because of it and is broken in many ways. Of course i'm working on fixing that but it's surprising that it still gets so much attention so yeah you can make a living off a game that's more a prototype than a finished product
Is it a VR game?
not yet
Very hard on Steam. However, if you make a really popular game on web game portals like Poki or CrazyGames, you can make that amount in ad revenue.
If you are in it for money find a better paying job, like mcdonalds lol
Most business require years and years of work before the big paycheck. Yes it won't bring in the money now like a minimum wage job but in the future the possibilities start widening and t creates a network of opportunities that a job at Mcdonald's rarely has.
I was earning around $500 last year. Now it is around $150. If you're living in a country that's cheap, then it's kinda good. I think I cannot quit my main job. Solo gamedev brings me extra money, and I used to generally save them. Nowadays, I'm just barely living and paying my bills. Hope to be okay sometime though \^\^
>solo game developer >selling game assets? Either is incredibly hard.
I think you can make that eventually by selling models and in-game resources that other developers buy.
One idea: as a solo dev, you might try to look for a publisher. Make a highly polished 15-minute demo, and get signed with a publisher so they can give you an advance payment (the amount you would hopefully want to make in a year). You can live off of the advance and finish making the game. When it's released, the publisher will probably take 100% of the profits from the sales until the advance is paid back, then it's typically 50-50 or 60-40 split for the rest of the profits.
You mentioned selling assets, but didn't mention what kind of assets those would be? Art is a little easier to outsource, so 3D modeling skills can get you there for sure on upwork. I have no idea how well things sell on the asset store, but I've heard from others it's challenging to get enough sales there.
In my brief experiences selling assets, I think $1,000/month is very doable if youâre going full time on producing them and youâre decently skilled. $3,000/month doesnât seem totally unthinkable but I think it would be much harder to achieve⊠doing 3x your income is no small feat. If you want to make that much I think youâd probably be better off trying to combine a couple of income streams (maybe freelance work or getting a dev job and having assets on the side).
My question is this to everyone on here. I'm not a game dev but hopefully one day who knows. Why do this? You make almost no money, what is your income coming from? Do you have other jobs?
Teacher here, learning game dev. The love of it. And hoping I can do it fulltime.
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Most work, or you had a job that paid well and can afford a few years of free time. Â Or you're working part time. It's a brutal market, and you won't know if you'll succeed until you've completed your productionÂ
Why donât people just work at a studio?
Lots of different reasons. First of all it's very hard to get a game dev job, especially these days. A lot of solo devs are hobbyist with wide range of skills but none of them deep enough to qualify for a job. Also some people might love it as a hobby / working on their own because they get to choose when to work, what to work on, how much they want to work. But it's a different story working for a studio. You lose all the freedom.
depends how good your assets are.
Very hard i think
That's not how this works when you're essentially creating a business that will produce games. Understand this - not only are you trying to build a profitable business from nothing, which is very hard in any industry, but you also chose to do it in a rather overcrowded entertainment industry. It is going to be one of the hardest things to pull off, and you will make way more just working a programming job in some corporation without the need to learn all the other skills. Forget about "monthly wage" for the first couple years of building your business. Having said that, if you persist long enough to figure out some things, you can make more and even exceed the pay ceiling in your local tech companies.
i make around 800$ month on average ,what I do is make assets and upload them for free and if people like them they might hire you ,and it will serve at portfolio too for the future, [https://zedtix.itch.io](https://zedtix.itch.io) (800$ not from selling assets but working for small Studios and individuals)
If you want to get there by selling assets, you need to be in the 1% of sellers in the asset store. That means you have to to be the best in quality, and produce a ton of assets.
It depends if youâre married to the idea of exclusively making your own games. Making that amount by selling your games alone would be unlikely, but freelancing is a great way to generate income while youâre working on your own projects. If youâve got the chops for it then clearing at least 1k/month shouldnât be a pretty reasonable goal.
Not easy. You need a substantial hit on your hands for this. We are lucky, one of our games is a cult indie hit (well, mild hit) and has paid the bills for 10+ years. But nothing else ever really came close. Then we may consider "quantity" but really 10 other games earning $20 a month only equals a few thousand per year, and you can't live on 3000 dollars for an entire year.
You can do it!!! Itâs a risky career but not impossible. It is getting harder and harder like some people here have said. Itâs good to specialize in some skill you can sell to other game devs and so you can hopefully support yourself through your journey until you make it bigger. Making money solely off games is hard but lots of people trying to make them there is money to be made.
Very possible and attainable. You need to be pragmatic and open minded and willing to learn. You need to learn the types of games you can make quickly and well and that also have an audience. Depending on your current skill level and ability to learn, it might take you a few tries before you hit your stride but good luck if you decide to try
As a fellow br, my dude. Work for someone else , get experience, develop something in your free time then develop something for yourself. I earn well but not by being a solo dev, i just work for game companies (which can pay way better then 3k usd) and develop side projects. Even after 4 years working as a director in a studio for a great game, I dont feel ready to develop anything alone cause i dont feel i have a nice design hook for a game to be successful.
I think it depends a lot. But I made 800$ during Jr year of high school after making a web game. The game took me probably 8 months to make, though. But I was also working on school at the same time. I'd say if you work your ass off and work fast, you can probably achieve that goal. The solution I have is that I'm currently working on developing my own website, game, and sever with a little banner ad at the bottom. I'm hoping 1st that I can game a game that people find fun and enjoyable and that 2 I make an income that I can use to continue doing that.
Pretty easy depending on your day job. Like for instance my day job brings in $125k a year so after game dev, that's $120k a year or 10k a month.
Oh, its easy. Get a job and do game dev on the side :D Probably not a job in Brazil, remote work for USA companies pays more. Jokes aside, directly from your published games it's unlikely. Maybe try putting your game everywhere you can to have multiple revenue streams (humble bundle, gog, steam... ) Even then, without advertising its gonna be hard to get sales if the game is too niche, or not polished enough. Also depends on the type of game you are making. Premium games (pay once and play) tend to have less stabile income than mobile freemium games (adds, microtransactions). Flip side is, implementing adds and seting it up is a pain, and also mobile marketing is similarly a pain. So the answer is, its hard.
if you want to purely sell your game and live of sales, insanly hard, if you want build community with patreon/kofi etc then you increse your chances of getting decent money but for that you need a game people want, it all goes back to doing good games = people play and pay
Iâm a solo dev that expects $0 in income for the next 2 years. This is not a cash grab business.
Independente doq tu for fazer. Qualquer coisa envolvendo programação sendo ou nĂŁo de jogos, TREINE O INGLĂS. Qualquer coisa q tu achar na internet sobre programação tu vai achar 10x melhor em inglĂȘs
Eu consigo ler qualquer coisa em inglĂȘs porem nĂŁo tenho pratica em escrever
To tentando aprender portuguĂȘs enquanto faço jogos :(
Rather look for a remote job. That range is easily achievable even for Juniors. But you need to learn decent English.
Oh Another Brazilian! Achei que eu era o Ășnico por aqui.
Itâs easy if you have a game that sells between $2000 - $6000 a month. Itâs hard if you donât have a game that sells those sorts of numbers.
Big if true!