As per request of @aliceingameland I’m making this thread.
//edit: @aliceingameland asked me to add the following:
This thread is for people to discuss all the various biz related topics that have to do with being a successful dev.
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Cool thread, bro.
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I can’t say much about game dev business. But I can talk about YouTube a little of that helps.
What has surprised me most is that the majority of revenue has come from two or three videos. These videos have more views then the rest combined. It’s been an interesting exercise tracking down exactly what it was with those ones. Here is my list of reasons.
- The information in them is poorly explained in the docs
- The titles very clearly relate to the content
- The videos show how to do a single task well
In terms of monetisation I’ve made somewhere around $2 per thousand views. Interestingly this is about the same amount I make off of web games, $2 per thousand plays. I’d be curious to see if anyone else’s numbers are significantly different.
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Quoted before you fix it. 
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I have little to contribute other than start with world famous ip, make good game, and launch in time with a blockbuster movie using the same ip.
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If anyone has any questions about the adult video game business, I’ll be happy to lead you in the wrong direction.
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Where do baby orcs come from?
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The Atari ST orc brings them.
my god, did I really just make that joke? Really? I need a drink.
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Let me get my notepad, this sound like solid advice!
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All I can say is, treat game development the same way you would treat a small business. You need to plan and budget your product, learn how to market it, learn how to progress through the initial stages of financial loss, so on and so forth. It’s really not that hard, it comes down to attitude.
The problem is, so many people think that creating a successful game is a purely emotional act like falling in love. You just sit there fiddling around until the cupid shoots an arrow and the divine light of artistic inspiration shines on you and you get swept away into a fairytale. And the very act of attempting to achieve it by rational means makes you a coldhearted, soulless creature trying to upset the balance of the universe.
All the while though, these colhearted, soulless creatures are raking in billions of dollars making great games that people enjoy playing.
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Out of curiosity, how do you market these? I see on steam there is a “nudity” tag, but isn’t marketing and distributing these more complicated than your average platformer or whatever?
This needs to be a forum, not a thread.
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Yes it’s better served as a forum. I don’t think anyone is going to take this thread seriously.
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You know how other games are marketed? Not like that.
Most assuredly so.
Just here to say I’m not taking this thread seriously. 
If folks can demonstrate that there would be enough serious activity on biz topics to warrant its own board, then cool, board get. However, so far, this thread hasn’t really done a great job of providing evidence to support it. I’ll leave this as a pin for a while longer to see if it can find its feet but we might have to call this a failed experiment for the time being.
I’ll use this op to ask a few questions as well to gauge interest.
How many of you would actually like to see (and participate in) a biz board? What types of topics would you discuss there?
If you have one, please link to a recent thread you engaged with that you feel would have fit nicely on a biz board.
thanks all x
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For me it’s much less about participating than about having a place where I could easily find available information without really knowing what to look out for - common pitfalls etc., things I wouldn’t think of. Whether that is a sticky thread or a sub forum I don’t really care.
If you want to un-sticky a thread to make space, I suggest the “Unity 5 Officially Available via Torrent! Please Tell Us What You Think!” because that one is pretty dead and useless for more people imho.
As to why this one hasn’t really taken off, I suspect it’s because it was created to be a sticky and didn’t evolve into one. Imho it would have worked out a lot better if we had waited till we have an ongoing 5+ page thread, sticky that and edit the OP to make clear it’s a general thread now. Same would go for a subforum. If you make one now it would be mostly awkward silence and maybe 2 or 3 threads I suspect. If we had 10+ active threads about biz topics here, those could be moved into a newly created subforum and act as critical mass to keep it going.
I think this has more to do with this thread being ~80% trolling (to which I’ve contributed), than this being a thread instead of a forum. It is a thread started without a question and without a topic that can be easily argued about, of course it goes nowhere.
Maybe someone can search for the most relevant thread that could be necroed, revitalized and stickied in place of this one? I haven’t looked, but I’m pretty sure you’ve had good discussions about related topics before, that would instantly be more useful as a sticky than this thread.
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Me, I’d be there sharing my findings.
Marketing, Unity Analytics, UnityAds, 3rd Party Ads, Upsell, DLC, Pricing, Markets to sell in, Sales Data and more. It’d be by far the most useful forum on this entire site, for pretty much everyone. Pretty much everyone wants to know about selling if they’re spending.
[quote]
If you have one, please link to a recent thread you engaged with that you feel would have fit nicely on a biz board.
[/quote]There’s a few scattered around the forums. The problem is, nobody knows where to put them. It’s all in snippets of advice, much which I’ve given people myself.
[quote=“aliceingameland, post:17, topic: 625842, username:aliceingameland”]
we might have to call this a failed experiment for the time being
[/quote]To be brutally honest, I feel stickying a thread by a member who’s attacked moderators on twitter and is known for his inflammatory comments, would hardly ever warrant any other outcome.
I think in this case it’s a case of build it and they will come, that’s my 2p. And a sticky in general is a pretty hard to survive place. General is where the gremlins come out at night.
Importantly for Unity, there’s much opportunity for Unity’s own Analytics and ads to feature, which can only be a good thing.
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I think it’s pretty obvious that it’s important enough to have its own section regardless of what happens on this thread, no one will disagree that biz is the bottom part of the iceberg. I also agree the thread wasn’t set up very well. There was no one really appointed to start the ball rolling and guide it, maybe someone from Unity could/should have set the tone for the first couple of pages?
Also, biz is a sore point for a lot of devs from what I’ve seen, we often hate the whole topic and want it to go away, and find it hard to discuss the topic without starting a dispute about whether such and such a biz practice is undermining the game industry and is against the spirit of game development. We all want to make it in a haze of glory based solely on our artistic talent. So just starting a thread on biz is hardly going to make any progress.
So I vote for the UT to make a board, hang around to help us through the trauma of the first few threads and then leave it from there.
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