It has recently occurred to me that only a fraction of developers on here have managed to make games full time and generating good income from it while the majority on here are either making games for fun, just hoping to get lucky, or trying hard but not making income or even downloads.
For the devs here who are in that small category who have managed to replace and surpass their income from their full-time job with game making, I wonder if any of you would like to share your experience, process, âsecretsâ, with the rest of the community. Iâm sure the success stories will be very enlightening to most!
Mine is not a success story yet, But I am going into it. I still didnât make money from my game as I didnât release it yet, but I will just say what I have, my name is Ebrahim (Known as Eth) and I ran my indie game studio The State studio at the year 2013, and I managed to get our game (with my team mateâs help of course) to the quallity of the indie games outside my country, In Egypt(where I am right now) there are no kind of support to indie game developers or even programmers, they always think that what you do is stupid, there are a lot of games that has been made from Egyptians but most of it failed (and by games I donât mean mobile/small games), but me and my studio are hoping not to fail in gaming industry. I know I know, you have asked to know âa success storyâ but a person can get success in his life without having to have âincomes or even downloadsâ so to finish it up, if you want to be successful then just do what you have to do and do what you are born to do, even if you had no money/income from your game. you are still a god damn successful developer in my eyes. so I would agree with Yash. There is no secret for success and an other thing to add âThere are no rules for successâ .
If you look you can find article(s) by successful indies like Edmund McMillen (super meat boy, binding of issac) or toby fox (undertale), Rami Ismail seems to be very talkative (nuclear throne, super crate box, etc), I am sure there are other articles.
Iâve made enough monies to buy some licenses and buy a lot of Asset Store packages.
I bought Unity 3 Pro with both iOS + Android Pro, then Unity 4 Pro + iOS + Android then Unity 5 and hundreds of model packages from Asset Store all with little games and tools I was selling. I wouldnât call that success, but at least was able to âafford buying the toysâ I like to play with.
Back when ppl were still paying 0.99¢ in mobile games, I sold around 23k copies and the free stuff were around 60k downloads⌠And thatâs all about it for me, is impossible for me to even sell a 0.99¢ game nowadays, I donât want to make InApp games so I was trying to move into PC instead.
Oh and the tools Iâve made sold around 3k copies in Asset Store; but then I had a legal battle with former employer (they didnât respect laws and I had to leave) and now they own all my ex games and ex tools; still trying to figure what Iâll do with my life now =]
Now that F2P is the only way to make money I think I wonât make any games anymore, just donât like the model.
!!! Thatâs actually terrible! How does that happen?
Also what do you mean you canât make games that sell for $.99 anymore?
My hope for you would be that you could use your experience to get more involved in game development. Because itâs also what I wish I could accomplish. If you canât do it after years of experience, then almost no one can.
I hope you get back on your feet soon man.
Many companies, when you work for them, they own everything you do even if you do it at home in your free time. Youâll see that in contract pretty much every time you work for a business; thatâs why they own all my stuff now.
I meant there that paid games donât sell anymore, even the 0.99¢ ones. Ppl now want F2P or nothing and I donât agree with that.
When I left my job, I talked to a bunch of studios, also some high profile ones⌠But I live in South America, they donât want to deal with visas and Iâm not sure if I would leave my family behind for too long.
So Iâm working online freelancing small tasks for small studios and will keep doing that for a while.
At least freelance work can give you versatility to invest time in personal projects.
Too bad that paid games are getting ignored by users. I would also prefer sell games traditionally, but failing that my very personal opinion I would try to adapt and find a way to mske f2p with iaps/ads that hurts the game as little as possible.
Well say you had a demo on Kong and you sold the full version on your site at $10 a pop, with a sales conversion rate of 3% at 700k plays you could get like 21K customers at 10 a pop 210k. And you wouldnât have to give steam 30%
I was 2 years, more than 100k code lines into my first PC game when had to give it all away to the company;
Was called Whitewash, there was a 2gb pre-alpha on Steam, some Steam users still have a copy in their libs, I was about to release the 6gb first upgrade with more regions and story⌠When the shit happened.
Btw, PC will be the same of mobile market pretty soon tbh. I am watching Shinra Tech, they have stuff I want to get involved with when their API is indie friendly enough.
Compared to the amount of devâs out there, yeah sure it is only a tiny fraction⌠But many arenât interested in the commercial aspect of it, thereâs many who will never complete a game etc. etc.
There were many successful indieâs back when Steam decided to open the floodgates, of course thatâs not a thing anymore⌠Iâve never paid any attention to mobile dev, but Iâd guess it was lucrative at some pointâŚ
I know of a fair few âcurrentâ betaâs that have earned a lot of funding / moneyâŚ
It has nothing to do with gloom and doom. Most people arenât full time game developers, rather âin your spare, spare timeâ developers. Meaning if thereâs a hot new game out, theyâre playing that. Tiny little mobile games are o.k. but they arenât worth anything, to anyone.
Make a 50 hour game with an interesting story and genuinely fun gameplay that is somewhat polished. People buy that.
Itâs not about optimism/pessimism itâs about people with beginner level skills making âmy first game!â and then complaining about how the market is broken because they arenât rich. I may not be the best game developer on the planet, but I grew up playing games and I can tell what games I wanted to play vs. what I didnât. And these tiny scope little mobile games have more in common with Tiger Electronics junk than they do with Super Mario Bros. Just because Tiger made a lot of cash selling crappy little blip bleep games doesnât mean thatâs what the people want. It was a novelty.
Nothing at all to do with gloom and doom. Itâs just not plausible for a spare time developer making toy games to compete with a serious, full-time or even part-time developer making fully featured, full-length games.
this is the kind of developer that make me sick, he release something like 200 games and flowed the market with crappy games from template wich by the way i own, and use copyright assets that he doesn t even own, i believe he s a full time job and he s fine with it, the app store really need some cleaning to make discovery less painfull than it is right now
Ha. âYou wanna make games? Step one: get yourself few millions usdâ.
Interesting story and fun gameplay does not mean anyone will buy your game and working fulltime wonât guarantee you success. There ARE tons of games on older platforms, often those can be more polished than modern indies. The thing most people donât even know they exist.
Which has nothing to do with the conversation we are having, even in the most abstract, convoluted way I can imagine.
Nobody knows the company I worked at for 12 years existed. In the time I worked there I made nearly a half a million dollars, the company made millions. Youâre confusing being famous with making money. Itâs not one in the same.
mmm⌠I guess if you are doing everything wrong and not investing time and resources in a logical way, or if you just arenât very good or very experienced at making games in general, then yes⌠yes this is very true.
But if you have skills and talent, working fulltime actually does guarantee success⌠at anything. Not just game development.
Honestly, you just sound like youâre trying to justify failure by saying that success has nothing to do with being good at making games.
Look at the OP, he made something people wanted and replaced his old income.
According to you, he did not succeed because nobody knows he exists⌠not only did he not succeed, he canât succeed⌠itâs not possible.
