A few weeks ago, I put my game on hold to work on a couple of tools to help make development a little bit easier. The UnityEditor API is not as cumbersome as I thought. So far everything’s working pretty well (with zero allocations in the game loop, thanks profiler!), and I’m actually liking making tools and plugins far more than trying to make actual games.
For developers here who make (or have made in the past) both games and game development tools:
Which do you prefer more overall?
Which do you find more profitable?
Who’s more difficult to please: your game customers or your developer customers?
Your new so you wouldn’t have seen it, but this topic did get beaten to death awhile back. I think there’s a place for both. Right now I’m dabbling at gold mining and really enjoying it but I would never be able to fund it if I wasn’t selling shovels
It depends. If you can only do single stuff like programming, art, sound you can sell shoves as completing game would be hard. By doing this you can collect funds for your game.
If you are a team or all rounder you can mine gold which is more valuable
In the past, selling shoves was a great business venture because of how little competition the shovel-business had. Unfortunately, you’re going to have just as hard a time selling shovel as selling games now, I think, and the rewards are smaller as always.
@jpthek9 - indeed. The business grows constantly. With ever lowering entry barriers (especially financially) the market is overrun and prices have dropped to sometimes unsustainable lows left and right. In both markets.
My game has made enough to buy a cheeseburger in the states, but not in godzone. My Youtube revenue would let me take my wife out here for a three course meal.
So we are talking about pretty small amounts here.
A little editor script I set up for run time trending of floats and ints, along with export to a .csv. Great for debugging and the like. The message I got back was the ‘audience appeal was too narrow’. I’m assuming that means they figure only a handful of devs would be interested.
I’m toying with the idea of making it able to record animations at runtime and play them back. It would probably be the logical next step to increase the appeal. But for the moment I’ll just hang on to it for my own use.
I prefer making games it is more exciting to me and much more of challenge (larger scope). I enjoyed making tools too just games are bit more fun.
So far tools are more profitable. Both seem to be in a race to the bottom but tools aren’t as far down that path yet. Not to say when you reach the bottom that you can’t still make money but it then seems to be hit driven. If you don’t have a hit on your hands you don’t make money and if you do you make A LOT of money.
Reviews on both tools and games seem to be the same. There are more support requests on tools but usually feature additions make your product better which leads to more sales so I don’t view requests as a bad thing.
Well its really hard to make a game that will sell. Wether its mobile (over 500 apps a day released, over 5 million apps already), how are you going to get any exposure or downloads in that enviroment. Steam where you have to have a game that people will play for over 2 hours (even if your game is longer and has great gameplay – unless people are really digging it they can return it). Kongerate where they will downvote anything but the best of games. Thats hard man, hard work and you might not make any money from it (and people might badmouth your game – even if its free) or you can sell stuff to other developers (and you dont need a full team worth of developers).
But why not do both (you probably didnt become a game dev) to sell stuff to other devs
First sell shovels to help other miners.
Then try your luck with mining a bit, but keep selling shovels on the side.
If you find a little gold, start mining more.
When you find a gold that can finance your mining, become a miner.
If that fails… well, selling shovels is always better than working behind a counter.
Sell shovels with teleporters installed secretly. Once a miner finds gold with your shovel it’ll immediately send it over to you! Now it’s time to look for a good spot to build your mansion…
Not sure what do you mean by tools but near me , creating assets is way more important that just programming a paper.
I mean , I spend way more time in learning graphics , modeling , animating , texturing and other in-game assets than making a game in unity. It’s such a headache but I’m learning this stuff more and more everyday.
I think making game is better than making assets. Unity asset store is not even close to what Google Play Store is. I hope all the developers have a good luck, so they can get some publicity
of their game!
You will need those tools to make your game, so technically by making tools you are indirectly making your game except you’re actually doing it right by creating a good foundation and working environment.
Make the tools that you need, which are probably tools that other people need.
It does seem the unity asset store has become much more competitive and saturated. It use to be a lot easier to come up with ideas for assets that hadn’t been done before, but now there has been an flood of new people contributing. There is obvious a lot of programming/development talent out there and it is showing up in some pretty sophisticated assets that become harder compete with. Obviously many more people are now making a living from the asset store. It’s hard to now identify some small pocket of development that is underserved, whereas before it was a bit more obvious that a certain area simply lacked any solution at all. I guess there is still some legs left on it, but for sure the competition has ramped up and it’s hard to compete with people who are clearly much more advanced in their abilities. It’s kind of as though the ‘AAA’ developers have noticed that the store was enough of a platform and are now flooding in with their professionalism and expertise, drowning out the more ‘ametuer’ background that was there before.
