Not only that, but most localities won’t even let you start a catering business from your home kitchen, because so many people die from food cooked on consumer stoves…or something. So even for the most bare bones of food service business you need a food truck or a separate room (sometimes separate building) for your kitchen. Thankfully, in our field we only need a separate room if we want the tax write-off. And most retail outlets take more than the 30% that people complain about our outlets taking. We are really very fortunate with regards to startup and operating costs. That doesn’t stop the complaints though. I guess it’s just human nature to want more for less.
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The flip side is the flooded market. Low entry barriers has it’s downsides.
No kidding. From 2009 to today I’ve went from I-can-support-myself income to apparently-I’m-a-caveman-now income.
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I would call a huge success to earn enough to repay me a Unity pro license making a game with the free flavour and for what Ryiah said above seems a target pretty much reachable. We’ll see…
Mobile development has a lot of competition now with each platform having different ways of marketing the games. Android seems to be primarily free games as an example. I have also read posts mentioning Blackberry as a small market that doesn’t receive much attention but I don’t know that much about it myself.
Edit: Found the thread again. http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/has-unity-abandoned-blackberry-support.294566/
After hating Blackberry for years, I fell in love with the Playbook I bought for development, and after using my Z10 I can’t stand using my iPod or Android devices. So, I’m now a true believer. But Blackberry themselves has pretty much told developers that they want us to publish games on the Amazon market and let the App World be for business class software. At least that’s the impression pretty much everyone got when they made the announcement about including the Amazon market on the device. I don’t really use apps on my phone besides the browser, a weather app or two, and Facebook, which may explain why the lack of apps compared to other platforms isn’t a deal breaker for me. But I still don’t really like the idea of non-native apps becoming the standard. Either way, Blackberry seems to have abandoned games for Blackberry long before people speculated that Unity had.
Hey guys, thanks for the responses. I just wanted to say that I just turned 15 years old and I was wondering about the possibilities with Unity. My first goal is to create a working game and bring it to Android. Just the thought of having my own game working on an Android device is satisfying enough!
I was just thinking that maybe it could be possible with a few games to afford a MacBook Pro, not because it’s Apple, but just for some technical reasons and their reliability.
Lately, I’ve been starting projects, but never finishing them. Now, I plan on forcing myself to finish a game, especially since I have this week off from school (March Break 
). It’ll just be a simple game considering that I’m a beginner at all of this and I’m learning Unityscript since I personally like the syntax more than C#, I don’t know why, I just do. As for Boo, no one seems to use, so I’d say good luck at finding any tutorials on it for Unity.
I have a Moto G 2013 (great cheap phone by the way) that I’d use for testing and such. Obviously this phone isn’t a beast, I’d say it might even be below average in terms of Android device specs, so if my games can run on my Moto G, they are likely to run on many other devices.
Which is better for a small, beginner game? Free with in-app purchases and ads? Or pay once? I also plan on testing with that.
Also, keeping in mind that I’ve never actually finished a project (I’ve started using Unity as my first game engine 1 month ago) how long should a simple Android game take to make in hours, days, or even months! My games will not have superb graphics since I can’t even wrap my head around Blender. I find using Blender and 3DS Max (student license) much harder than programming and Unity, but that’s just me…
Thanks!
Also, money is not my main motive. I just have a horrible laptop. I would love to get a new one. For gaming (just like any teen boy would 
) and for game development mainly Unity. If have the latest Mac OS X running alongside Windows 8.1, and then eventually Windows 10…
I have one thing that concerns me about game development. It’s the graphics. I cannot use tools like Photoshop or Blender or 3DS Max. I don’t know why. I can use Unity, UDK (to some extent) but none of those tools for the graphics. Are graphics really that important on mobile platforms?
Again, thanks!
I would count on at least a month. Both of the two simple games in the Imperial Nostalgia game listed in my signature took me about two weeks and I’ve been coding professionally since 2009 and as a hobby since the early 90s. Of course, it depends on the amount of polish you want to add. I could spend hours tweaking a single texture, or the position of a single UI object if I let myself, and I often do let myself. Then I end up going back and re-tweaking it a couple of times anyway.
But I wouldn’t get hung up on how long it should take. If it takes longer, you’ll end up feeling frustrated. And I can assure you that it will almost always take longer than you expect. I didn’t count on either of those games taking two weeks. I’m not counting on the next one taking two weeks, but I know it probably will.
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Totally free is your best bet. On your first app ignore monetisation altogether. Treat it as throw away, just get it out, and get as much feedback as you can.
Here’s why
- Monetisation turns off users. For it to work you app needs to be good enough
- Monetization requires a huge user base to be successful
- Your first app is going to suck
- Getting 400 downloads and no revenue will be a better result then getting 100 downloads and 22 cents
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So basically, I should make it completely free, with no ads, to maximize downloads and feedback?
Also, if any of you guys have gone through Computer Science courses in College and University, what is it like? Are most people that are there already quite familiar with programming? I’ve just recently started programming and I’m 15 and was also wondering if this is a little too old to begin a journey in computer science? Thanks again
Let’s be honest, the game makers, Ketchapp, their games aren’t of high quality, yet, they must still make quite a lot of money because their games are on a lot of people’s devices and I’ve also heard that they use Unity as a game engine? The graphics in those games are so simple, they can be easily made in Paint on Windows!
As a Computer Scientist (CS Degree) I can say that 15 certainly is not too old. I’d forget about money for now. Intend to make something fun that you would like playing. If at the end you decide it is great, you can monetise it. If not, release it for free and start making something fun again.
I’ve programmed a ton of stuff and released a few games in different engines. Some have made me money and others have not. My current Unity project is something that I cooked together a few years ago to inspire some young people that anything was possible. I’ve decided to polish it up a little and release it. I have no idea how it will be received. It’s very basic and uses primitives within Unity for all of the graphics. I find it fun and challenging and so do some others that have tried it.
The original reason that I brought money in this discussion was to upgrade my current computer.
I have many reasons for wanting a MacBook Pro instead of my current laptop.
They seem more reliable. Xcode. Mac OS X is quite stable. Dual boot Windows and Mac OS X. Etc…
My final reason for wanting a new MacBook Pro is that it’ll motivate me even more to just continue making games for mobile devices and even bring some games to iOS. An Apple computer is need to bring apps to the App Store anyways, I also have an iPad Mini 2 that I can test my games on.
Other than the whole MacBook Pro idea, I just do this for fun. Recently, I’ve been enjoying programming and Unity more than actually gaming. My PlayStation 3 has been collecting dust for awhile now! Hahha! 
Again, thanks for the responses!
By the way, my current laptop is an HP Pavilion g6 2235-ca.
The specs are:
8GB DDR3 RAM
Intel i3 3110-M 2.4GHz
Intel HD 4000
Hitachi 750GB HDD
Windows 8.1 & Windows 10 Tech Preview.
Also, I’m very picky on how my electronics look visually, and honestly, this laptop looks cheap, not only that, but once I brought it to school for a project, and my friends accidentally knocked it off of my desk and now there is a crack in the corner of the keyboard that bothers the heck out of me for no good reason…
Anyways, enough of me rambling on about stuff…
Thanks again for the help!
All of these guys are giving you really good advice. Your best bet right now is just to focus on actually finishing something…anything really… to get your feet wet. You can worry about great graphics and monetization later.
Having an older android device to test on is actually a good thing sometimes… During production of my first game I used my oldest device (Moto Droid X) as a base for benchmarking… if the game ran well on that device, I was sure that it would run well on most. Granted, this also means you will not be producing the next Dead Trigger or Quake on mobile any time soon. but if you are starting with goals like that…then it is likely you will never finish anything.
The best advice I can give is just to make something you love… something that is fun to you. More often than not, other people will find it to be just as much fun as you do … things like this have a way of making you spend a lot of time obsessing over them. The feeling you get when you finally finish something that you worked a month or longer on can’t be beat imho. Just have fun and commit to finishing something that you love.
About having an older Android device, I have a Moto G 2013, which I think would be good for benchmarking considering that it is a bit on the lower end side of current leaders on the Android phone market.
Yes, obviously I won’t be making the next Dead Trigger haha That was my original problem when I had first started. I basically told myself to make a First-Person Shooter, and never came close to finishing the basic mechanics of that game.
Also, I do agree, this is some pretty good advice, and I really appreciate it!
I find that the hardest part at the moment is the graphics because at the moment, I can’t make anything pretty. Another difficult part is coming up with an idea that hasn’t been done before with little coding skills. At the moment I’m using Unityscript in… well… Unity. I’ve already learned the bare minimum of C++ a year ago, and I’ve also learned a bit of Python a few months ago when I first got myself a Raspberry Pi B+. (I suggest you Google search the Raspberry Pi if you don’t know what it is. Hint: Credit card size computer, running a Linux distro, capable of making robots, and costs $35).
Again! THANKS!
I’m not sure where you are located but generally speaking there are many ways to make money that will be much faster and more guaranteed than making games. Here in the USA a 15 year old can get out and shovel sidewalks and driveways in the winter, mow lawns, light landscaping and other work in the summer to earn money. The return on investment (mainly just your time and effort) from such activities is much higher than if they spent the same amount of time making games. Heck when I was a teen I made $100 to $200 in a day just from going out and shoveling snow. Sure it was an all day thing and damn tiring by the end but very good money. From late Spring to Early Fall I made a few hundred dollars per month just from mowing lawns. The reason people say focus on games to learn and improve instead of making money is because it is much more effective for you to focus on making games for fun and focusing on making money in other ways. You will get much needed game dev experience and make money much faster to upgrade your dev gear. So many people seem to be coming into game dev to make money and they don’t seem to understand when you are first getting started it is unlikely you will make anything (at least meaningful). By the time you have made 6 to 7 simple games and worked as much as you can off the computer to make money you should have both the gear you want and the experience you need to make a game that will make you some money.
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I think some are misunderstanding my main goals here. I can still make games with my current laptop. I want to make fun games. I have fun using Unity. The whole money part was just a secondary thought. Sure, it would be nice to make money quick, but I know that that isn’t a reality. I most certainly don’t expect to make a living off of mobile game development!
Basically, what I’m trying to say is that, money involved would be like an extra.
First off, I live in Canada, but my exact location is in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by farms. Sure I can make money shoveling snow and mowing lawns, but I’m mainly looking at gaining experience with game development. Money is just like a bonus. That’s all. I never came here expecting to make a million bucks with only a few games.
Now, just forget about the whole money part of this discussion…
Again, thanks.