My first game has sold $176k in 2 years. Here are the numbers |
- My first game has sold $176k in 2 years. Here are the numbers
- A super quick video on responsive game design. Scale your camera for any screen size or aspect ratio.
- How I Made Money Developing Video Games, And How You Can Too
- Around 60-70 of my original music compositions and songs in the metal genre with elements of retro electronic music and chiptune over the past 9 years. All of them are available for free under Creative Commons, and free to use for any purpose, including commercial. Enjoy listening and using.
- I've just read a job advertisement for Game Programmer on Kojima Productions homepage and I have a few questions.
- Sharing Dancing Girl Sprites Animation in Pixel-Art
- What kind of posts do you learn the most from on Gamedev?
- Cyberpunk City Pixel-Art Game Assets by Ansimuz
- Itch.io can be a decent source of revenue (But only if you're lucky) -- my stats
- how much poly is too much poly?
- Please don't do that in your game controls
- I just released my first game ever (Android + Steam EA)...should I pay for some ads in order to have at least 1 install?
- Interesting video of sharing numbers from Steam - I always find this kind of thing useful, or at least motivating :P
- Unreal 4 - Multiple Game Modes in One Level Using Level Streaming
- How is this "radar" shader implemented in Dying Light?
- How to write a cost estimate for funding application?
- Unity Project-Based Step by Step Tutorial: Flappy Bird
- Making my own indie game while working for a game company. Asking for advices
- How To Be Happy As a Game Developer
- Platforms to sell your games other than steam?
- Should I do a game jam while I am still learning?
- Is a degree needed for a game dev job?
- Sebastian Lague - "Trying to Improve My Geography Game with More Real-World Data"
- How to make Wordle. Restarting my Youtube channel after several years, any feedback appreciated.
- Game pricing VS good value
| My first game has sold $176k in 2 years. Here are the numbers Posted: 09 Feb 2022 08:29 AM PST One year ago I made a post here about how my first game (Mortal Glory) sold $128k in 1 year. The post was received very positively here so I thought you might be interested in hearing how the sales have evolved after that now that the game has been out for 2 full years. The bolded numbers are lifetime totals after 2 years while the numbers in (parentheses) show only year 2 values.
Overall my 2nd year sales were 36.9% of 1st year, which still sounds pretty nice to me. Here are some numbers that have not changed but might still interest you:
If you are interested in some additional data and analysis, I also made a short video about this: [link] [comments] | ||||||||||
| Posted: 09 Feb 2022 01:16 AM PST
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| How I Made Money Developing Video Games, And How You Can Too Posted: 08 Feb 2022 09:20 PM PST I released my first game on Steam a few months ago as an early access title and it's sold around 1,100 copies and grossed about $15,000 so far. Is this a huge success? Not in the grand scale of things. Has it made me money, will continue to make me money, and was it fulfilling artistically? Yes, very much so. So how did I make this happen and how can you make your project successful as well? There's two main things that helped me have success: 1: Build an audience BEFORE you make the game. (Not while you're making it, before) 2. Have distinct art and strong artistic direction. I believe there two things are critical, there are many other things that can bring you sales success as well, but I can only speak about what I did personally. 1: Build an audience first. If you want people to buy your game, they need to know it exists. The main way people try to make this happen is via marketing. I didn't do this basically at all. Firstly , I hate doing it. You might be able to find success doing things you hate, but it's less likely and not at all fun. Secondly, it's incredibly time consuming/very expensive. People see ads all the time, they know when they're being advertised to and are trained to ignore it. So to gain any traction requires tons of eyeballs, which requires endless time on your part to get if you're not dumping money at the problem. So wait, how do you build an audience without marketing? Easy, give people things, don't sell them things. People love playing games, that's why they're hopefully paying money to get yours. I built a substantial community making free games before I ever charged a single cent. By that point, people were more then willing to open their wallets for me because I had their trust. They liked me and my content, I wasn't some random company they don't know trying to sell them something. And I did make money during this, about $750 a month on average through Patreon. I give people games for free, if they want they can support my Patreon. This allowed me to make games, get a small amount of funding to pay artists, buy food, and in the mean time my audience grew and grew. To give you an example of how successful this was in promotion, when I announced the game I got about 600 Steam page hits. That died down to around 200 a day after. When I posted a bunch of stuff to Reddit and other sites? About 300. Not even close to being worth how much work I put in promoting that day. When I advertised the paid game in one of my free ones? 2,500 Steam hits. And that lingered for a while. Now, I know that this might sound like "To be a successful game developer, just be a successful game developer already! It's not that hard!" But that's kind of true. If you want to sell leather goods, you have to already by good at leather working. So to be a good game dev, you have to make games. Your first ones probably aren't going to be great, so give them away. Keep doing it for a while, and if people like what you make you'll gain a following. If people don't like your games, they're never going to sell anyway. 2. Have distinct art and strong artistic direction. The other big segment of my sales, probably around 35%, comes from people who find my game on Steam and buy it. Why would they do that? Because it's visually unique in a way that comes across in one screenshot. That's all the attention people will give you for the most part. Two seconds and one glance. If you haven't hooked them in that timespan, 95% will be gone. If your game has amazing mechanics but dull or generic art can it sell? Sure, but it's going to be a LOT harder. My game has very distinct 1950's horror comics visual. Was that my goal from the very beginning? Not really. But once that direction was settled on, it informed every other artistic decision. The strong aesthetic was THE MOST important part of the theme, the writing, the UI, all had to feed that feel. Because if it didn't, people would glance and move on. Of course all this requires having "good" art. How do you get good art? If you can do it yourself, awesome. If you can't pay someone. And I mean money upfront. Revenue share is very risky, artists need money to live and if you're not actively providing that, they could drop the project at any time for a hundred different, valid reasons. If anyone is going to work for free, it has to be you. You're the only one who's actions you can control and who's motivations you fully understand. Besides, you have control over the project, it's only fair that the people who are mercenaries for hire make money first. So PAY YOUR ARTISTS, and pay them solid amounts of money. Even with all the money my amazing artist makes and has made off this game that came out of my pocket, I've still made a profit. Over time my profit will hopefully grow and grow and I'll be laughing all the way to the discount clothing store. So that's my main advice on how to get people to buy your game. It's worked for me so far, and it doesn't seem to be slowing down any time soon. Have big streamers played my game? No. Do I have millions of hits on Youtube? Not even close. Does the game's Twitter have a bunch of followers? 21 last I checked. Am I selling lots of copies and making solid money? Yes. If you've read this far and want to know what this game actually is, here you go. https://store.steampowered.com/app/1755870/The_Monster_Within/ Thanks for reading and I hope this post helped you in some way! [link] [comments] | ||||||||||
| Posted: 09 Feb 2022 04:56 AM PST
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| Posted: 09 Feb 2022 01:50 AM PST I've just finished reading a job advertisement on Kojima Productions homepage: http://www.kojimaproductions.jp/en/#careers and there are several things I'm not sure what they mean and how to acquire them. Firstly, in the list of Highly Desirable Experience (not mandatory), I came across these items: ・ Experience in developing non-portable consumer game consoles or 3D PC games ・ Experience in developing any of the following systems: ・ Character animation system ・ Event control system within RPG (flag control, conversations, etc.) ・ File load management, Asset management ・ Middleware and/or driver integration to titles ・ Specifications and inspection experience for new projects What do "Event control system within RPG (flag control, conversations, etc.)", "Middleware and/or driver integration to titles" mean? I tried searching for these terms on Google but still, not much useful showed up. Besides that, is there really any online course that covers any item in the list, since most of them sound very specific and the only way to get them is to go ahead creating a game. Secondly, I wonder if there is any other demand that employers may ask when applying for a Game Programmer position (in Kojima Productions especially) other than the actual expertise for the job? Thank you for spending your time replying this post! Luv y'all :))))))) [link] [comments] | ||||||||||
| Sharing Dancing Girl Sprites Animation in Pixel-Art Posted: 08 Feb 2022 11:45 PM PST
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| What kind of posts do you learn the most from on Gamedev? Posted: 09 Feb 2022 09:21 AM PST Personally I get SUPER excited about postmortems. The longer the better. I feel like it's so fun to read about what they did wrong, or right. There is SO much to learn from those posts for me. [link] [comments] | ||||||||||
| Cyberpunk City Pixel-Art Game Assets by Ansimuz Posted: 08 Feb 2022 11:51 PM PST Hello World, I'm sharing some Pixel-Art Game Assets with a Cyberpunk theme under a CC0 license, this means you can use them for Free on your own projects without credit. This kit includes everything you need to prototype a game quickly. Features
[link] [comments] | ||||||||||
| Itch.io can be a decent source of revenue (But only if you're lucky) -- my stats Posted: 08 Feb 2022 06:44 AM PST Let's not beat around the bush, my game is Anemoiapolis and it's only available on Itch at the moment. The title is in early access but I treated it as a soft launch of the itch version. I got a lot of benefit from seeing your stats on here, so I thought I'd do the same. Since early January, Anemoiapolis has been at the top of the 'bestsellers' page (following the release of beta V2).
Revenue: 6,555 USD (6 dollars per game plus tips). Not bad at all! Especially since Itch takes a lot less than the standard 30%. Here are some notable things about my experience:
I was surprised that top sellers seem to hit a ballpark of 120-250 USD per day - the number I reached that put Anemoiapolis at #2. I expected heavy hitters like Among Us and Celeste to flush out smaller productions like mine, but perhaps since they've been out for a while, they don't see much traffic. Thanks for reading, and I'd love to hear about your experience with itch! [link] [comments] | ||||||||||
| how much poly is too much poly? Posted: 09 Feb 2022 03:05 AM PST i wanna settle the age old debate - on average, how many polygons should a game asset have. i present you six categories: - a building (imagine something like a village hut) without interior - a sword - a barrel -a chest -a piece of equipment (for example a pair of shoes or a helmet) -a character if you were to model an asset of one of these categories, how many polygons would you believe is appropriate? [link] [comments] | ||||||||||
| Please don't do that in your game controls Posted: 09 Feb 2022 03:18 AM PST This is quite common in game controls settings: attaching the confirm/back command to some main gameplay command. But there is no reason to do that. It arbitrarily binds two completely unrelated command. It can only create unnecessary annoyance for our players. EDIT: [link] [comments] | ||||||||||
| Posted: 09 Feb 2022 01:21 AM PST Hi, Solo-dev, learned everything by myself 2 years ago. I have been reading the post about ads here, and they are very useful. I've tried getting in touch with youtubers, reviewers etc. Still, I have an existential question, should I spent X amout of $ in order to "boost" the presence of my game? Is there some sense to, let say, spend $100 on facebook ads (or adsense? reddit?) just once to make it started? thank you so much signed, a lost solo dev [link] [comments] | ||||||||||
| Posted: 09 Feb 2022 09:12 AM PST | ||||||||||
| Unreal 4 - Multiple Game Modes in One Level Using Level Streaming Posted: 09 Feb 2022 05:19 AM PST
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| How is this "radar" shader implemented in Dying Light? Posted: 09 Feb 2022 10:14 AM PST Example here: https://youtu.be/cZ46jk6cjsU?t=1166 (19:26 as a reference) How would something like this be implemented? Do all objects use a common shader that reads some uniform value? [link] [comments] | ||||||||||
| How to write a cost estimate for funding application? Posted: 09 Feb 2022 08:56 AM PST Hey guys, I'm working with another dev on my first game that I plan to sell. I'm hoping to apply for epic megagrants and probably other grants but I need to list my estimated costs and how the funding would help the project. Can somebody who knows about this tell me what sort of format it should be in? How precise or general can I be? Should I include the money I'd use to market the game in this costs estimate? Any answers like the ones to these questions would help a lot. Thanks guys [link] [comments] | ||||||||||
| Unity Project-Based Step by Step Tutorial: Flappy Bird Posted: 09 Feb 2022 03:50 AM PST Hi guys, do you think such project-based game dev tutorials are valuable for the community? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQVUGyto8Gg We tried to combine live coding with animations, effects and gaming-like experience. Please give me feedback.
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| Making my own indie game while working for a game company. Asking for advices Posted: 09 Feb 2022 07:55 AM PST Currently working for a video game company as backend engineer (server-side) I have been developing my game prototype for quite some time now in my free time, the prototype is made up of sample build-in mash objects and UI elements. I mainly build it to test my ideas and game gimmick. I haven't yet set on the game story or the art style. Just the main battle system. No one from the company is aware of the game, and I didn't use any of the company assets or tools to develop it. I did show my game to some of my friends outside the company to test it and they encouraged me to show it to the company. The company doesn't have a strict policy about developing your game project but I fear I might lose some control of developing processes due to me not in game development role. Still, I know it will make my game a reality. The company is mainly making mobile games for the local market and I want to releases it on PC (steam) and worldwide. Should I present my game to management and hope for adoption? [link] [comments] | ||||||||||
| How To Be Happy As a Game Developer Posted: 08 Feb 2022 11:15 AM PST I recently had an epiphany and just wanted to share it with people who are in a similar position. I've been passionate about making games since I was around 8 years old. I'm 24 now and the passion has only grown. But over the years, various things have discouraged me from making games. Working a full time job and not having enough time left over, not being a good enough pixel artist, and most of all: not being able to make enough money. Off and on throughout my life I've made games, and then took a long hiatus from development because of these discouragements. I even tried branching off into web design because I felt it was a more reliable way to make cash while still doing something I enjoy. (programming) I was terrible at web design lol. And it wasn't as fun to me anyway. Then the other day, I got the game making itch again out of nowhere and on a whim, decided to start making a game. I felt so happy and like my life had purpose for the first time in a long time. Then I realized: it was because I wasn't worried about being good enough. I wasn't worried about money. I was only concerned with making a game I thought would be cool and I was having fun. Nothing else should matter. I still plan to sell my game on Steam for like $5 bucks. I might sell 10 copies. I might sell none. And either way, that's okay if I had fun doing it. I'm just making this game as a hobby in my free time after a 40 hour work week. It might take me 2 or 3 years to finish it. But that's fine, too. I'm having fun. I might even hire somebody to make sprites for me. Will I lose money? Probably. But every hobby costs money, right? So my point is this: you shouldn't strive to be a game developer as a career. You may be one of those lucky few that puts out a few games and one of them takes off and you build a fanbase and you can afford to quit your job and make games full time. It very well could happen. But it shouldn't be your goal. You should be in game development because you love it. Do it every day because it's fun to you and because you would do it for free. Don't worry about making games that will sell lots of copies. Make games that you think would be really fun to play. Worst case scenario, I'll be a 70-year-old man playing my few dozen games I made throughout my life because I enjoy them myself. Maybe occasionally jump on Steam to read my 3 or 4 reviews of my stuff that say "this is my favorite game!" and that thought alone makes me happy. [link] [comments] | ||||||||||
| Platforms to sell your games other than steam? Posted: 08 Feb 2022 09:24 AM PST I am working on a small game wich I would like to publish and sell for a low price. I was planning to do it on steam, but the 100$ payment kinda bothers me, especially because I have no guarantee that the game will yield that much money back. Are there any other similar platforms to sell you games? [link] [comments] | ||||||||||
| Should I do a game jam while I am still learning? Posted: 09 Feb 2022 10:08 AM PST Hello r/gamedev, I recently started picking up gamedev as a hobby, and I have been enjoying it a lot so far with all the new stuff I am learning. I recently got interested in possibly doing the Brackeys Game jam that is happening in a couple of weeks and was wondering if it would be a good idea to do something like that while I am still in the process of learning, or should I wait to do a jam until I know how to properly create a game? I figured it would be a fun challenge, but I want to make sure this would be a good idea to begin with. [link] [comments] | ||||||||||
| Is a degree needed for a game dev job? Posted: 09 Feb 2022 10:04 AM PST I've got friends that are in uni and they've gotten internships at Sumo Digital (not sure if it was an internship or not but he ended working there for a bit) and it gets me thinking, if I want to get a game Dev job at a big place like that would I need a degree? [link] [comments] | ||||||||||
| Sebastian Lague - "Trying to Improve My Geography Game with More Real-World Data" Posted: 09 Feb 2022 09:42 AM PST
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| How to make Wordle. Restarting my Youtube channel after several years, any feedback appreciated. Posted: 09 Feb 2022 09:41 AM PST
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| Posted: 09 Feb 2022 03:21 AM PST Here's an idea. I have this belief that there is a huge gap between devs and players on how much the same game should cost. As I've had to lay out production planning and budgets before in my career, I've ended up at point where I conviced myself that the fierce competition in AAA titles combined with massive marketing budgets just sets up expectations so high that the average gamer feels ripped off if their newer game does that have all the bells and whistles their previous one had plus extra for the same asking price. Ipso facto, games are evermore complex, wages are low but hours are long and burn-out rate is high. And when I worked in the industry, it felt like a never ending downward spiral. So I bailed. Since I've taken a break some years ago because of that very reason, I feel I've lost touch with where the industry is that. So I wanted to hear your take on that. Some of you have already released premium games before. What was your reasoning behind the price you set for your game? Do you think you offered good value for your asking price and why? At first I wanted to ask for specific criteria taken into account but since every project is different so must be the reasoning behind their pricing (man-hours, break-even point, hobby vs full-time, solo or team, marketing budget etc). My follow-up question for everyone is : as a gamer, what are the criteria you consider for a game to be good value? Length, production-value, originality, niche aspect? How much do you factor game price in your purchase (it'd be great to get context regarding how much that money means to you, wether you're a student, working class, wealthy etc.). Thank you for your time. [link] [comments] |
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