You wanna make money off games these days? All by yourself?

Write the next killer iPhone app. Your game has access to millions of users. Make thousands of dollars per day if it gets popular.
I'm not joking. The money is insane.

yes the iphone is prolly your best bet, I feel though the heyday of app development for it is now over, but hey theres prolly still another 6 months life yet until it becomes like other platforms, theres also android but its still to early to tell if that will pan out.
The problem though is you will need to get access to one of those mac thingees (ive heard theres a mac emulator but cant see it being that great)

You can use Unity to develop for the iPhone (works on a PC now) if you buy the license which I believe was around $1000-$1500. It sure did make development go much faster and taught us quite a bit about unity that we were then able to apply to our PC / Mac project.

Unity is a great 3D engine but may not be exactly what you need for your iPhone project if you have a simpler concept in mind.

Also the source code for Unity IS available, I believe the price was a bit over $30,000.

I just want to clarify one thing about Unity and iPhone development, while you can development on Windows with Unity now, you still can not develop iPhone applications on windows since you need xCode to compile for the iPhone, even with Unity.

Also, it would cost either 700 (Unity Indie and iPhone Basic) or 3000 (Untiy Pro and iPhone Advance) but you can also development for web, pc, and mac too.

I saw this today
http://www.nimblebit.com/2009/06/nimblebit-numbers/

some hard iphone sales data, none of the games appear to be major hits

game + how much the developer made working on it (though final numbers will be higher cause they havent stopped selling)

Hanoi Plus - $4,500 a week
Scoops - $35,000 a week
Textropolis - $4,625 a week
Kyper - $110 a week
Sky Burger - $1,062 a week

thus it was possible for some ppl to earn a decent wage, though I feel with the iphone its glory days are over (as is true with most tech)

I have a Mac, but I really don't like working on a Mac. I'm afraid I wouldn't have the motivation to follow through with a whole game, but I probably should go that route. When you buy a Unity license, is that only good for 1 Iphone game, or can you make several with it? And are there other base kits like that for Iphone?

And thanks to everyone for all the great info.

[Edited by - Walt on August 4, 2009 9:32:29 PM]