Not sure where all the "rich" talk comes from. Making $20,000 a year on games is not getting rich.

The amount of hard work put into programming, art, music, and design is worth something is it not? Just because I love my day job doesn't mean I would go there for $5 an hour.

People who're business minded should be able to relate. The eBay mentality of selling games for next to nothing, has hurt all developers. Why shouldn't we get paid for our hard work? But then again, if you would go to your day job for next to nothing because you enjoy it, I hope you can still pay your bills.

I'm not asking game programmers who just make games only to release to boast about their accomplishments, and gain status. I'm asking business minded people. If everything in life was low balled, the wages for the people producing the low balled products would never increase, and we would all be living off crackers and water.

The problem really isn't the prices, low budget mobile games can sell several million copies if they're good and a 2 man team only need to sell around 20.000 copies per month at a $5 pricepoint to support themselves(the exact amount depends on what kind of distributor deal you can get, your living expenses and how much tax you have to pay), a decent 2 man team should be capable of pushing out 3 high quality mobile titles per year

I mean it would be great to be the next minecraft or terreria story! but honestly as an indie developer If I had to pick between a million people playing my game for free, or making a nice little amount off of few people, Id pick option A, if your a hobbyist money shouldn't be the first thing on your mind, a hobby is something you do for fun. Iam actually worst off then selling my product for $1 as I started taking a ~250$ hit per month just to host my servers for my current project. It'd be great to turn a profit but if I don't I honestly wont care, now if I see my monthly traffic is like 10 users THEN! we have a problem lol.

The problem really isn't the prices, low budget mobile games can sell several million copies if they're good and a 2 man team only need to sell around 20.000 copies per month at a $5 pricepoint to support themselves(the exact amount depends on what kind of distributor deal you can get, your living expenses and how much tax you have to pay), a decent 2 man team should be capable of pushing out 3 high quality mobile titles per year

I feel like that is a lot more than you need to sell to "support [yourself]".

Selling that much the developers get $35,000/month/person. If you are only just supporting yourself on $35,000/month you are doing it wrong

edit: I really like the thing they are coming out with for the android app store for featured and employee pick apps to bring the higher quality apps to a more center stage. The largest problem in app stores isn't the low prices, it's the low prices paired with the giant ? of app quality. Once they sort out better ways to bring high quality apps to the customer the prices will naturally increase. Probably not to more than $5-10, but you can make bucket loads of money with rapid development of $5-10 apps.

Almost makes me wonder why I don't do it... I'm just sitting around watching top gear or true blood after work anyways...

/runs away to make millions of dollars.

One problem here is definition of terms, especially when it comes to "indie".

Start by understanding "The Long Tail" effect, which was known for many years but only given an interesting name a few years back.

There were many old articles in the Shareware community in the 1980's and 1990's that described the effect well enough.

If you want to support yourself making games and other software, you don't make JUST ONE random product and hope it does well.

You systematically build a product after doing market research, follow a professional workflow to determine what is preventing sales, and systematically remove them. Each barrier to entry multiplies with the ones before. For example, you have no advertising, which limits you to 0.001% of your potential market. Those who do hear about you visit your website, but it is crappy, and only 0.01% actually download your game. Of those who download it, only 23% actually install it. So at this point your barriers multiply to give you only 0.00000000023% of your potential sales. Continue with other barriers (the game crashes, hard to purchase, bad price point) and it quickly approaches zero. Approaching this professionally means finding the biggest barriers and breaking this down.


Then once you've got your first product doing reasonably well, make a second. You'll still have the "long tail" effect so you'll see sales from the first game. Then you systematically remove the barriers from the second game, and then the third game, and the fourth game, and eventually you'll see a rather significant income from combined sales of multiple products.

You'll notice that the people who made a lot of money with the various phone's app stores don't have just one app. They have a bunch of apps, and everyone knows about them, and they are trivial to buy, and they have great and impressive free demos, and everything about them is friendly with the barriers to making a profit being basically non-existent.


That takes BUSINESS work. Just coding up the game is the easy part.

[quote name='SimonForsman' timestamp='1310980436' post='4836727']
The problem really isn't the prices, low budget mobile games can sell several million copies if they're good and a 2 man team only need to sell around 20.000 copies per month at a $5 pricepoint to support themselves(the exact amount depends on what kind of distributor deal you can get, your living expenses and how much tax you have to pay), a decent 2 man team should be capable of pushing out 3 high quality mobile titles per year

I feel like that is a lot more than you need to sell to "support [yourself]".

Selling that much the developers get $35,000/month/person. If you are only just supporting yourself on $35,000/month you are doing it wrong

edit: I really like the thing they are coming out with for the android app store for featured and employee pick apps to bring the higher quality apps to a more center stage. The largest problem in app stores isn't the low prices, it's the low prices paired with the giant ? of app quality. Once they sort out better ways to bring high quality apps to the customer the prices will naturally increase. Probably not to more than $5-10, but you can make bucket loads of money with rapid development of $5-10 apps.

Almost makes me wonder why I don't do it... I'm just sitting around watching top gear or true blood after work anyways...

/runs away to make millions of dollars.
[/quote]

oops, i was mixing SEK and USD when counting:P , my bad, divide by 6 or 7 , so yeah, the number of sales you need isn't all that high, the problem is to get noticed without a marketing budget, but thats something that applies to pretty much any business.

Making money is essential if you wish to make games full time though

Then don't make games full time if you can't be sure your product is going to keep you afloat. Find a source of income that you can live off and still have enough time left over to work on your game development.

Jumping head first into game development with the idea of "I'll quit my job, work for a year full time on game development, and then make millions!" just doesn't fly. You're jumping out of an air plane with the idea that you can sew yourself a parachute before you hit the ground.


Make a game, build a business, Then dive into it full time.


How many years did Notch from Wurm Online/Mine Craft spend working part time on game development? Dreams aren't built over night.

[color="#1C2837"]Making a game to sell for $1.00 - $5.00 appears to be a very sad reality in today's game market[/quote]
I don't quite understand what the problem is with selling a game for $5 or even $1.

Did it take more than $5 to make the game? Of course. That's why you hope more than one person buys the game. Do realize that AAA games often take millions of dollars, and require very large teams of people working full-time for years? Those games sell for $60. I guarantee there was much more 12 times combined effort put into an average AAA game than you put into your $5 game you sell on an app market.

[color=#1C2837][size=2] I'm finding it extremely hard to believe the time investment is worth the $40.00 I can make from 40 sales before a better game hits the spot light[/quote]
You just said it right there. If your game isn't good enough then who's at fault for your low sales? The guy who made the better game? The industry as a whole? No, you are at fault.

There is an element of risk involved, sure. There's just as much risk for AAA development studios and publishers. More, probably. It's a risky business. Like others have pointed out, if you determine that it's not worth the risk, then we suggest you pursue other avenues.

Few of us here are independent game developers as our primary means of winning bread. We do it because it's a fun hobby. If you are trying to make money by not putting forth much effort, then I suggest you go into business.

I can give you a story from my own experience.

I started work on Holy Moly Dragons in Septemeber 2009. A friend of mine did all the art, I did all the programming, and we shared design. We both had full time jobs in the game industry (at that time, since then I've started working for a Univeristy in the R&D department), so we started developing the game on our spare time after work and on weekends. After 18 months of ~15 hours a week dev time, we released Holy Moly Dragons for the iPhone in April 2011 for $1.99 on the iPhone.

We had some initial success, we were even featured on the front pages of itunes in the "New and Noteworthy" section. At the time we were on the front page, we had dropped our price to .99 for the weekend. We were getting 300+ buys a day and reachedthe #31 most downloaded strategy game. Then when our sale ended and we went back to $1.99, our sales plummeted to ~100/day, even though we were still being featured.

As soon as we were off the front page, sales plummeted to ~30/day. We released an update with new levels and that shot sales up to about ~80/day for 2 days, then they fell again.

After ~3 months of being in the app store, we've made about $2,200. We sit around ~5 sales per days now and ~25 free version downloads per day. In relative comparison to most iphone apps, we've done extremely well, as most don't even make the $99 back for the ios dev license.

It's disappointing to put so much time and effort into something and have it not pay off, but that's life. I'm still proud of the game and I will continue to make games on the side, with the hopes of making a big seller one day.

[quote name='SimonForsman' timestamp='1310970583' post='4836666']
Making money is essential if you wish to make games full time though

Then don't make games full time if you can't be sure your product is going to keep you afloat. Find a source of income that you can live off and still have enough time left over to work on your game development.

Jumping head first into game development with the idea of "I'll quit my job, work for a year full time on game development, and then make millions!" just doesn't fly. You're jumping out of an air plane with the idea that you can sew yourself a parachute before you hit the ground.


Make a game, build a business, Then dive into it full time.


How many years did Notch from Wurm Online/Mine Craft spend working part time on game development? Dreams aren't built over night.
[/quote]

I agree 100% with this course of action.

In general, I think maybe people would get more out of the whole game development experience if they'd make games that were more interesting.

The Supreme Court recently decided that video games are an art form. I don't think we act as if they are, though. Independent artists do art for the most part because they love it. Sure, they'd like to make money, but it's known by everyone that it's going to be tough. Most artists remain "starving artists" and they're ready for that, because they receive a deeper form of gratification.

Unless what you do is novel and interesting in some way, what makes you think you deserve to stand out from the thousands of shitty games that are available on any app market? Does the fact that it took you a lot of effort necessarily mean that people should pay more? I don't care if it took an hour to make me a burger or 10 minutes, I'm only going to pay what a burger's worth.

How many years did Notch from Wurm Online/Mine Craft spend working part time on

http://www.chacha.co...-make-minecraft

Minecraft is a sandbox building indie video game written in Java originally by Swedish creator Markus Notch Persson. Minecraft development began on May 10, 2009. It was released on It was released on May 17, 2009

Research: Someone has to do it. n.n Google: Easier than research. Demotivational posters: I've seen too many. XD

P.S. I'm not the most socially apt person (read: I tried to buy tact, but they said they don't sell it), so if anyone wants this rephrased, let me know. n.n